in the Round Tower of Windsor Castle, and whom he married soon afterward. Henryson, a student of the University of Glasgow, and, in later life, a schoolmaster in Dumfermline, wrote The Testament of Cresseid, a continuation of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, a translation of Æsop's Fables, and Robin and Makyne, the earliest known English pastoral. Dunbar, a student of the University of St. Andrews, a Franciscan novitiate, and, later, Court poet, wrote The Lament for the Makars, The Thistle and the Rose, The Golden Targe, The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, The Two Married Women and the Widow, The Devil's Inquest, A Winter's Walk, and The Merle and the Nightingale. Douglas, scholar and prelate, wrote The Palice of Honour, Kind Hart, and made a translation of the Eneid, which Craik says was the first English version of any ancient classic that had yet appeared in either kingdom. Campbell considers this group of Scottish versifiers superior on the whole, in originality and spirit, to their English contemporaries, though their style was, for the most part, cast in a worse taste. "The pre

vailing fault of English diction, in the fifteenth century," he says, "is redundant ornament, and an affectation of anglicising Latin words. In this pedantry and use of 'aureate terms,' the Scottish versifiers went even beyond their brethren of the south. Some ex

ceptions to this remark, I am aware, may be found in Dunbar, who sometimes exhibits simplicity and lyrical terseness; but even his style has frequent deformities of quaintness, false ornament, and alliteration. The best of them, when they meant to be most eloquent, tore up roots from the Latin, which never took root in the lan

guage, like children making a mock garden with flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither."

ume.

Following the stream of English Verse we have seen that it was distinguished so far by two main currents— religion and history. As we proceed we shall see them still, no longer flowing side by side, with the same speed, but now rising and now falling, and now blending with other currents of equal if not superior volThe historical current, which reached its height in Lydgate, and slowly ebbed through the Scottish disciples of Chaucer, rose again in The Mirror for Magistrates. There was a similar movement in the allegorical current in these Scottish poets. It rose and sank in James the First, and Dunbar, and Douglas, and rose again in England in The Pastime of Pleasure. Lydgate was the intellectual father of Sackville, and Chaucer, through his Scottish descendants, and through Hawes, was the intellectual father of Spenser. Another current, which we have not noted, and which was strong in Langland-the satirical current-meandered lazily along until it reached Skelton, when it broke into a cascade of doggerel scurrility, directed against the clergy in general, and Cardinal Wolsey in particular. There is a quality in Skelton, which, if it existed before his day, was not felt before he struck it—the lyrical quality, of which we soon have an abundance. The stream of English Verse received a new affluent from Wyatt and Surrey-the affluent of personality, and a new metrical form-the sonnet.

Like Chaucer before them, Wyatt and Surrey drew much of their inspiration from Italian poetry, but, un

like Chaucer, they drew it from the amatory sonnets of Petrarcha. That neither the spirit nor the form of these compositions should have impressed Chaucer and his successors is somewhat singular when one stops to consider the extent of their obligations to the Italian poets. But so it was. There is no trace of the amatory spirit and no trace of the sonnet form in English Verse until both were introduced by Wyatt and Surrey. The new current was an important one, though neither was poet enough to know it, or to impart force to it. If they felt, they failed to make their readers feel, and they failed to master the instrument with which they sought to reach them. Their handling of the sonnet was clumsy, as, indeed, was the handling of most of their successors. Sidney could, and did, write the Italian sonnet, and so could, and did, Drummond, and Milton, and one or two others, perhaps; but the majority of English sonneteers did not write it, if they could. They wrote poems the length of which was just fourteen lines, quatorzains, and rhymed them as they pleased, or as they could. The sonnets of Shakespeare, for example, consisted simply of three quatrains of alternate rhymes and a couplet. The form of Spenser was peculiar to himself, although it did not originate with him, but probably with James the Sixth in his pcetic nonage (1581) in The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie. Beginning with Wyatt and Surrey, and practically ending with Milton, the sonnet may be said to have flourished a little more than a century, and about half that time as a form of amatory expression. It was courtly and impassioned in Sidney, tender and pretty in Daniel, sensible but dull in Drayton, plaintive

and sweet in Drummond, affectionate but mysterious in Shakespeare, and grave and epical in Milton. Wyatt and Surrey will always be remembered as the fathers of English sonnetry. But Surrey has a stronger claim to distinction than attaches to that immature paternity, for he was the creator of English blank verse. That he did not perceive its capacity, but constructed it as he would have constructed the heroic couplet, without rhymes, is true. But neither did his contemporaries perceive its capacity. Grimoald, who employed it during the first decade after his death, and Sackville, who employed it during the first half of the second decade, and Gascoigne, who employed it at the close of the third decade, constructed it upon the lines that Surrey had laid down. Sackville discovered its use when, with Norton, he wrote the first English tragedy, Gorbuduc, but unfortunately he did not learn how to use it. That glorious discovery was made by Marlowe, who abandoned the jigging veins of rhyming mother wits for its high astounding terms. His line was mighty. It was mightier with Shakespeare, in whose hands it sustained the stress of every passion that his genius. could impose upon it, and mightiest with Milton, who alone raised it to epical heights. Had Surrey not created blank verse we could not have had Lear and Paradise Lost. But other forces than the dramatic current were flowing steadily along in the great stream of English Verse, and among them was the historic current, which, setting, as in the earlier poets, from the legendary antiquity of Britain, reached the era of Elizabeth in a long and swelling wave. Projected by Sackville about two years after the publication of the poems

of Wyatt and Surrey, and carried on by a band of poets, The Mirror for Magistrates rose from dulness to dignity in the year before Shakespeare was born, when Sackville contributed the Induction, and The Complaint of Henry the Duke of Buckingham. Of the former Hallam says: "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's Induction forms a link which unites the school of Chaucer and Lydgate to the Fairy Queen." The Mirror for Magistrates was an important book, for it not only impressed Spenser when he wrote the Fairy Queen, but it impressed Daniel when he wrote the Complaint of Rosamund, and the History of the Civil Wars between the Houses of York and Lancaster, and Drayton when he wrote the Legends of Robert, Duke of Normandy, Matilda the Fair, Pierce Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, and Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, and the Barons' Wars, and England's Heroical Epistles. Nor did its importance end here, for it may possibly, as Campbell intimates, have suggested to Shakespeare the idea of his historical plays. Closely related to, if not inspired by, The Mirror for Magistrates, was Warner's Albion's England, the earliest portion of which appeared about ten years before Daniel's Civil Wars, and distantly related to it-at least in a topographical sense--was Drayton's Polyolbion, which appeared about fifteen years after his Heroical Epistles.