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highly renowned for his accomplishments, learning, and valor, as well as his romantic life and melancholy fate. He signalized himself not only at tilt and tournament, but on the battle field; and celebrated the beauty of the Lady Geraldine with the gallantry, while he defended it with the courage of a knight errant. His sonnets are polished and expressive, wanting in power, yet free from that conceit which gives an air of affectation to the works of his friend, WYATT. Both were zealous imitators of the Italian writers, but Surrey had the better discrimination and finer vein of poetry. He was the first English composer of sustained blank verse, and this, in a translation of the Æneid of Virgil, he has employed with a force and grandeur worthy of later times. His description and praise of his love Geraldine, although often quoted, is too full of personal interest to be passed over in silence :

From Tuscane came my Ladies worthy race,
Faire Florence was sometime her auncient seate:
The Western Yle whose pleasant shore doth face
Wild Cambers clifs, did geve her lyuely heate:
Fostered she was with milke cf Irishe brest:
Her sire, an erle, her dame, of princes blood;
From tender yeres, in Britaine she doth rest,
With kinges childe, where she tasteth costly foode,
Honsdon did first present her to myne yien :
Bright is her hewe, and Geraldine she hight,
Hampton me taught, to wishe her first for myne,
And Windsor, alas, doth chase me from her sight.
Her beauty of kinde, her vertue from above,
Happy is he, that can obtain her love.

The following is a favorable specimen of Wyatt:

Venemous thornes that are so sharpe and kene,
Beare flowers we see, full fresh and fayre of hue,
Poyson is also put in medicine,

And unto man his health doth oft renue,

The fyre that all things eke consumeth clene,
May hurt and heale: then if that this be true,
I trust some time my harm may be my health,
Sins every woe is joyned with some wealth.

The spirit of literature seemed for a time prostrated during the turbulent reign of Queen Mary, when a gloom fell alike over the humanity and the institutions of our country. The Mirrour for Magistrates however appeared at this period, and for a long time obtained a popularity which the novelty of its design and merit of its execution fully deserved. This bold and extensive poem was conceived by Thomas Sackville, the first Lord Buckhurst, and Earl of Dorset. He had purposed that all the illustrious but unfortunate characters from the Conquest to the end of the fourteenth century should pass in review before the author, who descends, like Dante, into the infernal regions, conducted by Sorrow. But Sackville only lived to complete the prefatory poem, which he calls the Induction, and the solitary legend of Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, by far the best and most eloquent part of the work, which was afterwards published with the additions of Baldwyn, Ferrers, Churchyard, Fayer, and some other authors. Sackville possessed to a certain degree that wonderful power of personification, of giving form and shape to the passions, thoughts, and affections, and representing under the guise of fabled beings the

vices and deformities of our nature, in which Spenser was afterwards unrivalled; and the curious have carefully traced the influence of the former poet upon the loftier and nobler conceptions of the latter. His personification of war, although not the most minute in detail, is lofty and imposing.

Lastly stoode Warre in glitteryng armes yclad,

With visage grym, sterne lookes, and blackely hewed:

In his right hand a naked sworde he had,

That to the hiltes was al with bloud embrewed;
And in his left (that kinges and kingdomes rewed)
Famine and fyer he held, and therewythall

He razed townes, and threwe downe towers and all.

Cities he sakt, and realmes that whilom flowered,
In honour, glory, and rule above the best,
He overwhelmde, and all theyr fame devowred,
Consumed, destroyed, wasted, and never ceast,
Tyll he theyr wealth, theyr name, and all opprest.
His face forehewed with woundes, and by his side
There hunge his terge with gashes depe and wyde.

Sackville in early life, while a student at the Inner Temple, composed, in conjunction with Norton (a fellow laborer of Sternhold and Hopkins) a tragedy called Ferrex and Pollex, which is supposed to have been the first English tragedy. It is written in elevated blank verse, the dialogue is sustained, and the characters and action appropriate. It was acted before Queen Elizabeth at Whitehall in 1561, by the students of the Inner Temple.

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The English in remote times had their scenic representations, adapted to the circumstance of the age, and primitive as were the habits of the people. These at first consisted of certain passages of scripture, and were called Miracle Plays; they were acted in churches, and the characters chiefly sustained by the priesthood. were, according to the wife of Bath's prologue in the Canterbury Tales, exhibited during the season of Lent,* and sometimes a sequel of scripture histories was carried on for several days. Beelzebub and his host of imps were constantly exposed to the rebukes and blows of the more saintly characters, and by their cries and buffooneries enlivened a performance, that would otherwise have been sufficiently monotonous. The transcript of one of these plays, the well known mystery called Corpus Christi, or the Coventry Play, is yet in existence, and is a valuable specimen of the compositions in which our ancestors delighted. There were also secular plays of great antiquity performed by strolling jestours, which were discountenanced by the religious orders, and were of the most rude and disconnected composition. When the Mysteries ceased to be performed, the Moral Plays usurped their place. They chiefly consisted of moral reasoning, and their characters were allegorical, such as

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Good Doctrine, Charity, Faith, Prudence, Discretion, or Death, their discourses being of a serious cast; but the province of making the spectators merry descended from the Devil in the Mystery to the Vice or Iniquity* of the Morality, who usually personified some bad quality, as pride, lust, or any other evil propensity.+ Comedy, it is true, had not been wholly unknown-we meet with some instances of it in the reign of Henry the Eighth and his successor; but it was sadly deficient in plot, and enlivened by wit of the most degenerate species. There had also from early time been the Ludi, or Court Plays, exhibited at court during the Christmas holidays. But they consisted of pageants, mummeries, and disguisings, gorgeous and magnificent indeed, with their crowds of characters, the glitter and variety of their robes, the quaint and grotesque personifications of their actors, their devices and their hilarity, but presenting rather an exhibition than a sustained performance.

It was in the reign of Elizabeth that the drama, in its first infancy, rose to its fullest might and glory; it sprung into existence, like Venus from the waste of waters, in all its power and proportion. It had not been nurtured with

* In allusion to the character, Shakspeare makes the Duke of Gloucester

say:

Thus, like the formal vice, Iniquity,
I moralize two meanings in one word.

And Ben Johnson has these lines:

Richard the Third, Act 3, Seene 1.

But the old Vice

Acts old Iniquity, and in the fit

Of mimicry, gets th' opinion of a wit.

+ See Strutt's Sports and Pastimes of the People of England.

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