Tottel’s Miscellany is polished and artificial, like the models which it followed.  Dante’s Beatrice was a child, and so was Petrarch’s Laura.  Following their example, Surrey addressed his love complaints, by way of compliment, to a little girl of the noble Irish family of Geraldine.  The Amourists, or love sonneteers, dwelt on the metaphysics of the passion with a tedious minuteness, and the conventional nature of their sighs and complaints may often be guessed by an experienced reader from the titles of their poems:  “Description of the restless state of a lover, with suit to his lady to rue on his dying heart;” “Hell tormenteth not the damned ghosts so sore as unkindness the lover;” “The lover prayeth not to be disdained, refused, mistrusted nor forsaken,” etc.  The most genuine utterance of Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor—­a cage where so many a song-bird has grown vocal.  And Wiat’s little piece of eight lines, “Of his Return from Spain,” is worth reams of his amatory affectations.  Nevertheless the writers in Tottel’s Miscellany were real reformers of English poetry.  They introduced new models of style and new metrical forms, and they broke away from the mediaeval traditions which had hitherto obtained.  The language had undergone some changes since Chaucer’s time, which made his scansion obsolete.  The accent of many words of French origin, like nature, courage, virtue, matere, had shifted to the first syllable, and the e of the final syllables es, en, ed, and e, had largely disappeared.  But the language of poetry tends to keep up archaisms of this kind, and in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still find such lines as these: 

  But he my strokes might right well endure,
  He was so great and huge of puissance.[19]

Hawes’s practice is variable in this respect, and so is his contemporary, Skelton’s.  But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few years later, the reader first feels sure that he is reading verse pronounced quite in the modern fashion.

[Footnote 19:  Trisyllable—­like creature neighebour, etc., in Chaucer.]

But Chaucer’s example still continued potent.  Spenser revived many of his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his Faerie Queene, thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring Ben Jonson’s censure, that he “writ no language.”  A poem that stands midway between Spenser and the late mediaeval work of Chaucer’s school—­such as Hawes’s Passetyme of Pleasure—­was the induction contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a collection of narrative poems called the Mirrour for Magistrates.  The whole series was the work of many hands, modeled upon Lydgate’s Falls of Princes (taken from Boccaccio), and was designed as a warning to great men of the fickleness of fortune.  The Induction is the only noteworthy part of it.  It was an allegory, written in Chaucer’s seven-lined stanza, and described, with a somber imaginative power, the figure of Sorrow, her abode in the “griesly lake” of Avernus, and her attendants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc.  Sackville was the author of the first regular English tragedy Gorboduc; and it was at his request that Ascham wrote the Schoolmaster.