Meanwhile Richard Edwards produced a curious Interlude of a classical nature, "Damon and Pythias," the characters being Greek, Sicilian and English--a dash of buffoonery is mixed with very lamentable matter. The Drama was formless, unable to attain definite shape, till some twenty-five years had passed when we reach the date of the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, such as Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Peele, and the other University young men about town. The influences of the old waggish or controversial Interludes, of the Senecan school of stiffness, and of translations or imitations of Italian comedies, were seething in the cauldron of the age. CHAPTER XVII. WYATT AND SURREY. GASCOIGNE. SACKVILLE. The names of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), are for ever memorable in English poetry, not so much for what they actually achieved as for what they attempted. They abstained from allegory, still lingering in its unlovely dotage, and from doggerel. They wrote of themselves and their own loves, joys, and sorrows, but though their verse is concerned with their personal emotions, these are treated in a conventional way, borrowed from continental poetry. They turned to the Italian sonneteers, especially to Petrarch, and saw afar the dawning of the "Pléiade," the company of French reformers of poetic style and language, Ronsard, du Bellay, and the rest, or at least of Mellin de Saint-Gelais, their predecessor. But both Wyatt and Surrey died young, Wyatt by an unfortunate chance, Surrey as a victim of the jealous tyranny of Henry VIII. The two young poets thus live together in men's memories like the Bion and Moschus of Greece: theirs is "unfulfilled renown". Wyatt, of a Yorkshire family, was son of Sir Henry Wyatt, of Allington in Kent, a man who had strange vicissitude of fortune in the reigns of Richard III and Henry VII. Thomas went very early to St. John's College, Cambridge, married at 17, was a glory of the Court of Henry VIII, went on diplomatic missions to Italy (Venice, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, and Rome), studied Italian literature, was now in favour and now in prison, and made love, with more or less of earnestness, to Anne Boleyn, being fortunate in escaping from the doom of her admirers when Henry VIII took her life. Favoured by Henry's minister, Thomas Cromwell, but detested, and accused of diplomatic misdeeds by Bishop Bonner, Wyatt defended himself with a success then very rare, retired from Court and wrote satires and poems on the advantages of retirement; paraphrased the Seven Penitential Psalms, and died of a fever caught from fatigue and travel, in October, 1542, lamented in verse by Surrey.