The Romancer. Lyly's Euphues was in its analytical tendencies and its criticism of life an anticipation of the modern novel; Sidney's Arcadia belongs in essence to the stock of chivalric romance, blended with the pastoral strain. They have this in common, however, that the story, such as it is, with its straggling web of intrigue, is an original invention. But in Euphues the plot is a mere device, a framework for the author's theorizing about life. In the Arcadia the story is everything. Sidney wrote it for the entertainment of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, while he was exiled from the court and living at Wilton House. He conceived it as a poem, imaging a more beautiful world than the actual, laying his scene in a remote Utopian land which he identifies with the ancient Arcadia. Both action and characters body forth his ideals of chivalrous virtue, heroic energy, and passionate love, and express his longing for a simpler and purer fashion of life than was his own lot amidst the pomps and frivolities of Elizabeth's court. In many places the style is as affected as Lyly's at its worst:

In her face so much beauty and favour expressed as, if Helen had not been known, some would rather have judged it the painter's exercise to show what he could do than the counterfeiting of any living pattern; for no fault the most fault-finding wit could have found, if it were not that to the rest of the body the face was somewhat too little, but that little was such a spark of beauty as was able to inflame a world of love; for everything was full of a choice fineness, that if we wanted anything in majesty it supplied it with increase in pleasure; and if at the first it struck not with admiration, it ravished with delight.-Arcadia, Book I.

Conclusion. The style of Euphues was imitated, and the model set by the Arcadia copied, by the other novelists of the Elizabethan era, as will be shown more in detail later. Thus the tendencies observed in the prose of Lord Berners can be followed for a century or more, and it is not difficult to trace them even in such a mighty prose-master as Sir Thomas Browne, if we follow the track set by that remarkable intervening work, Drummond of Hawthornden's Cypresse Grove.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST

Texts.-Specimens of English Literature, 1394-1579, ed. W. W. Skeat (Clarendon Press, 1894); Berners's Froissart, ed. W. P. Ker (6 vols., Tudor Translations, Dent, 1901–3; abridged by G. C. Macaulay, Globe ed., Macmillan, 1895); Berners's translation of Huon of Bordeaux (E.E.T.S., 4 parts, 1882-7; Everyman, Dent, 1912); More's Utopia (various translations, the best by Raphe Robynson, ed. Arber, Lumby, etc.; ed. George Sampson, Bell, 1914); Elyot's Boke called the Gouernour, ed. H. H. S. Croft (1883); ed. Foster Watson (Everyman, Dent, 1907); Ascham's Scholemaster, ed. W. Aldis Wright (Cambridge University Press, 1904); Lyly's Euphues, ed. M. W. Croft and H. Clemons (Routledge, 1916); Sidney's Sonnets and Songs (Burleigh, 1900); Poems, ed. J. Drinkwater (Muses' Library, Routledge); Apologie for Poetrie, ed. E. S. Shuckburgh (Pitt Press, 1891); Arcadia, ed. E. A. Baker (Early Novelists, Routledge, 1907).

Studies and Criticisms.—WILSON, J. D.: John Lyly (Macmillan, 1905).—JusseRAND, J. J.: The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, trans. E. Lee, 3rd ed. (Unwin, 1899).—Raleigh, W.: The English Novel (Murray, 1894).-WESTCOTT, B. F.: General View of the History of the English Bible, 3rd ed. revised by Aldis Wright (1905).

CHAPTER 3. EARLY TUDOR POETRY

Tottel's Miscellany-Sir Thomas Wyatt-The Earl of Surrey-Nicholas Grimald

A Mirror for Magistrates-Thomas Sackville

TOTTEL'S MISCELLANY

An "Octavian" Collection. The importance of the reign of Henry VIII. in the history of English poetry has for various reasons been insufficiently recognized. The momentous events of the reign in the political, religious, and domestic spheres would in any case have absorbed the main interest of posterity. But partly owing to the national preoccupation with affairs of state, partly to the reluctance of men of rank to come forward as professed authors, most of the verse written by the courtiers of the second Tudor sovereign did not find its way into print till a decade after his death. In June 1557 a London printer, Richard Tottel, published a volume, Songes and Sonettes, written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and others. Surrey, who was doubtless singled out for mention on the title-page because of his exalted rank, had been dead for more than ten years, and Sir Thomas Wyatt, the other chief contributor, for fifteen years. Nicholas Grimald, who ranks next in importance as author of forty poems in Tottel's Miscellany,' belonged to a younger generation, but he had been active as an academic dramatist, and probably as a lyrist, in the later years of Henry VIII. Thomas, Lord Vaux, two of whose poems appear in the Miscellany, had been one of the king's courtiers, and among the uncertain" or anonymous authors included in it there were doubtless others of the same group. Thus the Miscellany is (to adopt a convenient designation) mainly an "Octavian" collection of song. But as it was published in the year before Elizabeth's accession, and as six editions appeared during her reign, its true literary perspective has been somewhat obscured. Moreover, recent investigation has increasingly shown that the most important section of the volume is the work of Wyatt, who is earliest in date among the chief contributors.

SIR THOMAS WYATT

Life. Sir Thomas Wyatt, eldest son of Sir Henry Wyatt, who held high offices under the first two Tudor kings, was born at Allington Castle, Kent, in 1503. He was educated at the newly founded St. John's College, Cambridge, where he took his M.A. degree in 1519-20. Soon afterwards he married Elizabeth, daughter of Lord Cobham, a Kentish neighbour. Their son, the ill-fated Thomas Wyatt the younger, was born in 1521. But if tradition, supported by some enigmatic refer1 In the second edition, July 31, 1557, thirty of Grimald's poems were omitted, and thirty-nine addi tional poems by "uncertain authors were inserted.

"

ences in Wyatt's own poetry, is to be trusted, he came for a time under the spell of Anne Boleyn's beauty and wit. The period of their intimacy was probably about 1525, for they are both mentioned as being present at the court Christmas revels of that year. In the following March Wyatt accompanied Sir Thomas Cheney on a mission to France, which was the beginning of a long period of diplomatic and official service abroad. In 1527 he took part in a mission to the Papal States, and also visited Venice, Florence, and other Italian towns. From 1528 to 1532 he was Marshal of Calais. On his return to England he acted as chief ewer at the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533; when the queen fell in May 1536, he was imprisoned for a short time in the Tower, and afterwards sent to Allington Castle to "amend his conduct" under his father's eye. The circumstances are obscure, but in any case Wyatt did not long remain out of the royal favour. In March 1537 he was appointed ambassador to Spain, where he spent the greater part of the two following years. On his return to England in May 1539 he was for some months at Allington, to which he had succeeded on his father's death during his residence abroad. But in November he again left England as ambassador-extraordinary to the Emperor in Flanders. On his return in May 1540 he was rewarded

with gifts of land and houses in London and Kent; but the fall of Thomas Cromwell in July caused a reverse in his fortunes. After a period of retirement at Allington, he was arrested on the accusation of Bonner, the Bishop of London, and committed to the Tower in January 1541. But the powerful defence that he made at his trial in March procured his acquittal, and in April he was again sent to Calais on a military mission. Afterwards he sat in Parliament as a knight of the shire for Kent. In October 1542 he was suddenly sent to Falmouth to meet the Spanish ambassador, but he fell ill on the way, and died at Sherborne, where he was buried in the abbey.

Wyatt and Chaucer.-Wyatt's career has some remarkable points of similarity to

that of Chaucer. Both exercised the poetic art in the intervals of a busy official life; both came while on diplomatic missions under the influence of the literatures of France and Italy; both sat in Parliament as knights of the shire for Kent; both went through dramatic changes of fortune owing to political events. But it is not merely in this external way that Wyatt is related to the greatest of his predecessors. His debt to Chaucer has been insufficiently recognized, partly owing to the famous reference by George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) to

a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyat th'elder and Henry Earle of Surrey were the two chieftaines, who hauing trauailed into Italie, and there tasted the sweete and stately measures and stile of the Italian Poesie, as nouices newly crept out of the schooles of Dante, Arioste, and Petrarch, they greatly pollished our rude and homely maner of vulgar Poesie from that it had bene before, and for that cause may iustly be sayd the first reformers of our English meetre and stile.

From this passage it would appear as if the "courtly makers" were solely under the dominion of foreign masters, and had broken completely with the earlier traditions of English poetry. But Wyatt, who in his first satire takes credit to himself that he is not one to

Praise Sir Thopas for a noble tale,

And scorn the story that the Knight told,

had been an enthusiastic reader of Chaucer in the edition published by Richard Pynson in 1526.' Pynson's volume included poems that are now known to be non-Chaucerian, and it presents a rhythmically imperfect text, owing to the frequent omission of the syllabic e. But it provided Wyatt with the model for his fivefoot line, which, in his autograph MSS. rather than in the smoother version preferred by Tottel, has five stresses but is syllabically irregular. From Chaucer, too, he borrowed, in his earlier poerns, the Romance accentuation of the final, instead of the root syllable, in words like "season" and "pleasure," which is so marked and disconcerting a feature of his rhyming system; as well as various peculiarities of spelling, grammar, and phraseology.

Wyatt's Lyrics. Nor was it only through Chaucer that Wyatt reached back to the poetry of medieval England. It was the fashion in the gay court of Henry VIII. for the king himself and his companions to write songs for music, in accepted forms and on traditional themes, often with a chorus or refrain. There is nothing more delightful in this kind than Wyatt's lines beginning:

A Robyn,

Joly Robyn,

Tell me how thy leman doeth,
And thou shalt know of mine,

which were set to music by William Cornish, and immortalized on the lips of the Fool in Twelfth Night. Other short flights of song, usually some form of love-com1 This has been made clear by Miss A. K. Foxwell in her study of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poems.

plaint, are in tripping measures of two or three feet. And from such dainty trifles Wyatt, when deeply stirred, can rise to true lyrical poignancy, as in

or

As if an eye may save or slay,

And strike more deep than weapon long,

My Lute awake! perform the last
Labour that thou and I shall wast.

These two poems and others carry over from popular native poetry the refrain that ends each stanza, but they have a fire and intensity that are the notes of a new age.

Italian Influence: the Sonnet. Other of Wyatt's lyrics show French influence, especially some of his rondeaux, which contain echoes from those of Clément Marot. But the French influence cannot always be clearly distinguished from the Italian, and it is not as the disciple of Marot and St. Gelais, but of Petrarch and Serafino, of Alamanni and Aretino, that Wyatt opens a new era in English poetry. Chaucer had borrowed plots and materials from the Italian masters of narrative verse, but it was left for Wyatt, a century and a half later, to be the first to acclimatize the sonnet, the epigram, and terza rima.

Wyatt's sonnets number thirty-one, twenty of which have been traced to Italian originals. Seventeen of these are translated or adapted from Petrarch, but Wyatt is no slavish follower of his master either in form or sentiment. He adopts (with very few exceptions) the Petrarchan rhyming scheme (abba, abba) in the octave, but in the sestet he generally rhymes cd dcee. He thus introduces a final couplet, inadmissible in Italian, and substitutes for the “dying fall" of the original sestet the "clinching" effect of a closing rhyme. In all its variations the Elizabethan sonnet clung to the final couplet. Wyatt's innovation held sway till the time of Milton, and when he introduced the strict Petrarchan form, the sonnet was about to disappear from English poetry for a century and a half.

In other ways Wyatt showed his independence. With the "conceits" and love-languors of the Southern school he mingled a more robust and defiant strain, and he skilfully adapted Petrarchan lines to his own circumstances. Thus the Italian's sonnet cxc, Una candida cerva," becomes " Whoso list to hunt: I know where is an hind," with obvious reference to Anne Boleyn; and "Rotta è l'alta colonna" is turned into "The pillar perished is wherto I lent," a lamentation on the fall of Thomas Cromwell. Still more personal are some of the sonnets which are apparently quite original, as when he declares that he will not bewail the fickleness of his lady :

But let it pass and think it is of kind,

That often change doth please a woman's mind;

or bids lucky lovers do observance to May, while he lies in bed remembering "the haps most unhappy" that have befallen him in that month.

Epigrams in Ottava Rima.-But the sonnet asks more than Wyatt's experimental