We may glance for a moment at another noble captive in Windsor--at the Earl of Surrey, likewise a poet; and, indeed, the poet who was the first writer of English blank verse. Impetuous of temper, heady of will, the gallant Surrey developed a lawless ambition which, on the 21st of January, 1547, led him to the Tower block. He was, says Mr. Robert Bell, "formed out of the best elements of the age, and combined more happily, and with a purer lustre than any of his contemporaries, all the attributes of that compound, and, to us, almost fabulous character, in which the noblest qualities of chivalry were blended with the graces of learning and a cultivated taste. It might be said of him that he united in his own person the characteristics of Bayard and of Petrarch;" and yet all these fine qualities led only to the scaffold. Surrey is connected with Windsor because he was educated and spent his youth there, together with the Duke of Richmond, base son of Henry VIII., who married Surrey's sister; and, further, because, in his day of misfortune, he became a sad prisoner in the castle in which he had spent so many joyous youthful days. Surrey was contracted when he was sixteen, and was only twenty when he became a father. He married, in 1535, the Lady Frances Vere, daughter of John, Earl of Oxford; but romance links his name for ever with that of the fair Geraldine, who was the Lady Elizabeth, daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare, and of Margaret, daughter of Thomas Gray, Marquis of Dorset. Geraldine, when Surrey died at the age of thirty, was but nineteen years of age. It was the fashion of that day for gallants to wear the sleeve of a mistress of the imagination; and Surrey's passion for the fair young girl was probably fantastic and partly feigned. The fair child was an adopted ideal of a knightly poet's passion. In the only one of Surrey's poems in which he speaks openly of her, he says:-- "From Tuscane came my lady's worthy race; Fair Florence was sometime their ancient seat. The western isle whose pleasant shore doth face Wild Camber's cliffs, did give her lively heat. Fostered she was with milk of Irish breast: Her sire an earl; her dame of prince's blood. From tender years, in Britain doth she rest, With kinges child; when she tasteth costly food. Hunsdon did first present her to mine eyen; Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight. Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine; Windsor, alas! doth chase me from her sight. Her beauty of kind; her virtues from above; Happy is he that can obtain her love!" The Lady Elizabeth was one of the ladies in attendance on Mary Tudor, and Surrey probably went with the Duke of Richmond to Hunsdon, there to visit the Lady Mary; and on that visit he first saw Geraldine. Later, when a captive, Surrey sings--