With thee she eats, with thee she drinks
With thee she talks, with thee she moans
With thee she sighs, with thee she groans
With thee she says—‘Farewell mine own!’
When thou, God knows, full far art gone.”
Surrey is to be held in honor as the first poet who wrote English blank verse; he having translated two books of the Æneid in that form. But this delicate singer, this gallant soldier cannot altogether please the capricious monarch; perhaps he is too fine a soldier; perhaps too free a liver; perhaps he is dangerously befriended by some ladies of the court: Quite certain it is that the King frowns on him; and the frowns bring what they have brought to so many others—first, imprisonment in the Tower, and then the headsman’s axe. In this way the poet died at thirty, in 1547: his execution being one of the last ordered by Henry VIII., and the King so weak that he could only stamp, instead of signing the death warrant.
Honest men breathed freer, everywhere, when the King died, in the same year with Surrey: and so, that great, tempestuous reign was ended.
A Boy-King, a Queen, and Schoolmaster.
Edward VI. succeeded his father at the age of ten years—a precocious, consumptive boy, who gave over his struggle with life when only sixteen; and yet has left his “Works,” printed by the Roxburgh Club. There’s a maturity about some of the political suggestions in his “Journal”—not unusual in a lively mind prematurely ripening under stress of disease; yet we can hardly count him a literary king.
The red reign of Mary, immediately following, lasted only five years, for which, I think, all Christian England thanked God: In those five years very many of the strong men of whom we have talked in this chapter came to a fiery end.