of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive knight after all.”  This bond between literature and action explains more than the writings of the voyagers or the pamphlets of men who lived in London by what they could make of their fellows.  Literature has always a two-fold relation to life as it is lived.  It is both a mirror and an escape:  in our own day the stirring romances of Stevenson, the full-blooded and vigorous life which beats through the pages of Mr. Kipling, the conscious brutalism of such writers as Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hewlett, the plays of J.M.  Synge, occupied with the vigorous and coarse-grained life of tinkers and peasants, are all in their separate ways a reaction against an age in which the overwhelming majority of men and women have sedentary pursuits.  Just in the same way the Elizabethan who passed his commonly short and crowded life in an atmosphere of throat-cutting and powder and shot, and in a time when affairs of state were more momentous for the future of the nation than they have ever been since, needed his escape from the things which pressed in upon him every day.  So grew the vogue and popularity of pastoral poetry and of pastoral romance.

(2)

It is with two courtiers that modern English poetry begins.  The lives of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey both ended early and unhappily, and it was not until ten years after the death of the second of them that their poems appeared in print.  The book that contained them, Tottel’s Miscellany of Songs and Sonnets, is one of the landmarks of English literature.  It begins lyrical love poetry in our language.  It begins, too, the imitation and adaptation of foreign and chiefly Italian metrical forms, many of which have since become characteristic forms of English verse:  so characteristic, that we scarcely think of them as other than native in origin.  To Wyatt belongs the honour of introducing the sonnet, and to Surrey the more momentous credit of writing, for the first time in English, blank verse.  Wyatt fills the most important place in the Miscellany, and his work, experimental in tone and quality, formed the example which Surrey and minor writers in the same volume and all the later poets of the age copied.  He tries his hand at everything—­songs, madrigals, elegies, complaints, and sonnets—­and he takes his models from both ancient Rome and modern Italy.  Indeed there is scarcely anything in the volume for which with some trouble and research one might not find an original in Petrarch, or in the poets of Italy who followed him.  But imitation, universal though it is in his work, does not altogether crowd out originality of feeling and poetic temper.  At times, he sounds a personal note, his joy on leaving Spain for England, his feelings in the Tower, his life at the Court amongst his books, and as a country gentleman enjoying hunting and other outdoor sports.