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as concurrent testimony seems to prove, the King was not in a state competent for any business, and was probably unable even to sign the warrant for execution. Holinshed says that Henry was "in the extremities of death" as early as the thirteenth of January, the day of the trial, and he died probably in the night of the twenty-seventh: but, as we find in Burnet that a difficulty in writing had led him to use a cyphered stamp some time before his death for the purpose of signature, it is not impossible that the royal assent on this occasion might have been obtained surreptitiously. The Duke of Norfolk, owing probably to the King's death, survived the storm, though not without the loss of a large portion of his vast possessions; and he procured the reversal of the act of attainder in the ensuing reign.

In person, the noble poet is described as somewhat small of stature, but well made, active, and able to endure much fatigue: his eye, dark and piercing; his countenance, thoughtful. In his habits, he was magnificent and sumptuous, but courteous and condescending: in disposition, of high courage, easily provoked, but soon appeased, and incapable of dissimulation. His mind was much cultivated, and of a romantic but contemplative cast. His acquirements, independently of the manly accomplishments of the body, comprehended a knowlege of the Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish languages, and an acquaintance with the best models of composition in most of them.

To the life of the Earl of Surrey, the editor has added all that he has been able to collect relative to the fair Geraldine, the Laura of this English Petrarch. A similar attempt will be found in Lord Orford's works: but the present inquiry is more full, and has exacted more industry, though it is not much more satisfactory. That she was a real personage has been generally allowed; but it must be confessed that the story of the passion which the poet entertained for her loses some of its credibility, when an attempt is made to confine the in

second son, the Earl of Northampton, to Framlingham, in Suffolk, who there placed an inscription over the body. This inscription, as quoted by Dr. N., seems replete with chronological errors. Surrey is said there to have died in 1566, nineteen years after that event happened; and his son to have placed the monument in 1514, or, as we find by the list of errata, in 1614. This epitaph must either be an invention of Hawes, from whose history of, Framlingham it is taken, or have been carelessly copied by him, and so transcribed by Dr. Nott. It is wonderful how the latter could have overlooked such inconsistencies. Other marks of incorrectness also appear about the inscription.

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cidents resulting from it within fixed dates and seasons. She is presumed to have been Lady Elizabeth Fitz-Gerald, commonly called Garrat, daughter of Gerald Fitz-Gerald ninth Earl of Kildare, a family descended from the Geralds of Florence. * She is said to have been born in Ireland, probably in the year 1528, and to have been sent to England while an infant under the protection of the King, and educated in the establishment of the Princess Mary, to whom she became a lady in waiting about the year 1542. Tradition adds that, at the age of fifteen, she was married to Sir Anthony Brown, then in his sixty-first year; and that, after his death in 1549, she became the third wife of the Earl of Lincoln, whom she also survived. Dr. Nott supposes Surrey to have first declared his passion for her in 1541, when she was in her thirteenth year; and he has somewhere said that he loved for two years in silence: she therefore became the object of his passion very considerably before she entered on her teens. Nevertheless, whenever this attachment commenced, the poet was neither fortunate in the prosecution of it nor so far enslaved but that, when long treated with neglect and disdain, he was able to divest himself of the enchantment; and, from the time at which he accepted the command at Boulogne, we hear no more of his love, whence arises a presumption that it was effectually conquered. Yet "risum teneatis, amici," when the reverend Doctor discourses in the following strain? Geraldine was of that ungenerous disposition, too often, alus!! united to beauty, which makes attachment subservient to admiration, and seeks in love no higher gratification than that of vanity.' We trust that, before the editor penned the foregoing sentence, he threw aside his gown and cassock, and exclaimed, "Lie there, Doctor." To make amends, however, for what might appear to the inconsiderate as a disapproval of the lady's chastity while unmarried and of her conjugal fidelity when married, he afterward subjoins his opinion that Surrey's love was purely of the Platonic kind: but, allowing, as he does, that nothing can be more dangerous to morality than this flimsy self-deception, how can he well condemn the conduct of the lady, who rejected it, as ungenerous and unamiable?

We are not inclined, however, either to impeach or to defend the purity of the poet's intentions,-an useless task at the best, and an impertinent one on a topic relative to which

A fact resting on the authority of a short poem by Surrey, addressed to her, and beginning, "from Tuscane came my noble lady's race."

we,

we, in company with the editor, are very imperfectly informed indeed. An amatory poet, like a knight-errant, must have a mistress, real or imaginary: wives, it seems, by some statute in the court of Apollo, being formerly incapacitated from holding this distinguished place in the eyes of their own husbands; and we must leave it to them to protest against such a law. Whether Geraldine was a peerless beauty at eleven years of age, or a creature of the poet's brain, a Dulcinea del Toboso, (only lighter by a pound or two) or lastly, whether Dr. N.'s dates are not fundamentally wrong, must be decided by others who are more curious in such matters.

The Dissertation on the state of English Poetry before the sixteenth century displays very considerable research into the history of its rise and progress, and is by far the most laboured part of the editor's performance. It is divided into twenty-two sections; embracing a great mass of disquisition, critical as well as historical; and, if one definable end must be given as the intended result of the whole collectively, we may state it to be a summary of the improvements introduced by Lord Surrey into English versification, deduced from the imperfections of his predecessors, and the visible effect arising from imitation of him, as a model, in those who succeeded him. It is farther argued that this influence extended not merely to the more artificial parts of poetry as a science, but to the reform of the English language generally. Lofty, indeed, are such claims as these: but they are advanced with boldness, and defended with vigour and penetration.

Section I. relates to the nature of our versification previously to the time of Surrey: the point in question being, whether the fluency and harmony of his numbers were the result of principles first introduced by himself, or whether he only improved on principles already understood. To com

prehend this question rightly, it becomes necessary to examine the numbers of Chaucer, undoubtedly the first polisher of our language, and even of those who preceded him. Mr. Tyrwhitt, the last editor of the Canterbury Tales, supposes Chaucer's versification to have been completely metrical, each heroic verse consisting of eleven syllables: but, as many of the lines of that poet fall short of this standard by one, two, and even three syllables, he would attribute such seeming irregularity to the changes that time has produced in our pronunciation. Subserviently to this system, he assumes a mode of pronunciation in reading poetry by which many words, of which one syllable is now dropped by the voice, are extended: such as Lord-is for Lords, bathed for bath'd, and other like expedients: but even these licences, however widely stretched, fail that

editor in the application of them: because numberless verses would still remain which no such usages could bring into the form of regular iambic hendecasyllables. Dr. Nott has not observed, but is probably aware, that this hypothesis of Mr. Tyrwhitt was by no means original; Speght, the editor of Chaucer in 1597, having asserted the same long before him ; and in fact the former has merely reduced into system the observations of the latter. His own opinions may claim a precedent in those of Dryden on this subject*: the modernizer of Chaucer was at variance with Speght on the same grounds on which the editor of Lord Surrey now differs from Tyrwhitt but Dr. Nott has shewn reasons for the rejection of the system, which we may suspect that Dryden was incompetent to assign.

The second section treats of the different sorts of English verse in use before the time of Chaucer, viz. the octosyllabic, the Alexandrine, and the alliterative. It seems unnecessary to define their respective peculiarities, since to persons who are fond of this branch of philology they are already known, and to others they are not interesting: but one point will subsequently be deduced from the disquisition, viz. that, if Chaucer was not the prototype of metrical versification in our country, his improvements in rythmical were great and incontestible.

Dr. Nott is thus led to consider the nature of rythmical versification, which he does in his third section, adducing specimens of it from poets antecedent to Chaucer. It is the property of this early species not to consist of a given number of feet, but to be so constructed as to render a certain cæsura and cadence necessary in the recitation; and the most positive proof that these early poets themselves did not write in rude metre, but simply in rythm, has been excellently derived by the editor from the very manuscripts in which they are preserved; where, for the purpose of assisting recitation, the cæsura is regularly marked, or, if not marked, an evident hiatus is left to shew the place of the pause between two hemistichs; as thus,

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England is right good: I ween it is land best;" and in the manuscript of Piers Plowman's visions,

"In a summer season when soft was the sun."

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* See Ellis's "Specimens of early English Poets," vol. i. p. 209., and the preface to Dryden's Fables by himself, in Mr. Scott's late edition, vol. xi. p. 220., where that editor characterizes Dryden's opinion as hasty and inconsiderate," and Tyrwhitt's position as supported with equal pains and success.

Other

Other marks are used besides these single or double dots, clearly with the same view; and, as if to distinguish them from any thing like punctuation, however rude, they are delineated in ink or paint of a different colour from the text. By extracts from the manuscripts of Chaucer, we are convinced that he made use of this same cæsura, and secured the use of it by an intelligible mark; and consequently the improvements, which he made in poetry, may, we think with the editor, be fairly allowed not to comprize the invention or rather adaptation to our language of verse purely metrical. His lines the Doctor considers generally as decasyllables, but as rythmical and not metrical; and, wherever pure iambic verses occur, he would attribute them to accident: observing that, if Chaucer had any preference for the iambic line, (which he probably would have if it had been his invention,) the slightest transposition of the words in many of his own verses would have produced for him the desired effect. As the ultimate object of this disquisition on rythm and metre is to give the palm of the invention in our language to Lord Surrey, it becomes necessary to prove that the style of the intermediate poets, from the time of Chaucer to that of his Lordship, was also simply rythmical. With this view, reference is made to those who had the greatest share of eminence, as Hoccleve, Lydgate, Stephen Hawes, Barclay, (the translator of Brandt's Ship of Foles,) Skelton, and lastly Parker Lord Morley, a nobleman nearly connected with Surrey's own family. In all these, as well as in Chaucer, iambic lines are to be found; and, indeed, to any person who considers how much our language runs in that metre, it would appear strange if our poets, although they wrote professedly in rythm only, had not been betrayed into what we now esteem legitimate verse. That the poets whose names we have enumerated wrote in rythm only is ascertained by reasons similar to those that are urged in the case of Chaucer. *

In the seventh section, which forms a conclusion to one (and a material) subject of the Dissertation, are summed up the changes in our versification that are attributable to Lord Surrey; and which we may safely allow him the credit of having introduced, if the proof that they were previously unknown has been satisfactorily displayed.

* To the names of Tyrwhitt, Walter Scott, and others, who have considered Chaucer as metrical, should be added the distinguished testimony of Mr. Morell, the author of the Greek Thesaurus. We are inclined, however; to assent to the evidence so largely collected by Dr. Nott.

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