the law.

[Note 9: One extraordinary, and indeed unaccountable, circumstance
in the life of the earl of Surry may here be noticed:--that while his
father urged him to connect himself in marriage with one lady, while the
king was jealous of his designs upon a second, and while he himself, as
may be collected from his poem "To a lady who refused to dance with
him," made proposals of marriage to a third, he had a wife living. To
this lady, who was a sister of the earl of Oxford, he was united at the
age of fifteen, she had borne him five children; and it is pretty plain
that they were never divorced, for we find her, several years after his
death, still bearing the title of countess of Surry, and the guardian of
his orphans. Had the example of Henry instructed his courtiers to find
pretexts for the dissolution of the matrimonial tie whenever interest or
inclination might prompt, and did our courts of law lend themselves to
this abuse? A preacher of Edward the sixth's time brings such an
accusation against the morals of the age, but I find no particular
examples of it in the histories of noble families.]

No one during the whole sanguinary tyranny of Henry VIII. fell more
guiltless, or more generally deplored by all whom personal animosity or
the spirit of party had not hardened against sentiments of compassion,
or blinded to the perception of merit. But much of Surry has survived
the cruelty of his fate. His beautiful songs and sonnets, which served
as a model to the most popular poets of the age of Elizabeth, still
excite the admiration of every student attached to the early literature
of our country. Amongst other frivolous charges brought against him on
his trial, it was mentioned that he kept an Italian jester, thought to
be a spy, and that he loved to converse with foreigners and conform his
behaviour to them. For his personal safety, therefore, it was perhaps
unfortunate that a portion of his youth had been passed in a visit to
Italy, then the focus of literature and fount of inspiration; but for
his surviving fame, and for the progress of English poetry, the
circumstance was eminently propitious; since it is from the return of
this noble traveller that we are to date not only the introduction into
our language of the Petrarchan sonnet, and with it of a tenderness and
refinement of sentiment unknown to the barbarism of our preceding
versifiers; but what is much more, that of heroic blank verse; a noble
measure, of