Although sufficiently distinguished from the common versifiers of his age, is confessedly inferior to Surrey in harmony of numbers, perspicuity of expression, and facility of phraseology. Nor is he equal to Surrey in elegance of sentiment, in nature and sensibility. His feelings are disguised by affectation, and obscured by conceit. His declarations of passion are embarrassed by wit and fancy; and his style is not intelligible, in proportion as it is careless and unadorned. His compliments, like the modes of behaviour in that age, are ceremonious and strained. He has too much art as a lover, and too little as a poet. His gallantries are laboured, and his versification negligent. The truth is, his genius was of the moral and didactic species: and his poems abound more in good sense, satire, and observations on life, than in pathos or imagination.-WARTON, THOMAS, 1778-81, History of English Poetry, sec. xxxviii.

One of the principal ornaments of an age unable to discern his merits, or unwilling to record them.-LODGE, EDMUND, 1792-1800, Imitations of Original Drawings by Hans Holbein, with Biographical Tracts.

Wyatt had a deeper and more accurate penetration into the characters of men than Surrey had; hence arises the difference in their satires. Surrey, in his satire against the citizens of London, deals only in reproach; Wyatt, in his, abounds with irony, and those nice touches of ridicule, which make us ashamed of our faults, and therefore often silently effect amendment. Surrey's observation of nature was minute; but he directed it towards the works of nature in general, and the movements of the passions, rather than to the foibles and characters of men; hence it is that he excels in the description of rural objects, and is always tender and pathetic. In Wyatt's "Complaint" we hear a strain. of manly grief which commands attention, and we listen to it with respect for the sake of him that suffers. Surrey's distress is painted in such natural terms that we make it our own, and recognize in his sorrows emotions which we are conscious of having felt ourselves. In point of taste. and perception of propiety in composition, Surrey is more accurate and just than Wyatt he therefore seldom either offends with conceits or wearies with repetition,

and when he imitates other poets he is original as well as pleasing. In his numerous translations from Petrarch he is seldom inferior to his master, and he seldom improves upon him. Wyatt is almost always below the Italian, and frequently degrades a good thought by expressing it so that it is hardly recognizable. Had Wyatt attempted a translation of Virgil, as Surrey did, he would have exposed himself to unavoidable failure. -NOTT, GEORGE FREDERICK, 1815-16, ed. Surrey and Wyatt's Poems, vol: II, p. 156.

The genius of Sir Thomas Wyat was refined and elevated like that of his noble friend and contemporary; but his poetry is more sententious and sombrous, and in his lyrical effusions he studied terseness rather than suavity.--CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Essay on English Poetry.

Wyatt is an abundant writer; but he has wrought his later versification with great variety, though he has not always smoothed his workmanship with his nail. For many years, Wyatt had smothered his native talent by translation from Spanish and Italian poets, and in his rusty rhythmical measures. He lived to feel the truth of nature, and to practice happier art. Of his amatory poems, many are graceful, most ingenious.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1841, The Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, Amenities of Literature.

In his Satires we find what we may call a mellowed souredness of spirit, like the taste of the plum or sloe when touched by the first frosts. There is no fury, no rancour, and but little bitterness. You have simply a good and great man, who has left the public arena early and without stain, giving the results of his experience, and deliberately preferring the life of rural simplicity and peace to that of courtly etiquette and diplomatic falsehood. How different from the savage and almost fiendish eye of retrospect Such men as Swift and Byron cast upon a world which they have spurned, and which, with quite as much justice, has spurned them! Wyatt and the world, on the other hand, part fair foes, and shake hands ere they diverge from each other's paths for ever.-GILFILLAN, GEORGE, 1858, ed. The Poetical Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt, p. xvi.

Wyatt and Surrey are said to have been the introducers of the sonnet into English

literature, but this credit is due especially to Wyatt, not only as the elder man and earlier writer, but as the one of the two who alone gave accurate models of the structure of that form of poem.

. . Although Surrey's sonnets are in fourteen lines, and closely imitate Petrarch's forms of thought, yet as to their mechanism they are all at fault. Wyatt studied the form of the verse before he imitated, and the true sonnet was introduced into our literature by him alone. MORLEY, HENRY, 1873, First Sketch of English Literature, pp. 293, 294.

Wyatt and Surrey are usually classed together par nobile fratrum-the Dioscuri of the Dawn. They inaugurated that important period in our literature known as the Era of Italian Influence, or that of the Company of Courtly Makers-the period which immediately preceded and ushered in the age of Spenser and Shakespeare. In Surrey we find the first germ of the Bucolic Eclogue. In Wyatt we have our first classical satirist. Of our lyrical poetry they were the founders. It is unfortunately not possible to decide how far these two poets acted and re-acted on each other. We are however inclined to think that Wyatt was the master-spirit, and that Surrey has been enabled to throw him so completely and so unfairly into the shade, mainly because he had his friend's patterns to work upon. . . . The dignity and gravity which characterise the structure of some of his lyric periods appear to have been caught from the poets of Castile. >His general tone is sombre, sententious

and serious, and he is too often reflecting when he ought to be feeling. The greater part of his poetry is wasted in describing with weary minuteness transports of slighted and requited affection, but his true place is among observant men of the world, scholars and moralists. His versification is often harsh and uncouth, except in some of his lyrics, which are occasionally very musical, and in his Satires, which are uniformly terse and smooth. He is inferior to Surrey in diction, in taste, in originality, and in poetical feeling; but it may be doubted whether the more delicate genius of the younger poet would have been able to achieve so complete a triumph over the mechanism of expression had he not been preceded by his robuster brother.

-COLLINS, J. CHURTON, 1880, The English Poets, ed. Ward, pp. 248, 249, 250.

His love-sonnets and songs have none of that lightness and gaiety which we are apt to associate with such verses, but they contain much subtle thought, and bear the appearance of expressing a genuine passion.-NICOLL, HENRY J., 1882, Landmarks of English Literature, p. 51.

Now there is every reason to believe, if we study the biographies of Wyatt and Surrey, that Wyatt, and not Surrey as is so commonly stated, led the way in the work which is associated with their names that Wyatt, and not Surrey, was the first to attempt the improvement of our metres by Italian example and precedent. As early as 1526, when Surrey was certainly not more than ten years old, perhaps only eight, Leland had "honoured" Wyatt, then twenty-three, as the most accomplished poet of his time.

Tulit alter honores. But surely it is time Wyatt had a more general recognition as the first, in time at least, of those "courtly makers." . . . Surely it is time he should more generally have some credit for having introduced the sonnet into our literature. Yet, in his otherwise admirable remarks on the sonnet in the

recently published edition of Milton's Sonnets, Mr. Mark Pattison, a singularly accomplished scholar, and a most excellent writer and critic, as all the world knows, does not even mention poor Sir Thomas. Sic vos non vobis.-HALES, JOHN W., 1883-93, Folia Litteraria, pp. 152, 154.

So stumbling and knock-kneed is his verse that any one who remembers the admirable versification of Chaucer may now and then be inclined to think that Wyatt had much better have left his innovations alone.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 5.

Wyatt gave abundant promise of the broad daylight of poetry that was to follow hard upon these crepuscular rays.SCHELLING, FELIX E., 1891, Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth, p. 5.

Wyatt is not one of the great masterminds, but certainly occupied one of the most distinguished positions in the history of his own nation. Owing to the soundness and complete harmony of his nature,

statesman. Elyot takes his future "Governor" in the arms of his nurse, and places the ideal being amid all the scenes which may exercise the virtues, or the studies which he develops. The work is dedicated to Henry the Eighth. The design, the imaginary personage, the author, and the patron are equally dignified. The style is grave; and it would not be candid in a modern critic to observe, that, in the progress of time, the good sense has become too obvious, and the perpetual illustrations from ancient history too familiar. The erudition in philology of that day has become a school-boy's learning. They had then no other volumes to recur to, of any authority, but what the ancients had left.

Boke of the Governor' must now be condemned to the solitary imprisonment of the antiquary's cell, who will pick up many curious circumstances relative to the manners of the age, always an amusing subject of speculation, when we contemplate on the gradations of social life.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1841, The Difficulties Experienced by a Primitive Author, Amenities of Literature.

Sir Thomas Elyot stands as a character altogether typical of the period, and is one of the pleasantest figures of the time; as an able lawyer and man of business, a clever diplomatist with a grand capacity for work, and an ornament to English knighthood because of his extensive knowledge, a man strictly honourable in nature, and of genuine piety. The unselfish Renaissance-zeal for culture, the impulse to learn and to teach, live vigorously in him, and his entire literary activity testifies to the fact. In addition to this we have in him that naïve, joyous hopefulness, lost for the greater part to our age, the faith in the power of aiding the enlightenment and improvement of men by means of popular moralizing writings.-TEN BRINK, BERNHARD, 1892, History of English Literature, (Fourteenth Century to Surrey) tr. Schmitz, p. 194.

vivacity of Ascham. Charm of style was hardly as yet a gift to which English prose had attained. Elyot has many virtuesclearness and precision among thembut if he seldom falls below a certain level, he as seldom rises above it.AINGER, ALFRED, 1893, English Prose, ed. Craik, vol. 1, p. 191.

It might be difficult to give any reason except the fact that it has been twice reprinted in the present century for the position held by "The Boke named the Governour," still more difficult to account for the reprinting itself. . In the history of prose style Elyot is commendable rather than distinguished; free from obvious and glaring defects rather than possessed of distinct merits. He is rather too much given to long sentences; he has little or nothing of Fisher's rhetorical devices, and while the romantic grace of his not much older contemporary Berners is far from him, so also is the deliberate classical plainness of his not very much younger contemporary Ascham. He is principally valuable as an example of the kind of prose which a cultivated man of ordinary gifts would be likely to write before the definite attempts of Ascham and his school.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, pp. 234, 235.

Elyot's literary work, although it exhibits no striking originality, illustrates the wide culture and erudition of Henry VIII's Court. Political philosophy and the theory of education chiefly interested him. His views were borrowed from the foreign writers of the Renaissance. Erasmus's influence is plainly discernable. Pico della Mirandola, Francesco Patrizi the elder, and other less-known Italian authors were familiar to him. His intimate friends included Sir Thomas More and Roger Ascham. As a Greek scholar who first translated part of Isocrates into English, and as an early student of both Greek and Latin patristic literature, he well deserves to be remembered. That he should have written all his books in his native language gives him a high place among the pioneers of English prose literature. His style is clear, although its literary flavour is thin. His fame as a translator lived through Elizabeth's reign.