tumbling and knock-kneed is his verse that any one who
remembers the admirable versification of Chaucer may now and then be
inclined to think that Wyatt had much better have left his innovations
alone. But this petulance is soon rebuked by the appearance of such a
sonnet as this:--

(_The lover having dreamed enjoying of his love complaineth that the_
_dream is not either longer or truer._)

"Unstable dream, according to the place
Be steadfast once, or else at least be true.
By tasted sweetness, make me not to rue
The sudden loss of thy false feigned grace.
By good respect in such a dangerous case
Thou brought'st not her into these tossing seas
But mad'st my sprite to live, my care to increase,[2]
My body in tempest her delight to embrace.
The body dead, the sprite had his desire:
Painless was th' one, the other in delight.
Why then, alas! did it not keep it right,
But thus return to leap into the fire?
And where it was at wish, could not remain?
Such mocks of dreams do turn to deadly pain."

[2] In original "tencrease," and below "timbrace." This substitution of
elision for slur or hiatus (found in Chaucerian MSS.) passed later into the
t' and th' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Wyatt's awkwardness is not limited to the decasyllable, but some of his
short poems in short lines recover rhythmical grace very remarkably, and
set a great example.

Surrey is a far superior metrist. Neither in his sonnets, nor in his
various stanzas composed of heroics, nor in what may be called his doggerel
metres--the fatally fluent Alexandrines, fourteeners, and admixtures of
both, which dominated English poetry from his time to Spenser's, and were
never quite rejected during the Elizabethan period--do we find evidence of
the want of ear, or the want of command of language, which makes Wyatt's
versification frequently disgusting. Surrey has even no small mastery of
what may be called the architecture of verse, the valuing of cadence in
successive lines so as to produce a concerted piece and not a mere
reduplication of the same notes. And in his translations of the _AEneid_
(not published in Tottel's _Miscellany_) he has the great honour of being
the originator of blank verse, and blank verse of by no means a bad
pattern. The following sonnet, combined Alexandrine and fourteener, and
blank verse extract, may be useful:--

(_Complain