Surrey was well born: was son to the Duke of Norfolk who figures in the Shakespearean play of Henry VIII., and grandson to the Surrey who worsted the Scotch on Flodden Field: he was companion of the King’s son, was taught at the Universities, at home and abroad. There was no gallant more admired in the gayer circles of the court; he too loved Petrarch, and made canzonets like his; had a Geraldine (for a Laura), half real and half mythical. The further story once obtained that he went with a gay retinue to Florence, where the lists were opened--in the spirit of an older chivalry--to this Stranger Knight, who challenged the world to combat his claims in behalf of the mythical Geraldine. And--the story ran--there were hot-heads who contended with him; and he unhorsed his antagonists, and came back brimming with honors, to the court--before which Hugh Latimer had preached, and where Sternhold’s psalms had been heard--to be imprisoned for eating flesh in Lent, in that Windsor Castle where he had often played with the King’s son. The tale[83] is a romantic one; but--in all that relates to the Florentine tourney--probably untrue. I give you a little taste of the graceful way in which this poet sings of his Geraldine:-- “I assure thee even by oath And thereon take my hand and troth That she is one of the worthiest The truest and the faithfullest The gentlest, and the meekest o’ mind That here on earth a man may find; And if that love and truth were gone In her it might be found alone: For in her mind no thought there is But how she may be true, iwis, And is thine own; and so she says And cares for thee ten thousand ways; Of thee she speaks, on thee she thinks With thee she eats, with thee she drinks With thee she talks, with thee she moans With thee she sighs, with thee she groans With thee she says--‘Farewell mine own!’ When thou, God knows, full far art gone.” Surrey is to be held in honor as the first poet who wrote English blank verse; he having translated two books of the Æneid in that form. But this delicate singer, this gallant soldier cannot altogether please the capricious monarch; perhaps he is too fine a soldier; perhaps too free a liver; perhaps he is dangerously befriended by some ladies of the court: Quite certain it is that the King frowns on him; and the frowns bring what they have brought to so many others--first, imprisonment in the Tower, and then the headsman’s axe. In this way the poet died at thirty, in 1547: his execution being one of the last ordered by Henry VIII., and the King so weak that he could only stamp, instead of signing the death warrant. Honest men breathed freer, everywhere, when the King died, in the same year with Surrey: and so, that great, tempestuous reign was ended. _A Boy-King, a Queen, and Schoolmaster._