[Sidenote 1: The _Utopia_] [Sidenote 2: Prose and Verse] [Sidenote 3: Surrey and Wyatt] Yet the literary achievements of Henry's time can hardly be called great. One work by an Englishman, More's _Utopia_, alone stands out as a classic on its own merits: and that was written in Latin, and remained untranslated till a later reign. In its characteristic undercurrent of humour, and its audacious idealism, it betrays the student of Plato; standing almost alone as a product of the dawning culture. Partly by direct statement, partly by implication, we may gather from it much information as to the state of England in Henry's early years, much as to the political philosophy of the finer minds of the day. But that philosophy was choked by revolution; More himself so far departed from its tenets of toleration as to become a religious persecutor. Most of the English writing of the reign took the form of controversial or personal pamphlets in prose or verse; such as the extravagant _Supplicacyon for the Beggers_, a rabid tirade against the clergy, or Skelton's rhyme _Why come ye nal to Court_, an attack chiefly on the Cardinal. The splendid raciness of Hugh Latimer's sermons belongs to oratory rather than to letters. The exquisite prose of Cranmer found its perfection in the solemn music of the Prayer-book of Edward VI. The translations of the Bible made no great advance on Wiclif. In the realm of verse, John Skelton was a powerful satirist with a unique manipulation of doggerel which has permanently associated a particular type of rhyme with his name; an original and versatile writer was Skelton, but without that new critical sense of style which was to become so marked a feature of the great literary outburst under Elizabeth. Herein, two minor poets alone, Surrey and Wyatt, appear as harbingers of the coming day. A hundred anonymous writers of Gloriana's time produced verses as good as the best of either Wyatt or Surrey; but these two at least discovered the way which, once found, became comparatively easy to tread. They introduced the sonnet, learnt from Petrarch; Surrey (the same who was executed on the eve of Henry's death) wrote the first English blank verse. The moribund tradition of the successors of Chaucer continued to find better exponents in Scotland than in England, in the persons first of bishop Gawain Douglas--who perhaps should rather be connected with the previous reign--and later of Sir David Lyndsay. But doctrinal controversy does not provide the best atmosphere for artistic expression. The whole literature of the reign, while showing emphatic signs of reviving intellectual activity, is remarkable not for its own excellence, for profundity of thought, intensity of passion, or mastery of form, but as exhibiting the first random and tentative workings of the new spirit. [Sidenote: Estimate of Henry VII.]