one light as described by the poet Gray,-with "lion port and awe-commanding face," or in another, or, it may be, only a different shade of the same light,—the inimitable virago, according to the free and more familiar description of Sir Walter Scott. Enough for the present subject is it that the forty-four years during which she held the sceptre is the most glorious of the English reigns, whether the sources of that glory are to be traced to the sovereign herself, or to the wisdom of the counsellors or the courage of the soldiers by whom her throne was encircled.

In speaking of the literary interreign between Chaucer and Spenser for the purpose of a general impression, I should give a very erroneous view were I to leave you to suppose that during that period of more than a century and a half the voice of the English Muse was hushed. It did not, indeed, produce works belonging, like the Canterbury Tales and the Fairy Queen, to the highest order of poems; but there flourished those who well deserve notice before entering on the more glorious Elizabethan

era.

It is usual to mark the early part of the sixteenth century as an epoch in the history of English poetry, and justly so when we consider the improvement it received from two poets who lived during the reign of Henry VIII., and whose names are scarce separable, from early and long association. They were men of aristocratic rank,-Sir Thomas Wyatt, the lover of Anne Boleyn, and Henry Howard, the ill-fated Earl of Surrey, the latter especially being esteemed one of the chief reformers of English verse. Acquaintance with the more refined poetry of Italy, acquired either by direct personal intercourse or by

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study, introduced important changes into that of England. Harsh, pedantic, and unpoetical fashions of speech, an ambitious style which betrayed itself as early as the time of Chaucer and became more prevalent afterwards, were thrown aside. The language was made at once more graceful and more simple, and Italian forms of verse introduced. The sonnet was for the first time naturalized into English poetry, to prove, as I shall show hereafter, congenial with its spirit and fitted to be the vehicle of a vast variety of thoughts and emotions. The metres of English verse were more strictly disciplined; so that the merit has been claimed for Surrey of having been the first to lay aside the early rhythmical form for the more regular metrical construction. There is, moreover, due to him, beyond all question, the fame of having given the first example of blank verse,—that form which has proved so eminently and peculiarly adapted to the language that it has been well said to deserve the name of the English metre,-a construction, as we shall familiarly see in the series of these lectures, so rich and varied in its music: for it will sound to us in the mighty drama of Shakspeare, in the epic language of the Paradise Lost, in the more humble strains of The Task, and the utterance of the high philosophy of The Excursion.

It is worthy of notice that Surrey brought to the cause of letters an influence important in that period,—the influence arising from dignity of rank and honourable public services. He was noble by birth and by character, a courtier and a soldier; but his bright career had a destiny of blood. There is nothing in the annals of English history of which we acquire an earlier and more vivid impression than the domestic tyranny of the Eighth Henry,

-to a child's fancy the British Blue-Beard of its storybook,-driving from him his wives, the mothers of his children, and devoting more than one fair neck, once lovingly embraced, to the bloody handling of the executioner. What reign in the range of history so execrable? And let me help your hearts to a still more fervid hatred by reminding you what was almost the last act of it. Henry Howard had been in childhood an inmate of the palace, -the playmate of the monarch's child; and when he grew into manhood he was a loyal and honoured courtier and a gallant and trusted soldier. But it was Surrey's fate, and his only crime, to bear the name of Howard,— -a name which had newly become odious to the despot's ear. He was committed as a traitor to the Tower; and, in the very same week in which death was slowly travelling through the unwieldy bulk of the bloated tyrant, the young poet, the gallant Surrey, at the age of twentyseven, laid down his head to meet a traitor's death upon the scaffold.

Another copartnership in poetry, closer than that of Surrey and Wyatt and suggesting very different associations, is to be briefly noticed in the succeeding reign of Edward VI., when was produced the first metrical version in English of the Psalms of David, by two writers whose names have become the symbols of dulness and wretched versification, Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. It would assuredly be a bold attempt to vindicate from its long-continued reproach the poetical character of these two good men. They were indeed for the most part but sorry versifiers, in whose hands the sublimity-or, to use a more adequate term, the omnipotence of the original Hebrew psalmody was often lost in their flat and prosaic

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phraseology and clumsy metres. But it should be remembered that the translation of the Psalms into English metre is an enterprise that has never yet been successfully achieved, though even the name of Milton stands among those by whom it has been adventured. It is also to be remembered that honourable testimony has been borne by high authority to the exactness of the old version in its correspondence to the Hebrew text, and that its faults are redeemed by some passages of true poetic spirit, a vigour, a simplicity, and a dignity, befitting the lofty theme. The load of obloquy which rests on the memory of Sternhold and Hopkins should be lightened a little when we meet with a stanza such as this:

"The Lord descended from above, and bowed the heavens most high, And underneath his feet he cast the darkness of the sky:

On cherub and on cherubim full royally he rode,

And on the wings of mighty winds came flying all abroad."

My design, however, in adverting to this metrical version, is not to discuss its merits, but to remark that it served to incorporate, in how rude soever a form, into English poetry that wonderful series of songs which "Heaven's high muse whispered to David,"-wonderful in its adaptation to the church in all ages and in all nations, to the church in victory or in wo, and to each Christian for all moods of devotion,- his season of thanksgiving and joy, his hours of peril and affliction and of contrite agony. It was this version that fitted to English lips the music of the royal inspired singer; and, as the homely verses were year after year familiarized in the people's devotions, the matchless imagery of the Hebrew poetry was sinking into the hearts of the men

of England and inspiring that sacred character which is the glory of all the highest inspiration of English poetry.

Just at the close of the gloomy reign of Queen Mary there appeared one poetical effusion, showing a force of imagination which would have placed its author in the highest rank of our poets had he not relinquished his inspiration for the exclusive devotion of his genius during a very long life to the political service of his country. "The Mirrour of Magistrates" was the title of a work planned by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, and intended to comprise a series of narratives of the disasters of men eminent in English history. The first of these, with the poetical preface, or "Induction," as it is styled, was all that he contributed; but in those few hundred lines there was an inventive energy the like of which the English Muse had not before shown, and a glorious o'ershadowing of the allegorical imagination which soon after rose in the "Fairy Queen." Sackville's "Induction" stands as the chief-the only greatpoem between the times of Chaucer and of Spenser. Allegorical poetry presents no more vivid image than in that single line of his personification of Old Age,

"His withered fist still striking at Death's door,-"

or the masterly personification of War:

"Lastly stoode Warre, in glitteryng arms yclad,
With visage grim, sterne looke, and blackly hewed.
In his right hand a naked sworde he had,
That to the hiltes was al with blood imbrewed;
And in his left (that kings and kingdomes rewed)
Famine and fyer he held, and therewythall

He razed townes and threwe down towers and all.