Greater than either of these books, in its influence upon the common people, is Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament (1525), which fixed a standard of good English, and at the same time brought that standard not only to scholars but to the homes of the common people.  Tyndale made his translation from the original Greek, and later translated parts of the Old Testament from the Hebrew.  Much of Tyndale’s work was included in Cranmer’s Bible, known also as the Great Bible, in 1539, and was read in every parish church in England.  It was the foundation for the Authorized Version, which appeared nearly a century later and became the standard for the whole English-speaking race.

WYATT AND SURREY.  In 1557 appeared probably the first printed collection of miscellaneous English poems, known as Tottel’s Miscellany.  It contained the work of the so-called courtly makers, or poets, which had hitherto circulated in manuscript form for the benefit of the court.  About half of these poems were the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?-1542) and of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517?-1547).  Both together wrote amorous sonnets modeled after the Italians, introducing a new verse form which, although very difficult, has been a favorite ever since with our English poets.[110] Surrey is noted, not for any especial worth or originality of his own poems, but rather for his translation of two books of Virgil “in strange meter.”  The strange meter was the blank verse, which had never before appeared in English.  The chief literary work of these two men, therefore, is to introduce the sonnet and the blank verse,—­one the most dainty, the other the most flexible and characteristic form of English poetry,—­which in the hands of Shakespeare and Milton were used to make the world’s masterpieces.

MALORY’S MORTE D’ARTHUR.  The greatest English work of this period, measured by its effect on subsequent literature, is undoubtedly the Morte d’Arthur, a collection of the Arthurian romances told in simple and vivid prose.  Of Sir Thomas Malory, the author, Caxton[111] in his introduction says that he was a knight, and completed his work in 1470, fifteen years before Caxton printed it.  The record adds that “he was the servant of Jesu both by day and night.”  Beyond that we know little[112] except what may be inferred from the splendid work itself.

Malory groups the legends about the central idea of the search for the Holy Grail.  Though many of the stories, like Tristram and Isolde, are purely pagan, Malory treats them all in such a way as to preserve the whole spirit of mediaeval Christianity as it has been preserved in no other work.  It was to Malory rather than to Layamon or to the early French writers that Shakespeare and his contemporaries turned for their material; and in our own age he has supplied Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and Swinburne and Morris with the inspiration for the “Idylls of the King” and the “Death of Tristram” and the other exquisite poems which center about Arthur and the knights of his Round Table.