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difficult for some scholars to realise that wisdom is the very last thing many desire with what an economist calls an effective demand," or, in other words, with willingness to pay its price.

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Early in the fifteenth century (1415) Henry Beaufort attended the Council of Constance, and there he met the famous Italian scholar, Poggio. Twenty years later, Æneas Sylvius travelled through parts of England and Scotland, more or less incognito. He was not greatly impressed, and he thought the northerners specially barbarous. He kept a record of his travels, and among other odd bits of information, he solemnly stated that the men of Stroud (in Gloucestershire) were all born with tails.

Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, a serious student of Italian, obtained native teachers to help him with that and with Latin. He became a great collector of book, and on his death in 1447, left his library to the University of Oxford. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was another eager collector of books. He, too, travelled to Italy, and on to Palestine. On his way home, he stayed in Italy, listening to great scholars who were lecturing in Padua, Florence and Ferrara, the latter distinguished by the brilliant Court of the House of Este, famous patrons of learned men and women. Other English students who visited Italy were William Grey, John Free (Phreas), a poor scholar of Bristol whom Tiptoft probably helped with money. Free invited another Englishman, John Gunthorpe, to Ferrara. They were joined by a third, Robert Flemming, Dean of Lincoln. All this travelling opened up good relations between the two countries, and when Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509, admiration for Italian learning and literature was firmly established in England. However disappointingly bad Henry became in later years, we have to remember that at his accession, the scholars of his day-e.g., Thomas More and Erasmus were full of high expectations concerning him. When Henry was only nine years old, More took Erasmus to see the royal children in their nursery; and the latter, writing to Prince Henry, closed his letter thus:

Farewell, and may Good Letters be illustrated1 by your splendour, protected by your authority, and fostered by your liberality.

This growth of vernacular literatures in Europe is a matter of great importance. Throughout the Middle Ages, learned men of different nations spoke and wrote to each other in the common language of the learned, Latin. The supreme place of this language can be guessed from this fact: to-day if we are called on to judge dishonourable conduct, we sometimes dismiss it with the remark, "It was not cricket"; in the Middle Ages scholars expressed the same opinion by calling it "false Latin."

The first Englishmen who made literary use in England of the knowledge they had gained abroad were Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and the Earl of Surrey (c. 1517-1547), who, while they were in Italy, had learned to know and appreciate Petrarca's work. On their return to England they wrote many sonnets, which were eventually collected in a book called Tottel's Miscellany. Though they had been inspired by Petrarca, they disregarded his rime arrangement. In the following sonnet, written by Surrey, he has only two rime sounds, all through, both in octave and sestet:

The soote season that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale,
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her make hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs;
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;
The fishes flete with new-repairèd scale;
The adder all her slough away she slings;
The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale;
The busy bee her honey now she mings;
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale,
And thus I see among these pleasant things,
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.

1 Rendered more shining.

a Sweet.

3 Dove.

4 Mate.

It may seem at first as if this sonnet not only breaks the rules of form, but does not fulfil the important requirement of having one main thought. Yet, though the facts are rather "catalogued," the leading motive is that in the midst of the passing away of all wintry pains, the poet's sorrow is quite untouched by the joy of returning spring.

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1556) more nearly used the true Italian form; but he, too, allowed himself license as to the placing of the rimes in the sestet; as a rule he rimed the ninth and eleventh, the tenth and twelfth, and the thirteenth and fourteenth. His sonnet, To Sleep, is a typical example of his matter and form:

Come, Sleep, O Sleep! the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof shield me without the prease1
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw.
O make in me those civil wars to cease,
I will good tribute pay if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf to noise or blind to light,
A rosy garland and a weary head:
And if these things as being thine by right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me
Livelier than elsewhere Stella's image see.

Though Sidney rimes as he will, he is careful about the pauses at the end of the quatrains; so far as form is concerned, this sonnet is an advance on Surrey's To Spring. The rimed couplet at the close of the sestet is a breach of Italian rules, but has become characteristic of the English sonnet form which is called Shakespearean. Surrey, Sidney and Spenser all practised this form, though of the three Spenser experimented most freely. His arrangement of rimes is his own; he rimes the first and third lines; the second, fourth, fifth and seventh; the sixth, eighth, ninth and eleventh, the tenth and twelfth; and then ends with a rimed couplet.

1 Pressure.

His sixteenth sonnet, where he described the little archers of love, who lived in his lady's eyes, may serve as an example of his sonnet form, and not less of his sonnets' beauty of matter:

One day as I unwarily did gaze,

On those fair eyes my love's immortal light:
The whiles my 'stonished heart stood in amaze,
Through sweet illusion of her look's delight;
I mote perceive how in her glancing sight
Legions of loves with little wings did fly,
Darting their deadly arrows fiery bright,
At every rash beholder passing by.
One of those archers closely did I spy,
Aiming his arrow at my very heart:
When suddenly with twinkle of her eye,
The Damsel broke his misintended Dart.
Had she not so done, sure I had been slain,
Yet, as it was, I hardly 'scaped with pain.

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) wrote one great sonnet on Spenser's Faerie Queene. His form is, no doubt, highly irregular: he does not divide his poem into octave and sestet; he admits no less than seven rime sounds, whereas Spenser was content with five, however far his arrangement of them might be from the typical Italian form. We always should remember that the whole Elizabethan age was one of adventure and experiment. This spirit spread to the literary men; they knew they had learned much, and that of great value, from Italy, but they did not allow themselves to forget that there is such a thing as national genius. However irregular Raleigh's sonnet may be, it has its place in our literature:

Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn; and passing by that way
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair love and fairer virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Faery Queene,
At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept;
And from thenceforth those Graces were not seen,
For they this Queen attended; in whose stead

Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse.
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce;
When Homer's spright did tremble all for grief,
And cursed the access of that celestial thief.

Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) and Michael Drayton (1563-1631) further developed the English or Shakespearean type of sonnet, using six and even seven rime sounds.

But it was left for Shakespeare to perfect this typical English form of sonnet. In his hands the octave and sestet divisions disappear; he uses three quatrains and a rimed couplet.

The problem, To whom did he address these sonnets ?has never been solved; they remain to show us that, quite apart from his dramatic genius, he had also lyrical genius, a rare sense of melody, a penetrating insight, and passionate emotions, qualities in which no other poet has surpassed him. In the whole range of English poetry, abundantly rich though it is in the expression of unquenchable love, can there be found lines more perfect, more passion-laden, more musical than these?

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Anyone can see that Shakespeare observes no sonnet rules save that he keeps to fourteen lines of ten syllables

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