Surrey, the gallant and the ill-fated, exactly reverses our doubt about Sir Thomas. A poet beyond question, is he to be reckoned a Catholic? His father was, and his son would have been had he had the courage of his opinions. The former, imprisoned at the same time with Surrey, “though a strong Papist,” says Lord Herbert, “pretended to ask for Sabellicus as the most vehement detecter of the usurpations of the Bishop of Rome.” And Surrey’s sister, the Duchess of Richmond, who swore away his life, “inclined to the Protestants,” says Walpole, “and hated her brother.” We need not dwell upon the doubt, however, since Surrey is otherwise ruled out of our small society. A poet included in all the regular collections, called by his admirers the first of English classics, and by Pope accorded the final glory of being “the Granville (!) of a former age,” can scarcely be held one of the neglected to whom alone our suffrages are due. There, too, is Nicholas Grimoald, also of dubious orthodoxy, though undoubted genius. Nicholas was Ridley’s chaplain and suspected of being tainted with his patron’s heresy, but cleared himself by a formal recantation. Let us trust it was sincere. Grimoald’s verses are often of remarkable elegance, and to the “strange metre” or blank verse, which he adopted from Lord Surrey, he lent renewed grace and vigor.
“Right over stood in snow-white armour brave
The Memphite Zoroas, a cunning clerk,
To whom the heavens lay open as his book,
And in celestial bodies he could tell
The moving, meeting, light, aspect, eclipse,
And influence and constellations all.”
The eighteenth century might own these lines, the product of the first half of the sixteenth.
Edward Parker, Lord Morley, was a “rigid Catholic” and a prodigious author. He lived to be near a hundred, and left at least as many volumes as he had years. Besides translations of countless Latin and Greek authors from Plutarch and Seneca to St. Thomas Aquinas and Erasmus, he wrote “several tragedies and comedies the very titles of which are lost,” and “certain rhimes,” says Bale with a sniff of disdain. All alike are “dark oblivion’s prey,” but history has preserved the important fact that “this lord having a quarrel for precedence with the Lord Dacre of Gillesland, he had his pretensions confirmed by Parliament.” What a sermon on human ambition! Genius toils incessantly for a century or so, turning off tragedies and comedies, rhymes and commentaries, without number, to be its monument through all time, and presently along comes that uncivil master of ceremonies, that insufferable flunky, Fame, kicks these immortal works without ceremony into the dust-heap, and introduces Genius to posterity as the person who “had the quarrel for precedence with my Lord Dacre of Gillesland.” No distinction here, you see; not even a decent observance of those pretensions which Parliament confirmed. Lord Dacre, who never wrote, perhaps never knew how to write, a line, has his name bawled as loudly to the company as the author of all these tragedies and comedies and rhymes. Poor Lord Morley! may he rest as
soundly as his books! His pretensions to oblivion, at least, no one is likely to dispute.