is of a series of fictions by Nash half a century after his death.
He cannot have been more than thirty when, in the Reign of Terror towards
the close of Henry VIII.'s life, he was arrested on frivolous charges, the
gravest being the assumption of the royal arms, found guilty of treason,
and beheaded on Tower Hill on 19th January 1547. Thus it will be seen that
Wyatt was at Cambridge before Surrey was born, and died five years before
him; to which it need only be added that Surrey has an epitaph on Wyatt
which clearly expresses the relation of disciple to master. Yet despite
this relation and the community of influences which acted on both, their
characteristics are markedly different, and each is of the greatest
importance in English poetical history.

In order to appreciate exactly what this importance is we must remember in
what state Wyatt and Surrey found the art which they practised and in which
they made a new start. Speaking roughly but with sufficient accuracy for
the purpose, that state is typically exhibited in two writers, Hawes and
Skelton. The former represents the last phase of the Chaucerian school,
weakened not merely by the absence of men of great talent during more than
a century, but by the continual imitation during that period of weaker and
ever weaker French models--the last faint echoes of the _Roman de la Rose_
and the first extravagances of the _Rhetoriqueurs_. Skelton, on the other
hand, with all his vigour, represents the English tendency to prosaic
doggerel. Whether Wyatt and his younger companion deliberately had recourse
to Italian example in order to avoid these two dangers it would be
impossible to say. But the example was evidently before them, and the
result is certainly such an avoidance. Nevertheless both, and especially
Wyatt, had a great deal to learn. It is perfectly evident that neither had
any theory of English prosody before him. Wyatt's first sonnet displays the
completest indifference to quantity, not merely scanning "harber,"
"banner," and "suffer" as iambs (which might admit of some defence), but
making a rhyme of "feareth" and "appeareth," not on the penultimates, but
on the mere "eth." In the following poems even worse liberties are found,
and the strange turns and twists which the poet gives to his decasyllables
suggest either a total want of ear or such a study in foreign languages
that the student had actually forgotten the intonation and cadences of his
own tongue. So s