[19]

Hawes's practice is variable in this respect, and so is his
contemporary, Skelton's. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few
years later, the reader first feels sure that he is reading verse
pronounced quite in the modern fashion.

[Footnote 19: Trisyllable--like creature neighebour, etc., in Chaucer.]

But Chaucer's example still continued potent. Spenser revived many of
his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his _Faerie Queene_,
thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring
Ben Jonson's censure, that he "writ no language." A poem that stands
midway between Spenser and the late mediaeval work of Chaucer's
school--such as Hawes's _Passetyme of Pleasure_--was the induction
contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a collection
of narrative poems called the _Mirrour for Magistrates_. The whole
series was the work of many hands, modeled upon Lydgate's _Falls of
Princes_ (taken from Boccaccio), and was designed as a warning to great
men of the fickleness of fortune. The _Induction_ is the only noteworthy
part of it. It was an allegory, written in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza,
and described, with a somber imaginative power, the figure of Sorrow,
her abode in the "griesly lake" of Avernus, and her attendants, Remorse,
Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville was the author of the first regular
English tragedy _Gorboduc_; and it was at his request that Ascham wrote
the _Schoolmaster_.

Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). While
a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some of the
_Visions of Petrarch_, and the _Visions of Bellay_, a French poet, but
it was only in 1579 that the publication of his _Shepheard's Calendar_
announced the coming of a great original poet, the first since Chaucer.
The _Shepheard's Calendar_ was a pastoral in twelve eclogues--one for
each month in the year. There had been a revival of pastoral poetry in
Italy and France, but, with one or two insignificant exceptions,
Spenser's were the first bucolics in English. Two of his eclogues were
paraphrases from Clement Marot, a French Protestant poet, whose psalms
were greatly in fashion at the court of Francis I. The pastoral
machinery had been used by Vergil and by his modern imitators, not
merely to portray the loves of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic charms
of rustic life; but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy, satire, and
personal allusion of many