,
The woods, the raging seas, were fallen to rest,
When that the stars had half their course declined.
The fields whist: beasts and fowls of divers hue,
And what so that in the broad lakes remained,
Or yet among the bushy thicks[6] of briar,
Laid down to sleep by silence of the night,
'Gan swage their cares, mindless of travails past.
Not so the spirit of this Phenician.
Unhappy she that on no sleep could chance,
Nor yet night's rest enter in eye or breast.
Her cares redouble: love doth rise and rage again,[7]
And overflows with swelling storms of wrath."

[5] In these extracts () signifies that something found in text seems
better away; [] that something wanting in text has been conjecturally
supplied.

[6] Thickets.

[7] This Alexandrine is not common, and is probably a mere oversight.

The "other" or "uncertain" authors, though interesting enough for purposes
of literary comparison, are very inferior to Wyatt and Surrey. Grimald, the
supposed editor, though his verse must not, of course, be judged with
reference to a more advanced state of things than his own, is but a
journeyman verse-smith.

"Sith, Blackwood, you have mind to take a wife,
I pray you tell wherefore you like that life,"

is a kind of foretaste of Crabbe in its bland ignoring of the formal graces
of poetry. He acquits himself tolerably in the combinations of Alexandrines
and fourteeners noticed above (the "poulter's measure," as Gascoigne was to
call it later), nor does he ever fall into the worst kind of jog-trot. His
epitaphs and elegies are his best work, and the best of them is that on his
mother. Very much the same may be said of the strictly miscellaneous part
of the _Miscellany_. The greater part of the Uncertain Authors are less
ambitious, but also less irregular than Wyatt, while they fall far short of
Surrey in every respect. Sometimes, as in the famous "I loath that I did
love," both syntax and prosody hardly show the reform at all; they recall
the ruder snatches of an earlier time. But, on the whole, the
characteristics of these poets, both in matter and form, are sufficiently
uniform and sufficiently interesting. Metrically, they show, on the one
side, a desire to use a rejuvenated heroic, either in couplets or in
various combined forms, the simplest of which is the elegiac quatrain of
alternately rhyming lines, and the most complicated the sonnet; while
between them variou