SURREY.—­A twin star, but with a brighter lustre, was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a writer whose works are remarkable for purity of thought and refinement of language.  Surrey was a gay and wild young fellow—­distinguished in the tournament which celebrated Henry’s marriage with Anne of Cleves; now in prison for eating meat in Lent, and breaking windows at night; again we find him the English marshal when Henry invaded France in 1544.  He led a restless life, was imperious and hot-tempered to the king, and at length quartered the king’s arms with his own, thus assuming royal rights and imperilling the king’s dignity.  On this charge, which was, however, only a pretext, he was arrested and executed for high treason in 1547, before he was thirty years old.

Surrey is the greatest poetical name of Henry the Eighth’s reign, not so much for the substance of his poems as for their peculiar handling.  He is claimed as the introducer of blank verse—­the iambic pentameter without rhyme, occasionally broken for musical effect by a change in the place of the caesural pause.  His translation of the Fourth Book of the AEneid, imitated perhaps from the Italian version of the Cardinal de Medici, is said to be the first specimen of blank verse in English.  How slow its progress was is proved by Johnson’s remarks upon the versification of Milton.[23] Thus in his blank verse Surrey was the forerunner of Milton, and in his rhymed pentameter couplet one of the heralds of Dryden and Pope.

SIR THOMAS MORE.—­In a bird’s-eye view of literature, the division into poetry and prose is really a distinction without a difference.  They are the same body in different clothing, at labor and at festivity—­in the working suit and in the court costume.  With this remark we usher upon the literary scene Thomas More, in many respects one of the most remarkable men of his age—­scholar, jurist, statesman, gentleman, and Christian; and, withal, a martyr to his principles of justice and faith.  In a better age, he would have retained the highest honors:  it is not to his discredit that in that reign he was brought to the block.

He was born in 1480.  A very precocious youth, a distinguished career was predicted for him.  He was greatly favored by Henry VIII., who constantly visited him at Chelsea, hanging upon his neck, and professing an intensity of friendship which, it is said, More always distrusted.  He was the friend and companion of Erasmus during the residence of that distinguished man in England.  More was gifted as an orator, and rose to the distinction of speaker of the House of Commons; was presented with the great seal upon the dismissal of Wolsey, and by his learning, his affability, and his kindness, became the most popular, as he seemed to be the most prosperous man in England.  But, the test of Henry’s friendship and of More’s principles came when the king desired his concurrence in the divorce of Catherine of Arragon.  He resigned the great seal rather