Then lively doth he look," and salueth me again,

"

And saith, " My dear, how is it now, that you have all this
"pain?"
Wherewith the heavy cares, " that heaped are in my breast,
Break forth and me dischargen clean" of all my great unrest:
But when I me awake," and find it but a dream,

The anguish of my former woe" beginneth more extreme;
And me tormente:h so, that uneath may I find

"

Some hidden place wherein to slake" the gnawing of my mind.'

In the lines which are supposed to have produced the bitter retort from his mistress, is a good description of coquetry, mixed at the same time with a very tender and touching air of regret.

In silence though I keep " such secrets to myself,

Yet do I see how she sometime" doth yield a look by stealth, As though it seem'd, I wis, "" I will not lose thee so;

When in her heart so sweet a thought " did never truly grow.' The epitaph on Clere, which was formerly in Lambeth church, is a pleasing specimen of Surrey's tenderness and compression. Clere was a young gentleman who followed him in the wars, both as friend and attendant; and is supposed to have received some mortal injury in saving the Earl's life.

Norfolk sprung thee, Lambeth holds thee dead,
Clere, of the county of De Cleremont hight;
Within the womb of Ormond's race thou'rt bred,

And saw'st thy cousin * crowned in thy sight. * Anne Boleyn.
Shelton for love, Surrey for lord thou chase;

(Aye, me! while life did last, that league was tender)

Tracing whose steps thou sawest Kelsal blaze,

Landrecy burnt, and battered Boulogne render.

At Montreuil gates, hopeless of all recure,

Thine Earl, half dead, gave in thy hand his will;
Which cause did thee this pining death procure,

Ere summers four times seven thou couldst fulfil.
Ah, Clere! if love had booted, care, or cost,
Heaven had not won, nor earth so timely lost. '

But the best specimens of the pith and dignity of his grave style, are to be found in the pieces on his friend Wyatt. The following are the best passages of the longest of them. The illustration of that subtle and contemplative spirit's tendency to continual thinking, is exceedingly lively and forcible.

Wyatt esteth here, that quick could never rest,
Whose heavenly gifts increased by disdain,

And virtue sank the deeper in his breast;

Such profit he of envy could obtain:

A head, where wisdom mysteries did frame,
Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain
As on a stiphy, where some work of fame

Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain's gain :
A visage stern and mild, where both did grow
Vice to contemn, and virtue to rejoice;
Amid great storms, whom grace assured so,
To live upright, and smile in fortune's choice:
A hand, that taught what might be said in rhyme,
That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit;

A mark, the which (unperfected for time)

Some may approach, but never none shall hit;
An eye, whose judgment no affect could blind,
Friends to allure, and foes to reconcile;
Whose piercing look did represent a mind

With virtue fraught, reposed, void of guile :

A valiant corpse, where force and beauty met.'

But of all the authenticated poems of Surrey, the most pleas ing and perfect is that which he wrote during one of his imprisonments in Windsor Castle. As it consists of recollections of his early youth, it has all the graces of his chivalrous spirit without the pride. It combines the three best features of his character, personal and poetical; his tender spirit of friendship, his taste for knightly gallantry, and his powers of description. We give

it entire.

So cruel prison how could betide, alas!

As proud Windsor, where I in lust and joy
With a king's son my childish years did pass,
In greater feast than Priam's sons of Troy.
Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour;

The large green courts, where we were wont to hove, t
With eyes cast up unto the maiden's tower,

And easy sighs, such as folks draw in love;

The stately seats, the ladies bright of hue,

The dances short, long tales of great delight,
With words, and looks, that tigers could but rue,
Where each of us did plead the other's right;
The palm-play, where despoiled for the game,
With dazed eyes oft we, by gleams of love,
Have missed the ball, and got sight of our dame,
To bait her eyes, which kept the leads above.
The gravelled ground, with sleeves tied on the helm,
On foaming horse, with swords and friendly hearts,

With chear as though one should another whelm,
Where we here fought, and chased oft with darts;
With silver drops the meads yet spread for ruth;

In active games of nimbleness and strength,
Where we did strain, trained with swarms of youth
Our tender limbs, that yet shot up in length;
The secret groves, which oft we made resound
Of pleasant plaint, and of our ladies praise,
Recording soft what grace each one had found,
What hope of speed, what dread of long delays;
The wild forest, the clothed holts with green;

With rains availed, and swift y-breathed horse
With cry of hounds, and merry blasts between,
Where we did chase the fearful hart of force; *
The void walls eke that harboured us each night;
Wherewith, alas! revive within my heart
The sweet accord, such sleeps as yet delight,
The pleasant dreams, the quiet bed of rest,
The secret thoughts imparted with such trust,

The wanton talk, the divers change of play,
The friendship sworn, each promise kept so just,-
Wherewith we past the winter nights away.
And with this thought the blood forsakes the face;
The tears berain my cheeks of deadly hue;
The which, as soon as sobbing sighs, alas!
Up-supped have, thus I my plaint renew:
"O place of bliss! renewer of my woes!

Give me account, where is my noble fere ?
Whom in thy walls thou didst each night enclose,
To other lief, but unto me most dear.
Echo, alas that doth my sorrow rue,

Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint.
Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew,

In prison pine with bondage and restraint;
And with remembrance of the greater grief
To banish the less, I find my chief relief. '

The only point in which this poem is inferior to the other principal ones of the Noble author is, that the style is not so clear and concise; but, like their masters the Italians, the poets of that and the subsequent age, paid much more attention to versification than is apt to be supposed; stretching it, indeed, into all its artifices, good and bad; and it is possible that Surrey may have intended, by the lax and tangled nature of some of these stanzas, to give the whole an air of careless

* Game of force is game which is run down.

desolation.' We must not forget to notice, that in this, as in most of his other pieces, the Earl has taken some delicate expressions from his predecessors, and the reader has seen that he copies whole sonnets out of Petrarch; yet it does not appear that he made any acknowledgement in so doing. At the same time, the charge is by no means exclusively applicable to him. It may be brought against all the poets, before and after, till, we suppose, reading became too common to leave them undetected. Chaucer is the only one we are aware of, who makes any references to his originals; and, what is curious enough, this seems to have been owing to a contrary custom, which often affected originals where none existed; so that perhaps an acknowledgement, when well founded, was to very doubtful purpose. The delightful romancers of Italy pretended they got all their materials out of the fabulous history of Archbishop Turpin. Cervantes, in mimicking them as well as their heroes, refers, with the same gravity, to that illustrious unknown, the Cid Hamet Benengeli. Yet it was but the other day that some of the largest and best pieces of Chaucer were discovered to be borrowed; one of them, the Palamon and Arcite, being taken from a poem of Boccaccio's, almost unknown even in Italy. Spenser and Milton borrow from the same country without any remorse; and, though it is pleasant to know that all three improved upon what they borrowed, and though the prevalence of the custom relieves them from the worst part of the charge of plagiarism, yet it is a proceeding, we confess, we do not well understand. The musicians and painters are still greater poachers; and, what alone would give us a high idea of the intellectual riches of the nation whom they plunder, their booty is almost all from the same place. The musicians have no more excuse than the poets for not making their acknowledgement. The painters, unluckily, have their apology; for we cannot well call upon them to quote a leg,—to hitch a note on a lady's bosom,-or put the turn of a countenance between inverted

commas.

There remains one poem to notice, which Dr Nott thinks himself authorized in pronouncing to be Surrey's, and which, if it were really his, might dispute the palm with any we have extracted. But we are not of the Doctor's opinion. We do not mean to pronounce the reverse; but it does not strike us that the style is like Surrey, as he asserts; and his chief reason for adjudging it to the Noble poet appears far from conclusive. It is here given,' he says, to Surrey, on the authority of Turberville, who, quoting a passage from it, attributes it' (that is to say, the passage) expressly to the Noble Surrey,'

6

Though Noble Surrey said that "chance wonders frame, And make things out of sight forgot, and thereof takes his name.' The line referred to by Turberville is,

'Chance, my friend, works wonders oft.' I. 169.

Nothing, we conceive, can be more inconclusive than thisespecially when it is considered that, in several of the miscellanies of those days, pieces taken from Tottel's Songs and Sonnets bear the name of Surrey, as if he were the author of them, when in reality nothing more was intended than a general reference to the volume in which the pieces cited were to be found. Our reasons for holding the poem not to be Surrey's, are, that it has a finer flow of various music than any of his authentic pieces ;-that it is much longer, and written in a more patient spirit of mental enjoyment;-that it consists of nothing but regular eight-syllable couplets, which is a measure he never appears to have used;-and, lastly, that with a more modern air of versification, it nevertheless has a closer eye to Chaucer. We will just quote a passage or two in fairness, and because they are well worth extracting. The poem is upon the Restless State of a Lover; and opens thus

The Sun, when he hath spread his rays,
And showed his face ten thousand ways,
Ten thousand things do then begin
To show the life that they are in.
The heaven shows lively art and hue,
Of sundry shapes and colours new,
And laughs upon the earth :-anon,
The earth, as cold as any stone,
Wet in the tears of her own kind,
'Gins then to take a joyful mind;
For well she feels that out and out
The sun doth warm her round about,
And dries her children tenderly,
And shews them forth full orderly.

The mountains high, and how they stand;
The vallies, and the great main land,
The trees, the herbs, the towers strong,
The castles, and the rivers long;
And even for joy thus of this heat,
She sheweth forth her pleasures great,
And sleeps no more; but sendeth forth
Her clergions, her own dear worth,
To mount and fly up to the air,
Where then they sing in order fair,
And tell in song full merrily,
How they have slept full quietly