CONTENTS. attempts. Marriage. Friendship with Erasmus. Historie V.-Lord Berners translates Froissart's Chronicle, French prose-romances and Guevara's Boke of Marcus Aurelius. Berners' nephew, Sir Francis Bryan, translates Guevara's Dis- braise of the life of a Courtier. Sir Thomas Elyot. His Boke of the Governour; The education of children; Doctrinal of Princes; Image of Governance; Of that Knowledge whiche maketh a Wise Man; Pasquil the Playne; Defence of Good Women; Latin-English Lexicon; Castel of Helth; Bankette of Sapience; Preservative agayns'e Deth. Thomas Starkey. R. Pole sends Henry VIII. his De unione ecclesiastica. Starkey's Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, a supplement to the picture given of England in Utopia. Robert Fabyan's ix 144-187 VI. New court-poetry in Henry VIII.'s reign. Thomas Wyatt. Journey to Italy and influence of Petrarch. His Sonnets. Terza rima, rondeaux. Wyatt's erotic poetry; Anne Boleyn. Ambassador at the court of the Emperor Charles V. Ottava rima and canzonettes. Elegy on Cromwell's fall borrowed from Petrarch. Wyatt's arrest; his Declaration; is acquitted, and retires from public life. Love-poems alternately with satires, imitations of Horace and Alamanni. Town Mouse and Field Mouse. Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms and of the Thirty-seventh Psalm. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Distinguished and dangerous family relations. Surrey's son- nets on Wyatt. Surrey's military proceedings. His poetical prototypes. Love-poems on Geraldine; Satire on the Citi- zens of London. Epigrammatical sketches of character. On Wyatt's translation of the Psalms; two Elegies on Wyatt. Surrey a Mæcenas. His translation of Vergil; Blank-verse. New military undertakings; arrested; Elegy; translation of Ecclesiastes and some Psalms. Beheaded. 212-263 TH HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. IX. (Continued). HE numerous transcripts made of the legend of The Three Kings bear witness to its increasing popularity during the decline of the Middle Ages. It is possible that the success of the subject also led to the general acceptance of the form of composition in which it appeared. The ground thus gained by prose was, however, part and parcel of the whole tendency of the age. As early as the second half of the fourteenth century occasional instances are met with where works, originally written in metrical form, were turned into prose. This had been the case with one of the versions of the life of Adam and Eve, where the Biblical nucleus of the legend had been supplemented by a variety of attractive, symbolical motives, and had thus tempted several English poets-and subsequently prose-writers as well to take the subject in hand. During the fifteenth century a number of the Lives of the Saints were translated from Latin into English prose-in some cases repeatedlyand even the Miracles treating of the Legends of the Virgin sometimes assumed this form. It has been considered that this legendary literature every now and again gives distinct evidence of the increasing tendency to asceticism and mysticism, to the spread of which, in England, Hampole so essentially contributed. Characteristic, too, is the part which women played in this branch of literature, both in prose and poetry, whether by forming the centre of the legends-as the heroines-or by inducing writers to turn foreign works into English. One English priest, out of regard for a noble lady, his confessant, compiled a life |
