Forthwith Fame flieth through the great Libyan towns:
A mischief Fame, there is none else so swift;
That moving grows, and flitting gathers force:
First small for dread, soon after climbs the skies,
Stayeth on earth, and hides her head in clouds.
Whom our mother the Earth, tempted by wrath
Of gods, begat: the last sister, they write,
To Cœus, and to Enceladus eke:
Speedy of foot, of wing likewise as swift,
A monster huge, and dreadful to descrive.
In every plume that on her body sticks,—
A thing in deed much marvelous to hear,—
As many waker eyes lurk underneath,
So many mouths to speak, and listening ears.
By night she flies amid the cloudy sky,
Shrieking, by the dark shadow of the earth,
Ne doth decline to the sweet sleep her eyes:
By day she sits to mark on the house top,
Or turrets high, and the great towns affrays;
As mindful of ill and lies as blazing truth.
(Earl of Surrey: Æneid, book IV. 223-242. ab. 1540. pub. 1557.)
Surrey's translation of two books of the Æneid may have been suggested by the translation (1541) made by Francesco Maria Molza, attributed at the time to Cardinal Ippolito de Medici. This was in Italian unrimed verse. (See Henry Morley's First Sketch of English Literature, p. 294, and his English Writers, vol. viii. p. 61.) The verse of Surrey, like Wyatt's, shows a somewhat mechanical adherence to the syllable-counting principle, in contrast to regard for accents.[26] Thus we find such lines as:
"Each palace, and sacred porch of the gods."
"By the divine science of Minerva."
There is a fairly free use of run-on lines; according to Schipper, 35 in the first 250 of the translation. Nevertheless, the general effect is monotonous and lacking in flexibility.
O Jove, how are these people's hearts abused!
What blind fury thus headlong carries them,
That, though so many books, so many rolls
Of ancient time record what grievous plagues
Light on these rebels aye, and though so oft
Their ears have heard their aged fathers tell
What just reward these traitors still receive,—
Yea, though themselves have seen deep death and blood
By strangling cord and slaughter of the sword
To such assigned, yet can they not beware,
Yet cannot stay their lewd rebellious hands,
But, suff'ring too foul reason to distain
Their wretched minds, forget their loyal heart,
Reject all truth, and rise against their prince?
(Sackville and Norton: Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, V. ii. 1-14. 1565.)
This tragedy, although Dryden curiously instanced it in defence of the use of rime on the stage, was the earliest English drama in blank verse. The metre is decidedly more monotonous than Surrey's, and gives little hint of the possibilities of the measure for dramatic expression. In general, the early experiments in blank verse suggest—what they must often have seemed to their writers—the mere use of the decasyllabic couplet deprived of its rime. Nevertheless, as Mr. Symonds remarks of a passage in Gorboduc, "we yet may trace variety and emphasis in the pauses of these lines beyond what would at that epoch have been possible in sequences of rhymed couplets." (Blank Verse, p. 20.)