His epigrams are not the stinging wasps of verse commonly called epigrams, but are brief poems in the manner of the epigrams of the Greek Anthology. The satires on the Court, based on Italian poems, and including a form of the "Town and Country Mouse," are not in Skelton's violent way, but the work of a gentle man, and the poems in rhyme royal, seven line stanzas, with six syllables to the line, are charming novelties. The Earl of Surrey. The date of Surrey's birth is uncertain: it was four or five years after the battle of Flodden (1513), in which his grandfather--"an auld decrepit carle in a chariot--" was victorious over the fiery James IV. The title Earl of Surrey is a courtesy title, borne by the poet as son of the Duke of Norfolk. He was at least a dozen years younger than his friend Wyatt, and was a lively young courtier, who was made a Knight of the Garter in 1541. He married very early, in 1532, and his famous passion for fair Geraldine may have been merely poetical--the usual story about Geraldine and the magic mirror is derived from a novel of 1554. About 1542 he was imprisoned for a matter of a duel, a challenge at least, and in 1543 went about London at night breaking windows with a stone-bow. He wrote a poem in which he gravely maintains that he was merely punishing the wicked city for her sins. Again released from prison he saw some fighting in France, and, returning, patronized a poet named Churchyard, who later wept unmelodiously above his early tomb. Early in 1546 Surrey had the worse of a battle with the French near Boulogne, was superseded by the Earl of Hertford, and, in January, 1547, was accused of a sort of heraldic high treason (quartering the arms of Edward the Confessor, who, of course, had never heard of armorial bearings), and executed, shortly before the death of the tyrant, Henry VIII. Surrey's versification, especially in the sonnet, is much superior to that of Wyatt, but he is less apt to keep to the rules of rhyme, in the first eight lines; indeed he writes in the form of Shakespeare's sonnets. His "Prisoned in Windsor" is a pleasant picture of a young gallant's life, who takes his eye off the ball at Tennis to watch the ladies in the _dedans_: hunts, tilts, and makes friends. The moral poems in lines of fourteen feet are of no great merit, but Surrey's translation of the Second Book of the Æneid is the first English example of blank verse, borrowed from Italian practice. The lines are stiff and hard; and the main merit is the novelty, the first birth of the measure that was to become, in forty years, "Marlowe's mighty line". Tottel's Miscellany.