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The subjects of Wyatt and Surrey were chiefly lyrical, and the fact that they imitated the same model has made some likeness between them. Like their personal char

acters, however, the poetry of Wyatt is the more thoughtful and the more strongly felt, but Surrey's has a sweeter movement and a livelier fancy. Both did this great thing for English verse-they chose an exquisite model, and in imitating it corrected the ruggedness of English poetry.' Such verse as Skelton's became impossible. A new standard was made, below which the after poets could not fall. They also added new stanza measures to English verse, and enlarged in this way the lyrical range.' Surrey was the first, in his translation of Vergil's Eneid, to use the ten-syllabled, unrhymed verse, which we now call BLANK-VERSE. In his hands it is not worthy of praise; it had neither the true form nor the harmony into which it grew afterwards. Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, introduced it into drama; Marlowe, in his Tamburlaine, made it the proper verse of the drama; and Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Massinger used it splendidly. In plays it has a special manner of its own; in poetry proper it was, we may say, not only created but perfected by Milton.

The new impulse thus given to poetry was all but arrested by the bigotry that prevailed during the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, and all the work of the New Learning seemed to be useless. But THOMAS WILSON'S book in English on Rhetoric and Logic in 1553, and the publication of THOS. TUSSER'S Pointes of Husbandrie and of Tottel's Miscellany of Uncertain Authors, 1557, in the last years of Mary's reign, proved that something was stirring beneath the gloom. The latter book contained the poems of Surrey and Wyatt, and others by Grimald, by Lord Vaux, and Lord Berners. The date should be remembered, for it is the first printed book of modern English poetry. It proves that men cared now more for the new than for the old poets, that the time of imitating Chaucer was over, and that of original creation was begun. It ushers in the Elizabethan literature."

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PERIOD IV.

ELIZABETH'S REIGN,

1558-1603.

LESSON 17.

Brief Historical Sketch.-Elizabeth's first Parliament undid Mary's work, repealed the statutes of heresy, dissolved the refounded monasteries, and restored the Royal Supremacy. Manufactures of all kinds are stimulated, commerce is developed, and the diet of the common people improved; pewter plates replace wooden trenchers, and feather beds straw mattresses; carpets supersede rushes, glass windows become common, and houses are no longer built for defence, but for comfort, and of brick instead of wood. Members of the House of Commons no longer paid. The thirty-nine articles of faith enacted by Parliament, 1562. Hawkins begins Slave Trade with Africa, 1562. First penal statute against Catholics and first Poor Law, 1562. Puritans secede from English Church, 1566. The Revolt of the Netherlands against Philip II. assisted by Elizabeth, 1575 and on. Futile attempts to colonize America made by Gilbert, 1578, and by Raleigh, 1584, 6, and 7. Drake circumnavigated the earth, 1577. London supplied by water in pipes, 1582. Potatoes and tobacco introduced, 1586. Mary, Queen of Scots, executed by Elizabeth, 1587. Spanish Armada defeated, 1588. Episcopacy abolished in Scotland and Presbyterianism established as the state religion, 1596. Ruin of second Armada, 1597. Bodleian library founded at Oxford, 1598. East India Company chartered, 1600. Magnetism discovered same year. Earl of Essex executed, 1601. Tyrone's rebellion in Ireland crushed, 1603. Wonders of the New World powerfully influenced the literature of this period.

LESSON 18.

ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.-"This may be said to begin with Surrey and Wyatt. But as their poems were published shortly before Elizabeth came to the throne, we date the be

ginning of the earlier Elizabethan literature from the year of her accession, 1558. The era of this earlier literature lasted till 1579, and was followed by the great literary outburst, as it has been called, of the days of Spenser and Shakespeare. The apparent suddenness of this outburst has been an object of wonder. Men have searched for its causes chiefly in those which led to the revival of learning, and no doubt these bore on England as they did on the whole of Europe. But we shall best seek its nearest causes in the work done during the early years of Elizabeth, and in doing so we shall find that the outburst was not so sudden after all. It was preceded by a various, plentiful, but inferior, literature, in which new forms of poetry and prose-writing were tried, and new veins of thought opened, which were afterwards wrought out fully and splendidly. All the germs of the coming age are to be found in these twenty years. The outburst of a plant into flower seems sudden, but the whole growth of the plant has caused it, and the flowering of Elizabethan literature was the slow result of the growth of the previous literature and the influences that bore upon it.

The Earlier Elizabethan Poetry, 1558-1579, is first represented by SACKVILLE, Lord Buckhurst. The Mirror of Magistrates, 1559, for which he wrote the Induction and one tale, is a poem on the model of Boccaccio's Falls of Princes, already imitated by Lydgate. Seven poets, along with Sackville, contributed tales to it, but his poem is the only one of any value. The Induction paints the poet's descent into Avernus, and his meeting with Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whose fate he tells with a grave and inventive imagination. Being written in the manner and stanza of the elder poets, this poem has been called the transition between Lydgate and Spenser. But it does truly belong to the old time; it is as modern as Spenser. GEORGE GASCOIGNE, whose satire, the Steele Glas, 1576, is our first long satirical poem, is the best among a crowd of lesser poets who came after Sackville.

They wrote legends, pieces on the wars and discoveries of the Englishmen of their day, epitaphs, epigrams, songs, sonnets, elegies, fables, and sets of love poems; and the best things they did were collected in a miscellany called the Paradise of Dainty Devices, in 1576. This book, with Tottel's, set on foot in the later years of Elizabeth a crowd of other miscellanies of poetry, which were of great use to the poets. Lyrical poetry and that which we may call 'occasional poetry' were now fairly started.

2. The masques, pageants, interludes, and plays that were written at this time are scarcely to be counted. At every great ceremonial, whenever the queen made a progress or visited one of the great lords or a university, at the houses of the nobility, and at the court on all important days, some obscure versifier, or a young scholar at the Inns of Court, at Oxford, or at Cambridge produced a masque or a pageant, or wrote or translated a play. The habit of play-writing became common; a kind of school, one might almost say a manufacture, of plays arose, which partly accounts for the rapid production, the excellence, and the multitude of plays that we find after 1579. Represented all over England, these masques, pageants, and dramas were seen by the people, who were thus accustomed to take an interest, though of an uneducated kind, in the larger drama that was to follow. The literary men, on the other hand, ransacked, in order to find subjects and scenes for their pageants, ancient and mediæval and modern literature, and many of them in doing so became fine scholars. The imagination of England was quickened and educated in this way, and, as Biblical stories were also largely used, the images of oriental life were added to the materials of imagination.

3. Frequent translations were now made from the classical writers. We know the names of more than twelve men who did this work, and there must have been many more. Already in Henry VIII.'s and in Edward VI.'s time, ancient authors

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