Labour that thou and I shall waste,
For ended is that we began;
Now is the song both sung and passed;
My lute, be still, for I have done."
But the most famous of these was the Earl of Surrey (b. 1516, d. 1547). Like Wyatt, he had travelled in Italy, and formed a high admiration of the great Italian poets, Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, on whose model he formed his taste. Like his ancestor, the conqueror of Flodden, he was brave and high-spirited but seems to have had a facility for getting into scrapes, both with his own family and the Government. As a gay courtier, however, he was much admired by the ladies, and still more by people of taste for his poems, which went through four editions in two months, and through seven more in the thirty years after their appearance. They are supposed to have strongly influenced the taste of Spenser and Milton. The theme of his lyrics was the fair Geraldine, but who she was precisely neither critics nor historians have quite determined, though believed to be a lady of the Irish family of Fitzgerald. A single stanza will indicate the spirit with which he proclaimed her beauty:—
"Give place, ye lovers, here before
That spent your boasts and brags in vain!
My lady's beauty passeth more
The best of yours, I dare well say'n,
Than doth the sun the candle-light,