the Earl of Hertford's daughter, and the Duchess of Richmond, his own daughter, now a widow, to marry Sir Thomas Seymour; but neither of these matches was effected, and the Seymours and Howards then became open enemies; and the Seymours failed not to inspire the king with an aversion to the Norfolks. The real cause why the Earl of Surrey was finally committed (Dec. 12, 1547) to the Tower has never been accurately defined; but the charge upon which he was arraigned was, generally, high treason; and particularly, among other alleged offences, the adding some part of the royal arms to his own; but in this he was justified by the heralds, as he proved that a power of doing so was granted by preceding monarchs to his forefathers. Upon the strength of these suspicions and surmises, however, he and his father were committed to the Tower, the one by water and the other by land, so that they knew not of each other's apprehension. The 15th day of January next following he was arraigned at Guildhall, where he was found guilty, and received judgment. About nine days before the death of the king, he lost his head on Tower Hill, Jan. 21, 1548. 66 It is said, when a courtier asked King Henry why he was so zealous in taking off Surrey: "I observed him," says he, an enterprising youth-his spirit was too great to brook subjection; and though I can manage him, yet no successor of mine will ever be able to do so; for which reason I have despatched him in my own time.” He was first interred in the chapel of the Tower, and afterwards, in the reign of King James, his remains were removed to Framlingham in Suffolk. Lord Surrey was the first of the English nobility who had any familiar intercourse with the Muses, and far surpassed his contemporaries in purity of language and harmony of numbers. "This is he," expatiates Barry Cornwall," who trod on the Field of the Cloth of Gold; who gazed on the magic glass of Cornelius Agrippa; who proclaimed the peerless beauty of his Florentine lady, and defended it in tilt and tournament. Vanity and love and heroism are written on his brow; and his life was an illustration of its aspect. He was a believer in princes and magicians; he was a nobleman, a courtier, a lover, a knight, a poet, an accomplished traveller, and an eminent soldier. He overcame the gallants of Tuscany, in honour of his Lady Geraldine; and he conquered the Scots at Flodden Field, in honour of his country. It was his misfortune to live in the reign of our Henry VIII., than whom a more fierce, uncertain, and relentless brute was never worshipped even among the abominations of Egypt. He was the first writer of narrative blank verse in the English language; though his poetry in general is in rhyme, and is more like Petrarch's, perhaps, than any other model. He has some of the quaintness of his age upon him; but there is also a pure vein of pathos running through his poetry, and occasionally a depth of sentiment which is not perceptible in any of his contemporaries." 66 WILLIAM BALDWIN. (Born circa 1518.) William Baldwin is supposed by Wood to have been a west-country man. Having studied several years in logic and philosophy at Oxford, he proceeded M.A. in January 1532. The scanty materials of his life neither show his rank, pursuits, nor his connexions. In 1549 he subscribes himself "servaunt with Edwarde Whitchurche," the printer; but what was his immediate station and dependence upon the press is uncertain, although he appears to have found employment thereupon for several years. It is conjectured by Herbert, that he was one of those scholars who followed printing in order to forward the Reformation,” and therefore submitted to the labour of correcting the press. In 1563 he tells his readers "he has been called to another trade of type;" and he is believed to have then taken orders and commenced schoolmaster. With the exception of Sir Thomas Chaloner, he was the oldest man of the number who met by general assent to devise the continuation of Lydgate, in the form of the Mirrour for Magistrates, to which metrical series of histories he contributed fourteen out of the thirty-four lives, constituting part iii. One of the earliest of his writings, A Treatise of Moral Philosophy, was nearly as popular as the Mirrour for Magistrates, and went through many editions. THOMAS LORD VAUX. (Born circa 1520.) Thomas Lord Vaux, "a poetical writer among the nobility in the reign of King Henry VIII., whose commendation," says Puttenham, “lyeth chiefly in the facility of his metre, and the aptness of his descriptions, such as he takes upon himself to make-namely, in sundry of his songs, wherein he showeth the counterfeit action very likely and pleasurable,"—was eldest son to Nicholas, the first lord. In 1532 he waited on the king in his expedition to Calais and Boulogne; a little before which time he is said to have had the custody of Queen Catherine. In the following year he was made a knight of the Bath, at the coronation of Anne Boleyn. He appears to have held no public office but that of captain of the Isle of Jersey, which he surrendered in 1536. He died early in the reign of Philip and Mary. From the prose prologue to Sackville's Induction to the Mirrour for Magistrates, it would seem that Lord Vaux had undertaken to pen the history of King Edward's two sons, cruelly murdered in the Tower of London; but what he performed of this undertaking does not appear. Two poems in Tottle's collection, The Assault of Cupid, and that which begins, I lothe that I did love (from which three stanzas are quoted in the song of the gravediggers in Hamlet), are certainly his. Ten other pieces of his are preserved in the Paradise of Dainty Devises. William, the eldest son and successor of our author, seems also to have been a poet. Sir Egerton Brydges pub lished two pieces of his in the Poetical Register of 1801. NICHOLAS GRIMALDE. (Born circa 1520.) Nicholas Grimalde was a native of Huntingdonshire, and received the first part of his academical instruction at Christ's College, Cambridge. Removing to Oxford in 1542, he was elected fellow of Merton College; but about 1545, having opened a rhetorical lecture in the refectory of Christ Church, then newly founded, he was transplanted to that society, which gave the greatest encouragement to such students as were distinguished for their proficiency in criticism and philology. The same year he wrote a Latin tragedy, which probably was acted in the college, entitled Archipropheta, sive Johannes Baptista, Tragedia. He is the same person called by Strype one Grimbold," who was chaplain to Bishop Ridley, and who was employed by that prelate, while in prison, to translate into English Laurentio Valla's book against the fiction of Constantine's Donation, with some other popular Latin pieces against the papists. In the ecclesiastical history of Mary's reign he appears to have been imprisoned for heresy, and to have saved his life, if not his credit, by a recantation. But theology does not seem to have been his talent, nor the glories of martyrdom 66 to have made any part of his ambition. One of his plans, which never took effect, was to print a new edition of Joseph of Exeter's poem on the Trojan war, with emendations from the most correct manuscripts. Grimalde merits all the more notice, as he is the second English poet, after Lord Surrey, who wrote in blank verse; nor is it his only praise that he was the first who followed in this new path of versification. To the style of blank verse exhibited by Surrey he added new strength, elegance, and modulation. In the disposition and conduct of his cadences he often approaches to the legitimate structure of the improved blank verse, though it is not to be supposed that he is entirely free from those dissonances and asperities which still adhered to the general character and state of our diction. Another of Grimalde's blank-verse poems, On the Death of Zoroas, has a most nervous and animated exordium. As a writer of verses in rhyme, Grimalde yields to none of his contemporaries for a masterly choice of chaste expressions, and the concise elegances of didactic versification. Some of the couplets in his poem In Praise of Moderation have all the smartness which marks the modern style of sententious poetry, and would have done honour to Pope's ethic epistles. RICHARD EDWARDS. He is Richard Edwards was born in Somersetshire, about 1523. said by Wood to have been a scholar of Corpus Christi College, in Oxford; but in his early years he was employed in some department about the court. This circumstance appears from one of his poems in the Paradise of Dainty Devises, a miscellany which contains many of his pieces. He was at one time a senior student of Christ Church, in Oxford, then newly founded. In the British Museum there is a small set of manuscript poems signed with his initials, addressed to some of the beauties of Queen Mary and of Queen Elizabeth. Hence we may conjecture he did not remain long at the University. Having first been a member of Lincoln's Inn, he was, in the year 1561, constituted a gentleman of the Royal Chapel by Queen Elizabeth, and master of the singing-boys there he had received his musical education while at Oxford, under George Etheridge. The earliest actual notice we have of Edwards as a dramatic poet, in which character he enjoyed a high reputation in his time, is under the year 1565, when a play of his production, Damon and Pythias, was performed by the children of the chapel, under his direction, before the queen at Richmond. The other extant play of his, Palamon and Arcite, was produced, also under his superintendence, before the queen, in Christ Church Hall, Oxford, in 1566, only a few months before his death. It is clear that we have lost many of his productions; for Thomas Twine, in his epitaph upon Edwards-whom he designates "The flower of our realme, And phoenix of our age-" after specifying Damon and Pythias and Palamon and Arcite, refers to more plays of his "Full fit for princes' ears." Puttenham, in like manner, gives the prize to Edwards for comedy and interlude, the term interlude being here of wide extent; for Edwards, besides that he was a writer of regular dramas, appears to have been a contriver of masques and a composer of poetry for pageantry. In a word, says Warton, he united all those arts and accomplishments which minister to popular pleasantry. He was the first fiddle, the most fashionable sonneteer, the readiest rhymer, and the most facetious mimic of the court; and his popularity seems to have arisen from those pleasing talents of which no specimens could be transmitted to posterity, but which eminently influenced his partial contemporaries in his favour. WILLIAM ROY. William Roy, a poetical satirist, less distinguished than Skelton as a Latin scholar, but at least equally formidable to Cardinal Wolsey and the Catholics, flourished in 1526. His work, which is now extremely rare, forms a small duodecimo volume, elegantly printed in black-letter, without date or publisher's name. It has a prose dedication to some person of whose name the initials only are given; and a metrical prologue, consisting of a dialogue between the author and his book. Then follows a sort of satirical dirge, or lamentation on the death of the Mass; and then the treatise itself, which is called a "Briefe Dialogue between two Preestes' Servauntes named Walkin and Jeffray." It is in two parts, of which the first is, in general, a satire on the monastic orders, though even here the cardinal and his friends are occasionally introduced. Roy's versification is tolerably |