Honsdon did first present her to mine eyne: 1 The Fitzgeralds claimed descent from the Giraldi of Florence. 2 Cambria-i.e. Wales. 3 Elizabeth Grey, granddaughter of Eliza. beth Woodville, wife of Edward IV. 4 The Princess Mary. In other headings to his poems as first published Surrey is spoken of as 'the lover,' and there is mention of his love' and 'his lady,' but this is the only explicit reference to Elizabeth Fitzgerald. Drayton, however, in his Heroical Epistles, inserts an imaginary letter from 'Geraldine' to Surrey, and in Nash's Jack Wilton (see below at page 332) Surrey is represented as touring Italy (where he never set foot) as a knight-errant in her service. Working on these hints, in editing Surrey's poems in 1815, Dr G. F. Nott invented fancy headings, into which the Fair Geraldine' is dragged on every possible occasion, without any real justification, and the legend is not yet quite dead. In May 1541 Surrey was created a Knight of the Garter; in July 1542 he suffered a short imprisonment in the Fleet for challenging one John à Leigh, and next January took part in a foolish frolic in which stones were shot from cross-bows at the windows of London citizens, and also at the houses of ill-fame on the south side of the river. The Mayor complained to the Privy Council, and on 1st April Surrey was again committed to the Fleet. Here he wrote 'A Satire against the Citizens of London,' beginning (in Nott's edition): London! hast thou accused me Of breach of laws? the root of strife! That even the hate of sins, that grow That terror could it not repress. Council, and on the 12th both he and his father were arrested and sent to the Tower. A charge of making pretensions to the crown by using the arms of Edward Confessor, to which his family had a right, was trumped up against Surrey. He was condemned by a packed jury on 13th January 1547, and beheaded six days later. Round Wyatt and Surrey, whose varied lives brought English poetry into a new atmosphere, sprang up, as Puttenham tells us in The Arte of English Poesie (see infra, page 266), ‘a new company of courtly makers,' of whom Thomas Lord Vaux (1511-62), Sir Francis Bryan (d. 1549), Nicholas Grimald (1519–62), and Thomas Churchyard (1520?-1604) are known to us by name. With no patrons to please, it was characteristic of the 'courtly makers' for more than a century to let their poetry be passed round only among their friends, and it was thus not until June 1557 that (from the press of Richard Tottel, whence its familiar name of 'Tottel's Miscellany') there appeared a thin volume entitled Songes and Sonettes written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward, late Earle of Surrey, and other. This was reprinted, with alterations, the next month; went through six other editions (1559, 1565, 1567, 1574, 1585, and 1587); and formed a kind of 'Golden Treasury' on which all the Elizabethan poets were brought up. The first edition contained forty poems by Wyatt, ninety-six by Surrey, forty by Grimald, and ninety-five of Uncertain Auctours;' in the second edition thirty of Grimald's were omitted, and the poems of uncertain authorship increased by thirty-nine. In addition to any defects due to posthumous editing, we must remember that Wyatt, in leading English poetry into fresh fields, had to contend with many difficulties. The printed editions of Chaucer were so corrupt as to obscure his melody; Wyatt was probably hardly a good enough Italian scholar to catch the secret of that of Petrarch, while English poetical diction had to be rescued from its dreadful polysyllables and built up anew. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that Wyatt sometimes halts between what he took to be a Chaucerian pronunciation and that of his own day; that, in introducing the sonnet into English, he neither followed Petrarch correctly nor hit on the modification of three quatrains and a couplet, Before the Privy Council Surrey had simply confessed that, ‘touching the stone-bows, he could not deny but he had very evil doings therein,' and there seems no reason for taking this satire as seriously meant. In the autumn he joined the English force attacking Landrecies, afterwards visiting the Emperor Charles V. at Valenciennes. On his return he was appointed the king's cup-invented by Surrey, and so gloriously handled bearer, and about this time began the building of a mansion at St Leonard, near Norwich, over which he exhausted his means. In 1544 he was present at the capture of Boulogne and at the unsuccessful siege of Montreuil. In August 1545 he was appointed governor of Boulogne, then attacked by the French, and held his position there amid great difficulties till his recall in March 1546. At the end of this year the imminence of the king's death brought the strife between the Howards and the Seymours to a crisis. On 2nd December Surrey was cited before the Privy by Shakespeare; and that his more formal verse is frequently slow of movement and sometimes impossible to scan. As chance would have it, the first sonnet of his writing in 'Tottel's Miscellany' exhibits all his faults at their worst, and has more than once been singled out for unkind quotation. If the reader will remember the Chaucerian spellings resoun,' 'sesoun,' 'condicioun,' 'facyoun,' Wyatt will be seen to better advantage in this, entitled 'Of Change in Mind': Eche man me tell'th I change most my devise: To change purpose, like after the seasón. For in ech case to kepé still one guise Is mete for them, that would be taken wise. But alwaies one, your owne, both firm and stable. But though it is part of Wyatt's glory to have introduced the sonnet into English, it is not by his ten imitations of Petrarch, or his own essays on the same lines, that his contribution to our literature may most fairly be judged. His real innovation was the revival of that lyrical mood which had produced some charming snatches of English verse in the thirteenth century and had then died away, even Chaucer having but a faint touch of it. In Wyatt it is predominant, and to illustrate it a few quotations are worth much disquisition. Here, from Nott's edition of Surrey and Wyatt (1816), which contains many poems not in 'Tottel's Miscellany,' is one of the most often quoted of Wyatt's lyrics: Forget not yet the tried intent Of such a truth as I have meant ; Forget not yet when first began Forget not yet the great assays, Forget not, oh forget not this, How long ago hath been, and is Forget not then thine own approv'd, Scarcely less well known than this is the stouthearted poem, 'To a ladie to answere directly with yea or nay,' for which we have the advantage of Mr Arber's reprint of Tottel's Miscellany (1870): Madame, withouten many wordes, Once I am sure, you will or no. And if you will, then leave your boordes, And use your wit, and shew it so : For with a beck you shall me call. And if of one, that burns alway, Ye have pity or ruth at all, If it be Yea, I shall be faine. If it be Nay, frends as before. You shall another man obtain, jests Another poem, entitled 'The lover praieth not to be disdained, refused, mistrusted, nor forsaken,' is a good example of the cumulative effect which Wyatt sometimes attains: Disdaine me not without desert, Nor leave me not so sodenly, This carefull knot neades knit I must. Mistrust me not, though some there be That fain would spot my steadfastnesse : The proofe is not as they expresse. Forsake me not, till I deserve : Nor hate me not, tyll I offend. But sins ye know what I intend, Refuse me not, that am so true : Forsake me not, ne for no new. There is a touch of another kind in the poem beginning, 'They flee from me that sometime did me seke;' and lyrics which contain such stanzas in their feeling, their melody, and their simplicity of phrase break away altogether from the wordy rhetoric of Wyatt's predecessors, and are a worthy prelude to the best Elizabethan verse. Besides his sonnets and lyrics, Wyatt versified the Penitential Psalms, not very happily, and also wrote some satires, which may be illustrated by a few lines from that entitled 'Of the Courtiers Life, written to John Poyns': My Poyns, I can not frame my tune to fayne, I am not he such eloquence to bost, Midas Praise Sir Topas for a noble tale, And scorne the story that the knight tolde. The satiric note of indignation rings true in these lines, carelessly written as some of them are. For such careless lines Wyatt has suffered much in critical esteem, but he had the root of the matter in him as no English poet had had since Chaucer, and deserves, for what he did as well as for when he did it, a higher place among English poets than is usually assigned him. In turning from Wyatt to Surrey it is usual to contrast the smoothness and finish of the younger poet with the crabbedness of the elder. If we look only to their sonnets the contrast is obvious enough, for Surrey had the wit to invent the spurious but effective sonnet form of three quatrains and a couplet-a metre in which smoothness is lightly attained and easily surpasses Wyatt in these poems. His sonnet to Geraldine has already been given; for another we may take his farewell to his squire, Clere, who saved his life at the cost of his own in a skirmish Montreuil : outside Ere summers four times seven thou couldst fulfill. Ah! Clere! if love had booted, care, or cost, Heaven had not won, nor earth so timely lost. The allusiveness of this closely packed sonnet no doubt hinders its popularity, but not many finer have been written, and the warm personal feeling which runs through it is not often found in Surrey's poetry. It appears in a lighter vein in the poem written during his imprisonment in Windsor : So cruell prison how coulde betide, alas, As proude Windsor? where I in lust & joye, With a kinges sonne, my childishe yeres did passe, In greater feast than Priams sonnes of Troy : Where eche swete place returns a taste full sower, The large grene courtes, where we were wont to hove, hover The palme play, where, dispoyled for the game, stripped Have mist the ball, and got sight of our dame, Geve me accompt, where is my noble fere : comrade Surrey's lyrics are both fewer and less striking than those of Wyatt, but in 'A praise of his Love: wherin he reproveth them that compare their Ladies with his,' he is seen at his best : Geve place ye lovers, here before That spent your bostes & bragges in vaine, And thereto hath a trothe as just I could rehearse, if that I wolde, I knowe, she swore with ragyng mynd: That could have gone so nere her hart. Sith Nature thus gave her the prayse, To matche the candle with the sonne. Our last extract-part of Æneas's tale of the sack of Troy-is from Surrey's translation of the second and fourth books of Virgil's Eneid, published, after his death, in 1557, the same year as the Songes and Sonettes. This book has a double importance, first as our earliest English example of verse translation from a classical author as opposed to adaptation, and secondly and chiefly. as written in the blank verse, the invention of which will always preserve Surrey's name in the history of English poetry: Whom when I saw assembled in such wise, So desperatly the battail to desire : Then furthermore thus sayd I unto them, For nought ye strive to save the burning town. The blank verse halts at times, but to have established the use of the metre in English poetry was a great achievement, bearing out the chief claim that may be made for both Surrey and Wyatt, that they opened new fields, foreshadowed new possibilities, for our literature. Without Wyatt and Surrey as forerunners the Elizabethans had never entered into their kingdom, and from them our modern poetry takes its beginning. stretches of green pasture and fair flowers in the long journey we have taken since Layamon's Brut have been too many and too fair (at least to a lover of old things) to compare them to oases in a wilderness, travelling through which we have at last reached a Mount Pisgah and the sight of a fairer land. But in both poetry and the drama, The and to a less extent in prose, the reign of Elizabeth, despite its dull beginnings, marks a new epoch in English literature, and brings to a close the epoch of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance of the previous three centuries and a half. BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The references given in connection with the quotations from all the leading authors of this period indicate in every case what is believed to be the best edition. The best general bibliography of the subject, giving information not only about editions but as to the manuscripts on which they are founded, is Dr Gustav Körting's Grundriss der Geschichte der Englischen Litteratur (Münster, 1887); valuable notes as to editions will also be found in the various articles in the Dictionary of National Biography, most of which have also the highest biographical and critical value. Of general surveys of the subject, Ten Brink's History of English Literature (3 vols. 1883-96) still remains the best; but in vols. iii.-viii. of the late Henry Morley's English Writers: An Attempt towards a History of English Literature (1888-92), a wealth of historical and biographical information will be found, together with some useful epitomes and straightforward criticisin. For criticism, always original and interesting, A Short History of English Literature, by Professor Saintsbury (1898), is well worth consulting; while in his 'Periods of European Literature his own volume on The Flourishing of Romance and Rise of Allegory, Mr F. J. Snell's The Fourteenth Century, and Mr G. Gregory Smith's The Transition Period bring the British literature of over three centuries into connection with those of other countries. For the history of the language no complete manual exists, though much help may be obtained from Professor Skeat's introductions to the Clarendon Press Specimens of Early English, from Dr Sweet's Middle-English Primers, and Mr Kington Oliphant's Old and Middle English (1876). Stratmann's Middle-English Dictionary, as edited by Dr Henry Bradley (1891), is the only good lexicon. Most of the books of this period appear on the lists of the publications of the Early English Text Society, founded in 1864, or the Scottish Text Society, founded in 1884. The Chaucer Society (founded in 1868) has printed the complete text of most of the best manuscripts of Chaucer's works, and specimens of the others. The Wyclif Society (founded in 1882) confines itself to printing the numerous Latin works of Wyclif which had remained unpublished. His Select English Works were printed by Thomas Arnold in 1869-71, our quotations being taken from a supplementary volume, The English Works of Wyclif hitherto Unprinted, edited by Mr F. D. Matthew for the Early English Text Society in 1880. Of the four chief cycles of miracle-plays, the York Plays were edited by Miss Toulmin Smith for the Clarendon Press in 1885; the Towneley Plays (the Wakefield Cycle) for the Surtees Society in 1836, and again for the Early English Text Society in 1897; the Chester Plays and Coventry Plays for the Shakespeare Society, the former by Thomas Wright in 1843, the latter by J. O. HalliwellPhillipps in 1841. Vol. i. of a new edition of the Chester Plays was issued in 1892 by the Early English Text Society, which in 1896 reissued the Digby Plays, edited by Dr Furnivall for the New Shakspere Society in 1882. Of books about these plays, Thomas Sharp's A Dissertation on the Pageants anciently performed at Coventry (1825) is still valuable for its information, in addition to its text of the Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors' Company; there are also the present writer's English Miracle-Plays (Clarendon Press; 3rd ed. 1898), and a larger collection (3 vols.), edited by Professor Manly for the Athenæum Press series, Boston, U.S.A. Of collections of the Romances, the more important are Kitson's Ancient English Metrical Romancees (3 vols. 1802); Weber's Metrical Romances of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Centuries (3 vols. 1810); Utterson's Select Pieces of Popular Poetry (2 vols. 1817); The Thornton Romances, edited by Halliwell-Phillipps (1844); and Armour's Scottish Alliterative Poems (1897). Of books about Chaucer, Studies in Chaucer, his Life and Writings, by T. R. Lounsbury (3 vols. 1892), is valuable though discursive; the present writer has put all he knows into a shilling Chaucer Primer (1891); and Professor Skeat, in The Chaucer Canon (1900), has given an interesting account of the poet's grammatical usage, and the method by which it may be used to test pieces wrongly assigned to him. Of Langland, M. Jusserand has given a picturesque sketch in his Piers Plowman, a Contribution to English Mysticism (1894). ALFRED W. POLLARD. SCOTTISH LITERATURE. N building up the great fabric of English literature Scottish writers have had no unimportant share. One of the very oldest extant documents in the English tongue is the inscription on the Ruthwell Cross; and more than once in our history Scotsmen have been our foremost writers. When we now speak of Scottish writers and Scottish literature, we think almost solely of the Teutonic tongue of the Scottish Lowlands. But at the beginnings of English speaking and writing, the words Scot, Scottish, and their derivatives meant something widely different. Scoti-a Latin formation, possibly from a Cymric or Welsh word-is first used of some of the inhabitants of Ireland by Ammianus Marcellinus, in describing the recent inroads of the Scots and Picts into Roman Britain in 360 A.D. When Bede was writing at Jarrow on the Tyne early in the eighth century, and for two hundred years later, Scotia meant Ireland, and Ireland only. Scoti from this Irish mother-country had, indeed, established themselves in Argyll, and in the ninth century united themselves with the Picts to form the kingdom of Alba. But it is not till well on in the eleventh century (about 1034) that Scotia is used for any part of North Britain, and then only for Alba, the country north of the firths of Forth and Clyde-excluding, however, Argyll, the first headquarters of the Scots, as that region was now overrun by Norsemen. Scotia was a Latin form; but in like manner Scottaland or Scotland, an English word entirely foreign to the Celtic peoples and their speech, was the term used by Anglians and Saxons for Ireland at first, and afterwards for the northernmost kingdom of Britain. Picts as well as Scots now spoke a Celtic tongue of the Goidelic, Gaelic, or Irish type. But the blood of the Picts, much the most numerous people in the north, was probably in the main not Celtic at all. The Picts had been Celticised by invaders from the south; probably the bulk of them were descendants of one of the swarthy savage races— sometimes called Ivernian-who occupied Britain and Ireland before the first Celtic immigrants came hither from the Continent. The history of the country south of the firths— by far the most important part of what we now call Scotland-is wholly distinct. Possibly the descendants of the neolithic man survived through all comings and goings; a wave of Goidelic invasion had no doubt flooded the south of Scotland, and only partly passed on; but during the Roman occupation of Britain it was a British or Cymric country, and in the fifth and following centuries it was overrun and occupied by invading Angles. How far the new-comers exterminated or expelled the Welsh or other natives, and how far they absorbed them, is not known; but it seems certain that Lothian and the Merse became at least as English or Teutonic as the most English part of England. Early in the seventh century Lothian and Berwickshire formed an integral part of the dominions of the most powerful English kings of the age. They were included in Bernicia, the northern, as Deira was the southern, of the Northumbrian kingdoms. Edwin, or Eadwine, was king of Northumbria (617-633), and overlord of most of the rest of England; his sway was undisputed from Humber to Forth, and from sea to sea; Edinburgh, founded or refounded by him, is still a monument to the great Northumbrian; and the specifically English name of the Scottish capital-Edwinesburch or Edwinesburg in early twelfth-century documents-testifies to the fact that the original burch or fortress stood on old English ground. Strathclyde, bordering on Lothian, was a Welsh kingdom; Galloway was a distinct Pictish-Gaelic principality. Edinburgh, Lothian, and the Merse had for centuries no connection with the Scots save through their missionary enterprise. Strathclyde and the south of Scotland seem to have been partially Christianised before the coming of the Angles; the Irish Columba was at work among the Picts in the sixth century. Not till 627 did Northumbria welcome the gospel at the hands of Paulinus, the Roman missionary from Kent. The permanent conversion was, however, really begun in 635 by Irish missionaries from Iona, who, after thirty years' labour, were expelled as schismatics on the triumph of Roman over Celtic forms. After that revolution a Northumbrian bishopric was founded at Abercorn in West Lothian in 681; and by 730 Ninian's foundation at Whithorn was an Anglian see. In the tenth century Northumbria had fallen on evil times the kingdom was at an end, and great part of it was held by the heathen Danes. The kings of Alba, now coming to be called Scotia, made inroads and assaults; the harassed Northumbrian Earls could hardly resist; and in 1018, when Earl Eadulf was defeated in a bloody battle at Carham, Northumbria benorth the Tweed was formally ceded to the Celtic but Christian kings of Scots, whom doubtless the Angles preferred to pagan Danish masters. But it was on condition that Lothian should retain its Anglian laws and customs; of its Anglian speech there never was question. The great Danish king Cnut, now firmly established on the throne of England, did |