bound the most personal (and in a rather bad but unavoidable word) the most
"introspective" in Europe. There had of course been love poetry before, but
its convention had been a convention of impersonality. It now became
exactly the reverse. The lover sang less his joys than his sorrows, and he
tried to express those sorrows and their effect on him in the most personal
way he could. Although allegory still retained a strong hold on the
national taste, and was yet to receive its greatest poetical expression in
_The Faerie Queene_, it was allegory of quite a different kind from that
which in the _Roman de la Rose_ had taken Europe captive, and had since
dominated European poetry in all departments, and especially in the
department of love-making. "Dangier" and his fellow-phantoms fled before
the dawn of the new poetry in England, and the depressing influences of a
common form--a conventional stock of images, personages, and almost
language--disappeared. No doubt there was conventionality enough in the
following of the Petrarchian model, but it was a less stiff and uniform
conventionality; it allowed and indeed invited the individual to wear his
rue with a difference, and to avail himself at least of the almost infinite
diversity of circumstance and feeling which the life of the actual man
affords, instead of reducing everything to the moods and forms of an
already generalised and allegorised experience. With the new theme to
handle and the new forms ready as tools for the handler, with the general
ferment of European spirits, it might readily have been supposed that a
remarkable out-turn of work would be the certain and immediate result.

The result in fact may have been certain but it was not immediate, being
delayed for nearly a quarter of a century; and the next remarkable piece of
work done in English poetry after Tottel's _Miscellany_--a piece of work of
greater actual poetical merit than anything in that _Miscellany_
itself--was in the old forms, and showed little if any influence of the new
poetical learning. This was the famous _Mirror for Magistrates_, or rather
that part of it contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. _The
Mirror_ as a whole has bibliographical and prosodic rather than literary
interest. It was certainly planned as early as 1555 by way of a supplement
to Lydgate's translation of Boccaccio's _Fall of Princes_. It was at first
edited by a certain William Baldwin, and for nearly half a century