re their work was printed. The verses in _Tottel's Miscellany_
show very clearly the influence of Italian poetry. We have seen that
Chaucer took subjects and something more from Boccaccio and Petrarch.
But the sonnet, which Petrarch had brought to perfection, was first
introduced into England by Wiat. There was a great revival of
sonneteering in Italy in the 16th century, and a number of Wiat's poems
were adaptations of the sonnets and _canzoni_ of Petrarch and later
poets. Others were imitations of Horace's satires and epistles. Surrey
introduced the Italian blank verse into English in his translation of
two books of the _Aeneid_. The love poetry of _Tottel's Miscellany_ is
polished and artificial, like the models which it followed. Dante's
Beatrice was a child, and so was Petrarch's Laura. Following their
example, Surrey addressed his love complaints, by way of compliment, to
a little girl of the noble Irish family of Geraldine. The Amourists, or
love sonneteers, dwelt on the metaphysics of the passion with a tedious
minuteness, and the conventional nature of their sighs and complaints
may often be guessed by an experienced reader from the titles of their
poems: "Description of the restless state of a lover, with suit to his
lady to rue on his dying heart;" "Hell tormenteth not the damned ghosts
so sore as unkindness the lover;" "The lover prayeth not to be
disdained, refused, mistrusted nor forsaken," etc. The most genuine
utterance of Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor--a
cage where so many a song-bird has grown vocal. And Wiat's little piece
of eight lines, "Of his Return from Spain," is worth reams of his
amatory affectations. Nevertheless the writers in _Tottel's Miscellany_
were real reformers of English poetry. They introduced new models of
style and new metrical forms, and they broke away from the mediaeval
traditions which had hitherto obtained. The language had undergone some
changes since Chaucer's time, which made his scansion obsolete. The
accent of many words of French origin, like _nature_, _courage_,
_virtue_, _matere_, had shifted to the first syllable, and the _e_ of
the final syllables _es_, _en_, _ed_, and _e_, had largely disappeared.
But the language of poetry tends to keep up archaisms of this kind, and
in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still find such
lines as these:

But he my strokes might right well endure,
He was so great and huge of puissance.