nywhere. The bulk is not great: twelve
or fifteen hundred lines must cover the whole of it. The form is not new,
being merely the seven-line stanza already familiar in Chaucer. The
arrangement is in no way novel, combining as it does the allegorical
presentment of embodied virtues, vices, and qualities with the melancholy
narrative common in poets for many years before. But the poetical value of
the whole is extraordinary. The two constituents of that value, the formal
and the material, are represented with a singular equality of development.
There is nothing here of Wyatt's floundering prosody, nothing of the
well-intentioned doggerel in which Surrey himself indulges and in which his
pupils simply revel. The cadences of the verse are perfect, the imagery
fresh and sharp, the presentation of nature singularly original, when it is
compared with the battered copies of the poets with whom Sackville must
have been most familiar, the followers of Chaucer from Occleve to Hawes.
Even the general plan of the poem--the weakest part of nearly all poems of
this time--is extraordinarily effective and makes one sincerely sorry that
Sackville's taste, or his other occupations, did not permit him to carry
out the whole scheme on his own account. The "Induction," in which the
author is brought face to face with Sorrow, and the central passages of the
"Complaint of Buckingham," have a depth and fulness of poetical sound and
sense for which we must look backwards a hundred and fifty years, or
forwards nearly five and twenty. Take, for instance, these stanzas:--

"Thence come we to the horror and the hell,
The large great kingdoms, and the dreadful reign
Of Pluto in his throne where he did dwell,
The wide waste places, and the hugy plain,
The wailings, shrieks, and sundry sorts of pain,
The sighs, the sobs, the deep and deadly groan;
Earth, air, and all, resounding plaint and moan.

"Here puled the babes, and here the maids unwed
With folded hands their sorry chance bewailed,
Here wept the guiltless slain, and lovers dead,
That slew themselves when nothing else availed;
A thousand sorts of sorrows here, that wailed
With sighs and tears, sobs, shrieks, and all yfere
That oh, alas! it was a hell to hear.

* * * * *

"_Lo here_, quoth Sorrow, princes of renown,
That whilom sat on top of fortune's wheel,
Now laid full low; like wre