milies of that day. These historians were unfurnished with any dates to guide them, and never suspected that when Surrey is made to set off on his travels in Italy, after a Donna Giraldi who had no existence, he was the father of two sons, and "the fair Geraldine" was only seven years of age! that Surrey's first love broke out when she was nine; that he declared his passion when she was about thirteen and finally, that Geraldine, having attained to the womanly discretion of fifteen, dismissed the accomplished Earl of Surrey, with whom she never could be united, to accept the hand of old Sir Anthony Brown, aged sixty. Lady Brown disturbs the illusion of Geraldine, in the modest triumph of sixteen over sixty. Dr. Nott is in trepidation for the domestic morality of the noble poet; yet some of these amatory sonnets may have been addressed to his betrothed. He has perplexed himself by a formal protest against the perils of Platonic love, but apologises for his hero in the manners of the age. It appears that not only the mistress of Petrarch, but those of Bayard the chevalier "sans reproche," and Sir Philip Sidney, were married women, with as crystalline reputations as their lovers. Nor should we omit the great friend of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was a staid married man, notwithstanding his romantic passion for Anne Bullen. The courtly imitators of Petrarch had made love fashionable. It is evident that Surrey found nothing so absorbing in his passion, whatever it might be; for whenever called into public employment, he ceased to be Petrarch-which Petrarch never could, and possibly for a want of occupation. A small quantity of passion, dexterously meted out, may be ample to inspire an amatorial poet. Neither Surrey nor Petrarch, accomplished lovers and poets, with all their mistresses' coquetry and cruelty, broke their hearts in the tenderness of their ideas, or were consumed by "the perpetual fire" of their imagination. We have now traced the literary delusion which long veiled the personal history of the Earl of Surrey, and which has duped so many ingenious commentators. The tale affords an additional evidence of that "confusion worse confounded" by truth and fiction, where the names are real, and the incidents fictitious; a fatality which must always accompany "Historical Romances.' "" The same mischance occurred to "The Cavalier" of DE FOE, often published under different titles, suitable to the designs of the editors, and which tale has been repeatedly mistaken for an authentic history written at the time. Under the assumed designation by "a Shropshire Gentleman," whole passages have been transferred from the Romance into the authentic history of Nichols's Leicestershire—just as Anthony à Wood felicitously succeeded in his historical authority of Tom Nash's "Life of Jack Wilton." In the story of SURREY and WYATT, one circumstance is too precious to be passed over. WYATT Commenced as a writer nearly ten years before Surrey, and his earlier poetic compositions are formed in the old rhythmical school. His manuscripts, which still exist, bear his own strong marks in every line to regulate their cæsura; for our ancient poets, to satisfy the ear, were forced to depend on such artificial contrivances. It was in the strict intercourse of their literary friendship that the elder bard surrendered up the ancient barbarism, and by the revelation of his younger friend, studied an art which he had not himself discovered. Wyatt is an abundant writer; but he has wrought his later versification with great variety, though he has not always smoothed his workmanship with his nail. For many years Wyatt had smothered his native talent, by translations from Spanish and Italian poets, and in his rusty rhythmical measures. He lived to feel the truth of nature, and to practise happier art. Of his amatory poems, many are graceful, most ingenious. The immortal one to his "Lute," the usual musical instrument of the lover or the poet, as the guitar in Spain, composed with as much happiness as care, is the universal theme of every critic of English poetry. His defrauded or romantic passion for Anne Bullen often lends to his effusions a deep mysterious interest, when we recollect that the poet alludes to a riyal who must have made him tremble as he wrote. "Who list to hunt? I know where is an hind! We perceive Wyatt's keen perception of character in the last verse, admirably expressive of the playfulness and levity of the thoughtless but susceptible Anne Bullen, which never left her when in the Tower or on the scaffold. The poems of WYATT accompanied the unhappy queen in her imprisonment; and it was Wyatt's sister who received her prayerbook with her last smile, for the block before her could not disturb the tenderness of her affections. WYATT is an ethical poet, more pregnant with reflection than imagination; he was intimately conversant with the world; and it is to be regretted that our poet has only left three satires, the first Horatian Epistles we possess. These are replete with the urbanity and delicate irony of the Roman, but what was then still unexampled, flowing with the fulness and freedom of the versification of Dryden, Wyatt had much salt, and no gall. WYATT excelled SURREY in his practical knowledge of mankind; he had been a sojourner in politic Madrid, and had been employed on active embassies. Surrey could only give the history of his own emotions, affections, and habits; he is the more interesting poet for us; but we admire a great man in Wyatt, one whose perception was not less subtile and acute, because it spread on a far wider surface of life. WIAT, for so he wrote his name, was a great wit; as, according to the taste of his day, his anagram fully maintained. We are told that he was a nice observer of times, persons, and circumstances, knowing when to speak, and we may add, how to speak. That happened to Wyatt which can be recorded probably of no other wit: three prompt strokes of pleasantry thrown out by him produced three great revolutions-the fall of Wolsey, the seizure of the monastic lands, and the emancipation of England from the papal supremacy. The Wyatts, besides their connexion with Anne Bullen, had all along been hostile to the great Cardinal. One day Wyatt entering the king's closet, found his majesty much disturbed, and displeased with the minister. Ever quick to his purpose, Wyatt, who always told a story well, now, to put his majesty into good humour, and to keep the Cardinal down in as bad a one, furnished a ludicrous tale of "the curs baiting a butcher's dog." The application was obvious to the butcher's son of Ipswich, and we are told, for the subject but not the tale itself has been indicated, that the whole plan of getting rid of a falling minister was laid down by this address of the 280 THE EARL OF SURREY AND SIR THOMAS WYATT. wit. It was with the same dexterity, when Wyatt found the king in a passion on the delay of his divorce, that, with a statesman-like sympathy, appealing to the presumed tendency of the royal conscience, he exclaimed "Lord! that a man cannot epent him of his sin, but by the pope's leave!" The hint was dropped; the egg of the Reformation was laid, and soon it was hatched! When Henry the Eighth paused at the blow levelled at the whole ponderous machinery of the papal clergy, dreading from such wealth and power a revolution, besides the ungraciousness of the intolerable transfer of all abbey lands to the royal domains, Wyatt had his repartee for his counsel:-"Butter the rooks' nests!"—that is, divide all houses and lands with the nobility and gentry. Wyatt should have been the minister of Henry; we should then have learned if a great wit, where wit was ever relished, could have saved himself under a monarch who dashed down a Wolsey. Surrey and Wyatt, though often engaged, the one as a statesman, the other as a general, found their most delightful avocation in the intercourse of their studies. Their minds seemed cast in the same mould. They mutually confided their last compositions, and sometimes chose the same subject in the amicable wrestlings of their genius. It was a community of studies and a community of skill; the thoughts of the one flowed into the thoughts of the other, and we frequently discover the verse from one in the poem of the other. Wyatt was the more fortunate man, for he did not live to see himself die in the partner of his fame perishing on a scaffold, and he has received a poet's immortality from that friend's noble epitaph. In his epitaph Surrey dwells on every part of the person of his late companion; he expatiates on the excellences of the head, the face, the hand, the tongue, the eye, and the heart-but these are not fanciful conceits; the solemnity of his thoughts and his deep emotions tell their truth. Wyatt's was "A head, where Wisdom's mysteries did frame, Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain, * Was daily wrought." *The smith's forge. THE SPOLIATION OF THE MONASTERIES. INCIDENTS of such an overwhelming nature in political history as are those of the Reformation can have no sudden origin. They are but the consequences of something which has preceded. In our country the suppression of the monasteries and the abbeys had been long prepared; it was not, and it could not have been, the temporary passions, nor the absolute will, of an arbitrary monarch, which by a word could have annihilated an awful power, had not the royal edict been but the echo of many voices. It was attacking but an aged power dissolving in its own corruption, which, blind with pride, looked with complacency on its own unnatural greatness, its political anasarca. Its opulence was an object it could not conceal from its enviers, and its paramount eminence was too heavy a yoke for its rising rivals. This power, in the language of the times, had "covered the land with an Egyptian darkness," and when appeared the "Godly and learned king," as the eighth Henry was called, he was saluted as "a Moses who delivered them from the bondage of Pharaoh." It is not therefore strange that the act which at a single blow annihilated the monastic orders and their "lands and tenements" was hailed as the most patriotic which had been ever passed by an English sovereign. It made even a tyrannous and jealous monarch, who cut off more heads of men and women than any other on record, popular and extolled even in his latter days. Henry the Eighth had paused at the blow he was about to level. The plunder was too monstrous even for the hand of an arbitrary monarch. Its division among the nobility and gentry was an expedient which removed the odium from royalty, and invested it with that munificence which dazzled the pride of Henry. In the vast harvest, the king refused the lion's share, looking for his safer portion in the secure loyalty of the new possessors to whom he transferred this vast and novel wealth. As the scheme was managed, therefore, it was a compromise or copartnership of the king and his courtiers. The |