THE

LIFE OF HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY.

THE Earl of Surrey presents himself in various interesting lights amongst our poets. In the first place, besides his romantic history and his early doom, he was both a lord and a poet, a combination which has not been found very often in our literature-Byron being the only other very eminent bard who has worn the coronet; secondly, he was one of our earliest improvers in the art of versification; and, thirdly, he first introduced the sonnet and blank verse into England, and deserves the gratitude of all who enter into the spirit of Wordsworth's fine lines-" Scorn not the sonnet;" and of all who remember that the greatest poems in our language, such as "Shakspeare's Plays," the "Paradise Lost," the "Night Thoughts," the "Seasons," the "Task," Southey's "Roderick," and many others, have been written in blank verse.

Henry Howard was born, it is supposed, at Framlingham, in Suffolk, somewhere between 1516 and 1518. The family from which he sprung was an old one, but had had a somewhat fluctuating career between its first origin and the birth of the poet. It has been traced to a period antecedent to the Conquest. Under the reign of the first two Edwards, William Howard is said by some to have been a knight, and to have held the office of Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas ; but this is doubtful. His descendant, Sir Robert Howard, married Margaret Mowbray, the great-great-granddaughter

of Edward I. Her son, Sir John Howard, was created a baron in 1470; and when the family of the Mowbrays, the Dukes of Norfolk, became extinct, he became eldest co-heir of the house, through his mother, and was created duke by Richard III., his eldest son being at the same time made Earl of Surrey. It is of this duke that the wellknown rhyme occurs in Shakspeare

"Jockey of Norfolk, be not so bold,

Dickon, thy master, is bought and sold."

"Jockey" fell fighting bravely by the side of the usurper, at the Battle of Bosworth, and his son was taken prisoner, committed to the Tower, and deprived of his title of Earl of Surrey. To this, however, he was restored in 1489; and in 1514, having done good service at the battle of Flodden Field, was made Duke of Norfolk. Thomas, the eldest son of this duke, married Anne, the youngest daughter of Edward IV. All the children by this marriage died young, and were followed soon by their mother. Shortly after her death, Thomas married again, his second wife being the Lady Elizabeth, daughter of the Duke of Buckingham. The match, owing to disparity of years, and to a previous attachment of the lady to the Earl of Westmoreland, was unhappy, although it resulted in the birth of three children-Henry, the poet; Thomas, afterwards created Viscount Bindon by Queen Elizabeth; and Mary, who wedded the Duke of Richmond, the natural son of Henry VIII.

As neither the exact date nor the exact place of Surrey's birth is ascertained, so total uncertainty rests on the particulars of his childhood, In 1526, when he was about ten or eleven years of age, we find him acting as cupbearer to the king. Even before this time he had formed a friendship with the Duke of Richmond, his future brother-in-law; and when, in 1532, Henry VIII., who had been induced by Cardinal Wolsey to cultivate the friendship of Francis I., went to Boulogne and Calais, he was accompanied by these two youths. The memorable interview which took place between Henry and Francis, amidst such gorgeous circumstances, on

the Field of the Cloth of Gold, was witnessed by Surrey, and must very deeply have impressed his youthful imagination. After this, according to some accounts, Richmond, in his journey to Paris, where he went to complete his studies, was accompanied by Surrey. If he went there, however, his stay must have been short, as we hear of him, in 1533, at the coronation of the unfortunate Anne Boleyn-a relation of the Howard family, where, in the procession, the fourth sword, with the scabbard upright before the king, was borne by our poet. In November, the same year, the Duke of Richmond returned from Paris to England, and was contracted to Lady Mary Howard, Surrey's sister; but as the parties were too closely related, in the eye of the Roman Catholic Church, a dispensation was required. Till it was obtained, the young duke was placed at Windsor, while the bride continued to reside with her father. It was at this time that the intercourse between Surrey and Richmond, so vividly pictured in the following lines, took place :

"In active games of nimbleness and strength,
Where we did strain, train'd with swarms of youth,
Our tender limbs, that yet shot up at length.
The secret groves, which oft we made resound,
Of pleasant plaint, and of our ladies' praise,
Recording soft what grace each one had found,
What hope of speed, what dread of long delays."

The ladies here alluded to were Lady Mary Howard, the affianced of Richmond; and Lady Frances Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, to whom Surrey was contracted in 1532, and married in 1535. On the 10th of March 1536, she bore him his eldest son, Thomas.

All acquainted with literary history have heard of Surrey's "Geraldine," and of the sonnets he has indited in her praise. She ranks with Petrarch's Laura, Dante's Beatrice, Schiller's Laura, and various other half-true, half-fictitious heroines, whom poets have chosen to idealise and make immortal. All these were real personages-but to all, genius has given supplemental charms and attributes, which have thrown over

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them a graceful veil like that which autumn mist sheds on the face of an ordinary landscape, and which have tended partly to beautify them, and partly to obscure. What a delightful uncertainty rests on the history of Petrarch's Laura -object, as he says himself in his "Letter to Posterity," " of a single and honourable, but most passionate attachment, the violence of which I could not have endured had not the flame been extinguished by the severe but salutary hand of death!" What a diviner indistinctness rests, like the midnight of another planet, upon that fine, fluctuating figure of Beatrice, who, amidst all the mysteries of the Paradise of God, stands up a mystery more beautiful and more mysterious than any! How affecting those passionate outpourings of Schiller's strong soul towards that half-seen shape of witchery and loveliness, whom he, too, must call his Laura! And what more stimulating, amidst all the piquant materials of Byron's poetry, than his allusions in "Childe Harold," and other parts of his poetry, to imaginary or half-imaginary objects of love, some of whom death had snatched away from his side, to deify in his imagination. Byron himself says of Rousseau—

"For his was not the love of living dame,
Nor of the dead who rise upon our dreams,

But of ideal beauty, which became

In him existence, and o'erflowing teems

Along his eloquent page, distemper'd as it seems."

But in some of the poets just alluded to, death gave the highest kind of ideal beauty to lost objects of affection; and added, besides, what imagination alone cannot bestow-the awful apotheosis of the grave, and the consecrating shadow of eternity.

The tale of Surrey's Geraldine is sufficiently romantic. She was Elizabeth, the daughter of Gerald Fitz-Gerald, the ninth Earl of Kildare. She was born in Ireland, but brought over to England while yet a child. Her family became unfortunate, and Henry VIII. took compassion on her, and had her educated at the house of his daughter Mary (afterwards the "Bloody Mary"), where, when she reached the proper

age, she became one of the ladies of the chamber. Surrey met her first at Hunsdon, but it was at a subsequent interview at Hampton Court which completed the captivation. In the celebrated sonnet on her, he says

"Hunsdon did first present her to mine eyen.

Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight,

Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine."

It has been maintained by some that Surrey bore no real love to this lady, but merely used her as the subject of a poem, This, however, is disproved by the plain and passionate terms of the sonnet, as well as by various expressions sprinkled through his other verses, in which he speaks of his attachment as not only strong but desperate. That these expressions do not apply to his countess is obvious from the fact, that there never occurred any difficulty in the way of their nuptials, except delay owing to his and her age; whereas in his love-poems, he speaks of his mistress as cold and coy, and exhorts her to add "bounty to beauty." It is unquestionable, from the dates, that his love, whether real or simulated, for Geraldine occurred several years after his marriage, and seems to have resulted, not from any indifference to his lady, but from a sudden fit of infatuated passion—a fit which lasted for a considerable time, although it produced no result except a few pretty sonnets. Geraldine, like a sensible girl, although only fifteen, treated Surrey's passion as it deserved; was married, in 1543, to Sir Antony Brown, a man who might have been her grandfather; and upon his death, six years afterwards, became the third wife of the Earl of Lincoln, whom she managed to survive. It is not absolutely certain whether Surrey's attachment outlived her marriage with Brown.

Great obscurity, indeed, in spite of the elaborate researches of Dr Notts and Chalmers, rests on this passage of Surrey's life; and as fancy always delights in painting darkness with ideal and fantastic forms, so on the dim groundwork of the real story of Surrey and his Geraldine, has been reared one of the strangest of romantic fictions. Many a myth has been interwoven with true history, and often in an inextricable manner,