But the die was cast; the sentence of forfeiture was pronounced; the King was deaf to the supplications of his friends--to the last appeal for mercy. The thirst of blood had increased with the last agonies of dissolving nature; and, on the twenty-first morning of the same month, Surrey was hurried to Tower-hill, and there, under the blow of the executioner, bequeathed that name to posterity, around which, poet, painter, historian, and every lover of his country and her literature, have twined the wreaths of immortality. “Thou jealous ruthless tyrant, Heaven repay On thee, and on thy children’s latest line, The wild caprice of thy despotic sway; The gory bridal bed; the plundered shrine; The murdered Surrey’s blood; the tears of Geraldine!” Of the lives of Surrey and fair Geraldine, and the tournament in which his knights carried away the prize in the Tuscan capital, we adopt the following short sketch from the “Loves of the Poets:”-- “In the reign of Cosmo the First, the second Grand Duke of Tuscany of Lorenzo’s family, Florence, it is said, beheld a novel and extraordinary spectacle. A young traveller, from a court and a country which the Italians of that day seemed to regard much as we now do the Esquimaux, combining the learning of the scholar, and the amiable bearing of the courtier, with all the rash bravery of youthful romance, astonished the inhabitants of that queenly city, first by rivalling her polished nobles in the splendour of his retinue--the gallantry of his manners; and next, by boldly proclaiming that his ‘Ladye-love’ was superior to all that Italy could vaunt of beauty. That she was ‘Oltre le belle, bella,’--fair beyond the fairest; and maintaining his boast is a solemn tourney, held in her honour, to the overthrow of all his opponents. This was our English Surrey, one of the earliest and most elegant [Illustration] of our amatory poets, and the lover of the fair Geraldine. According to the old tradition repeated by all Surrey’s biographers, he visited on his travels the famous necromancer Cornelius Agrippa, who, in a magic mirror, revealed to him the fair figure of his Geraldine, lying dishevelled on a couch, and, by the light of a taper, reading one of his tenderest Sonnets.” “Dark was the vaulted room of gramarye,[69] To which the wizard led the gallant knight, Save that before a mirror, huge and high, A hallow’d taper shed a glimmering light On mystic implements of magic might; On cross, and character, and talisman, And almagest, and altar, nothing bright: For fitful was the lustre, pale and wan, As watchlight by the bed of some departing man.