W S E C T. XX. ITH Surrey's Poems, Tottel has joined, in his editions of 1557 and 1565, the SONGES and SONNETTES of fir Thomas Wyat the elder, and of Uncertain Auctours. Wyat was of Allington-castle in Kent, which he magnificently repaired, and educated in both our univerfities. But his chief and most splendid accomplishments were derived from his travels into various parts of Europe, which he frequently visited in the quality of an envoy. He was endeared to king Henry the eighth, who did not always act from caprice, for his fidelity and success in the execution of public bufinefs, his skill in arms, literature, familiarity with languages, and lively converfation. Wood, who degrades every thing by poverty of style and improper representations, fays, that "the king was in a high manner delighted "with his witty jefts "." It is not perhaps improbable, that Henry was as much pleased with his repartees as his politics. He is reported to have occafioned the reformation by a joke, and to have planned the fall of cardinal Wolfey by a feasonable story. But he had almost lost his popularity, either from an intimacy with queen Anne Boleyn, which was called a connection, or the gloomy cabals of bishop Bonner, who could not bear his political fuperiority. Yet his prudence and integrity, no less than the powers of his oratory, juftified his innocence. He laments his severe and unjust imprisonment on that trying occasion, in a fonnet addreffed to fir Francis Bryan infinuating his follicitude, that although the wound would be healed, the scar would a Wyat's begin at fol. 19. ATH. OXON. i. 51. < See MISCELLANEOUS ANTIQUITIES. Numb. ii. pag. 16. Printed at Strawberryhill, 1772. 4to. remain, remain, and that to be acquitted of the accufation would avail but little, while the thoughts of having been accused were still fresh in remembrance'. It is a common mistake, that he died abroad of the plague in an embaffy to Charles the fifth. Being sent to conduct that emperor's embaffador from Falmouth to London, from too eager and a needless defire of executing his commiffion with dispatch and punctuality, he caught a fever by riding in a hot day, and in his return died on the road at Shirburn, where he was buried in the great conventual church, in the year 1541. The next year, Leland published a book of Latin verfes on his death, with a wooden print of his head prefixed, probably done by Holbein ". It will be fuperfluous to transcribe the panegyrics of his cotemporaries, after the encomium of lord Surrey, in which his amiable character owes more to truth, than to the graces of poetry, or to the flattery of friendship. We must agree with a critic above quoted, that Wyat cooperated with Surry, in having corrected the roughness of our poetic style. But Wyat, although fufficiently distinguished from the common verfifiers of his age, is confeffedly inferior to Surrey in harmony of numbers, perfpicuity of expreffion, and facility of phrafeology. Nor is he equal to Surrey in elegance of fentitiment, in nature and fenfibility. His feelings are difguised by affectation, and obfcured by conceit. His declarations of paffion are embarraffed by wit and fancy; and his style is not intelligible, in proportion as it is careless and unadorned. His compliments, like the modes of behaviour in that age, are ceremonious and ftrained. He has too much art as a lover, and too little as a poet. His gallantries are laboured, and his verfification negligent. The truth is, his genius was of the moral and didactic fpecies and his poems abound more in good fenfe, fatire, and obfervations on life, than in pathos or imagination. Yet there • Fol. 44. • NENIE in mortem T. Viati, Lond. 1542. 4to. See alfo Leland's ENCOM. P. 358. is a degree of lyric sweetness in the following lines to his lute, in which, The lover complaineth of the unkindness of his love. My Lute awake, performe the last As to be heard where care is none, f Whereby my lute and I have done. Proude of the spoile which thou has gotte Vengeance shall fall on thy disdaine, h May chaunce thee lie withered and olde • Wherefore. Unacquitted. Free. It may chance you may, &c. ⚫ Moon. And And then may chaunce thee to repent Now cease my lute, this is the last Our author has more imitations, and even translations, from the Italian poets than Surrey: and he feems to have been more fond of their conceits. Petrarch has defcribed the perplexities of a lover's mind, and his struggles betwixt hope and defpair, a subject most fertile of fentimental complaint, by a combination of contrarieties, a species of wit highly relished by the Italians. I am, fays he, neither at peace nor war. I burn, and I freeze. I foar to heaven, and yet grovel on the earth. I can hold nothing, and yet grafp every thing. My prifon is neither shut, nor is it opened. I fee without eyes, and I complain without a voice. I laugh, and I weep. I live, and am dead. Laura, to what a condition am I reduced, by your cruelty! Pace non trovo, e non ho da far guerra; E temo, e fpero, ed ardo, e fon en un ghiaccio: Fol. 33. This paffage is taken from Meffen Jordi, a Provencial poet of Valencia. Veggio fenz' occhi, e non ho lingua, e grido; Ed ho in odio me fteffo, ed amo altrui : Wyat has thus copied this fonnet of epigrams. I finde no peace, and all my warre is done: I flye aloft, and yet cannot aryse; And nought I have, and at the world I feafon; That lockes" nor loseth, [nor] holdeth me in prison. And holdes me not, yet can I scape no wife; I love another, and I hate myselfe; It was from the capricious and over-ftrained invention of the Italian poets, that Wyat was taught to torture the paffion of love by prolix and intricate comparisons, and unnatural allufions. At one time his love is a galley steered by cruelty through stormy Leas and dangerous rocks; the fails torn by the blast of tempestuous fighs, and the cordage confumed by inceffant showers of tears: a cloud of grief envelopes the stars, reason is drowned, Sonn. ciii. There is a Sonnet in imitation of this, among those of the UNCERTAIN AUCTOURS at the end of Surrey's Poems, fol. 107. And in Davifon's POEMS, B. ii. CANZON. viii. p. 108. 4th edit. That which locks, i. e. a key. and |