The English Book of Common Prayer was compiled in 1549-1552.  More was, perhaps, the best representative of a group of scholars who wished to enlighten and reform the Church from the inside, but who refused to follow Henry VIII. in his breach with Rome.  Dean Colet and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, belonged to the same company, and Fisher was beheaded in the same year (1535) with More, and for the same offense, namely, refusing to take the oath to maintain the act confirming the king’s divorce from Catharine of Arragon and his marriage with Anne Boleyn.  More’s philosophy is best reflected in his Utopia, the description of an ideal commonwealth, modeled on Plato’s Republic, and printed in 1516.  The name signifies “no place” [Greek:  oy thopst], and has furnished an adjective to the language.  The Utopia was in Latin, but More’s History of Edward V. and Richard III. written 1513, though not printed till 1557, was in English.  It is the first example in the tongue of a history as distinguished from a chronicle; that is, it is a reasoned and artistic presentation of an historic period, and not a mere chronological narrative of events.

The first three quarters of the 16th century produced no great original work of literature in England.  It was a season of preparation, of education.  The storms of the Reformation interrupted and delayed the literary renascence through the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queen Mary.  When Elizabeth came to the throne, in 1558, a more settled order of things began, and a period of great national prosperity and glory.  Meanwhile the English mind had been slowly assimilating the new classical culture, which was extended to all classes of readers by the numerous translations of Greek and Latin authors.  A fresh poetic impulse came from Italy.  In 1557 appeared Tottel’s Miscellany, containing songs and sonnets by a “new company of courtly makers.”  Most of the pieces in the volume had been written years before by gentlemen of Henry VIII.’s court, and circulated in manuscript.  The two chief contributors were Sir Thomas Wiat, at one time English embassador to Spain, and that brilliant noble, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who was beheaded in 1547 for quartering the king’s arms with his own.  Both of them were dead long before their work was printed.  The verses in Tottel’s Miscellany show very clearly the influence of Italian poetry.  We have seen that Chaucer took subjects and something more from Boccaccio and Petrarch.  But the sonnet, which Petrarch had brought to perfection, was first introduced into England by Wiat.  There was a great revival of sonneteering in Italy in the 16th century, and a number of Wiat’s poems were adaptations of the sonnets and canzoni of Petrarch and later poets.  Others were imitations of Horace’s satires and epistles.  Surrey introduced the Italian blank verse into English in his translation of two books of the Aeneid.  The love poetry of