Wyatt should have been the minister of Henry; we should then have learned if a great wit, where wit was ever relished, could have saved himself under a monarch who dashed down a Wolsey.
Surrey and Wyatt, though often engaged, the one as a statesman, the other as a general, found their most delightful avocation in the intercourse of their studies. Their minds seemed cast in the same mould. They mutually confided their last compositions, and sometimes chose the same subject in the amicable wrestlings of their genius. It was a community of studies and a community of skill; the thoughts of the one flowed into the thoughts of the other, and we frequently discover the verse from one in the poem of the other. Wyatt was the more fortunate man, for he did not live to see himself die in the partner of his fame perishing on a scaffold, and he has received a poet’s immortality from that friend’s noble epitaph. In his epitaph, Surrey dwells on every part of the person of his late companion; he expatiates on the excellences of the head, the face, the hand, the tongue, the eye, and the heart—but these are not fanciful conceits; the solemnity of his thoughts and his deep emotions tell their truth. Wyatt’s was
| A head, where Wisdom’s mysteries did frame, Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain, As on a stithy,[4] where some work of fame Was daily wrought. |
[1] “The Works of the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt,” by Dr. Nott, form an important accession to our national literature. If we cannot always agree with the conclusions of our literary antiquary, we must value the variety of his researches, not less profound than extensive.
[2] “Tiraboschi,” vol. vii.—Haym’s “Bibliotheca Italiani.” When Conybeare communicated the same information to Dr. Bliss, it must have been derived from Warton.
[3] And, strange to add, it is still history! Mr. Godwin, in “The Lives of Necromancers,” details every part of this apocryphal tale! And the Edinburgh reviewer very philosophically, not doubtful of its verity, accounts for all its supernatural magic, and clearly explains the inexplicable!
[4] The smith’s forge.
