achievement, but they have other claims to attention. Wyatt, who slightly preceded Surrey, imitated Horace, and, according to Warton, may justly be deemed the first polished English satirist.* Surrey was the first poet who wrote heroic blank verse in our language; he did much to improve our versification, and the laws he established "have been adopted by our standard writers with hardly any variation ever since." And not only did he become an authority on the construction of verse, but proved that he possessed in some measure the inspiration of the poet. Truly does Sir Philip Sidney say that his lyrics contain "many things tasting of a noble birth and worthy of a noble mind." Both poets, we may add, attempted paraphrases of the Psalms, and both had poetical mistresses, upon whom they expended all the passion and real or imaginary despondency they could express in verse. Wyatt is conjectured to have been in love with Anne Boleyn; and Surrey's Geraldine is also supposed by some of his critics to have been a real woman. "In Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Earl of Surrey," writes Mr. Brewer, "we have poets of *He has certainly a better claim to this position than Joseph Hall (1574-1656), who, when he afterwards obtained a bishopric, was the opponent of Milton. Hall's coarse but vigorous satires were the work of his early life, and thus he writes concerning them "I first adventure, with foolhardy might, ripe age and growing families devoured by the pangs of love, and devoting themselves to the celebration of the charms of a youthful mistresstheir own woes, hopes, and despondency-with all the imaginary ardour of youthful lovers not yet arrived at the age of discretion. To this day it is impossible to decide whether the fair Geraldine in the case of the latter was the object of a real or mythical attachment; and in the former, whether 'his love called Anna,' a word 'that changeth not though it be turned and made in twain,' was a substantial incorporation of flesh and blood, or only an incorporeal quibble." * That some sort of flirtation existed between the knight and the maid of honour prior to Anne Boleyn's ill-fated marriage, seems probable enough, not only from the circumstantial story told by Wyatt's grandson, but also from what we know of the lady's free manners and volatile disposition. On the other hand, if Surrey's Geraldine was really the Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald—a statement that has been recently disputed-the love he lavished upon a child of twelve was an imaginary passion. The subject is of wider interest than the mere settlement of the relations of Wyatt and Surrey to their poetical mistresses. It was as imperative in those days as in the age of Petrarch that every verse-maker should have "Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII.,” arranged and catalogued by J. S. Brewer, M.A., vol. iv. p. 240. a mistress, no matter whether in the flesh or out of it. The amatory effusions of susceptible young poets were no doubt sometimes only too real, but for matters of poetic art it sufficed if they worshipped some imaginary goddess, a Dulcinea del Toboso of the fancy. "There is not," says Cowley, "so great a lie to be found in any poet as the vulgar conceit of men that lying is essential to good poetry." Bacon, on the contrary, says, and he also is alluding to the divine art, "A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure." Is the poet right or the philosopher? It depends entirely upon what we understand by lying. All true poetry, and all genuine work whatsoever, must be based on truth, and the recognition of primal truths is to be found in every great work of imagination. It is the veracity of such writers as Shakespeare and Scott, of Wordsworth and Tennyson, of Jane Austen and George Eliot, that makes them so dear to us; and the form in which they utter what they know is a vivid creation, and not a deceptive shadow. All this is obvious enough, and the reader may be reminded that some of the most sacred truths uttered on our earth were conveyed through the medium of parable or allegory. The poet, then, does not lie when his imagination lifts him above the smoke and stir of earth, when he sees visions and dreams dreams. In his inspired moments he looks further than most of us may into the life of things, and the truest words man has ever spoken to his fellow-men have been generally said under the veil of fiction. How much of genuine feeling and of poetical enthusiasm is to be found in Wyatt and Surrey, and the sonneteers who followed them, cannot readily be estimated. Sometimes the true voice of song sounds forth without hindrance, as in the "My lute, awake!" of Wyatt, and in the brightly descriptive poems attributed to Surrey, in which "the lover describeth his whole state unto his love." Frequently, however, the notes we hear are discordant, and will perhaps appear false; but what seems artificial to us may have been real to the singers, for poets, like other men, are creatures of circumstance and fashion. Goldsmith, in his bloom-coloured suit, would seem a strangely madeup creature, could we meet him to-day in the streets of London. Yet we know how true the man was to his nature, and what a generous heart beat under that tawdry costume. In reading the love-poetry of the Elizabethans it will be well, then, to bear in mind that if the diction of the age differs from our own, the expression of poetical feeling may be none the less genuine. To us the artifice is more evident than the sincerity, but it would be hard to call the most grotesque poet of that age a mere literary dandy, when we remember how great poets like Spenser and Shakespeare, and true poets like Surrey and Sidney, were affected by the habits of the time. Queen Mary's reign, a period one would think unfriendly to all art, found a poet in Sackville, Thomas Sackville (Lord Buckhurst), whose "Mirror of Magistrates" is as remarkable as it is poetical. "Sackville's genius," says Hallam," stands absolutely alone 1536-1608. in the age to which, as a poet, he belongs;" and in the following passage this eminently sane critic gives a just estimate of the one man who, in that dark period of our history, "shone out for an instant in the higher walks of poetry": "The 'Mirror of Magistrates,' " he writes, " published in 1559, is a collection of stories by different authors, on the plan of Boccaccio's prose work, 'De Casibus virorum illustrium,' recounting the misfortunes and reverses of men eminent in English history. It was designed to form a series of dramatic soliloquies united in one interlude. Sackville, who seems to have planned the scheme, wrote an induction, or prologue, and also one of the stories, that of the first Duke of Buckingham. The induction displays best his poetical genius; it is, like much earlier poetry, a representation of allegorical personages, but with a fertility of imagination, vividness of description, and strength of language, which not only leave his predecessors far behind, but may fairly be compared with some of the most poetical passages in Spenser. . . . Sackville is far above the frigid elegance of Surrey, and in the first days of Elizabeth's reign is the herald of that splendour in which it was to close." An elaborate account of the "Mirror of Magistrates" will be found in Warton's "History of |