osts so sore
as unkindness the lover;" "The lover prayeth not to be disdained,
refused, mistrusted, nor forsaken," etc. The most genuine utterance of
Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor--a cage where
so many a song-bird has grown vocal. And Wiat's little piece of eight
lines, "Of his Return from Spain," is worth reams of his amatory
affectations. Nevertheless the writers in _Tottel's Miscellany_ were
real reformers of English poetry. They introduced new models of style
and new metrical forms, and they broke away from the mediaeval
traditions which had hitherto obtained. The language had undergone
some changes since Chaucer's time, which made his scansion obsolete.
The accent of many words of French origin, like _nature_, _courage_,
_virtue_, _matere_, had shifted to the first syllable, and the _e_ of
the final syllables _es_, _en_, _ed_, and _e_, had largely disappeared.
But the language of poetry tends {67} to keep up archaisms of this
kind, and in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still
find such lines as these:

"But he my strokes might right well endure,
He was so great and huge of puissance." [5]

Hawes's practice is variable in this respect, and so is his
contemporary, Skelton's. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few
years later, the reader first feels sure that he is reading verse
pronounced quite in the modern fashion.

But Chaucer's example still continued potent. Spenser revived many of
his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his _Faery Queene_,
thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring
Ben Jonson's censure, that he "writ no language." A poem that stands
midway between Spenser and late mediaeval work of Chaucer's
school--such as Hawes's _Passetyme of Pleasure_--was the _Induction_
contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a
collection of narrative poems called the _Mirrour for Magistrates_.
The whole series was the work of many hands, modeled upon Lydgate's
_Falls of Princes_ (taken from Boccaccio), and was designed as a
warning to great men of the fickleness of fortune. The _Induction_ is
the only noteworthy part of it. It was an allegory, written in
Chaucer's seven-lined stanza and described with a somber imaginative
power, the figure of Sorrow, her abode {68} in the "griesly lake" of
Avernus and her attendants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville
was the author of the first regular Eng