exemplified after a
simple human fashion, in the story, that is, of real men and women,
instead of by allegorical personifications of the analysed and abstracted
constituents of them. Allegory has her place, and a lofty one, in
literature; but when her plants cover the garden and run to seed,
Allegory herself is ashamed of her children: the loveliest among them are
despised for the general obtrusiveness of the family. Imitation not only
brings the thing imitated into disrepute, but tends to destroy what
original faculty the imitator may have possessed.

CHAPTER IV.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ELIZABETHAN ERA.

Poets now began to write more smoothly--not a great virtue, but
indicative of a growing desire for finish, which, in any art, is a great
virtue. No doubt smoothness is often confounded with, and mistaken for
finish; but you might have a mirror-like polish on the surface of a
statue, for instance, and yet the marble be full of inanity, or
vagueness, or even vulgarity of result--irrespective altogether of its
idea. The influence of Italian poetry reviving once more in the country,
roused such men as Wyat and Surrey to polish the sound of their verses;
but smoothness, I repeat, is not melody, and where the attention paid to
the outside of the form results in flatness, and, still worse, in
obscurity, as is the case with both of these poets, little is gained and
much is lost.

Each has paraphrased portions of Scripture, but with results of little
value; and there is nothing of a religious nature I care to quote from
either, except these five lines from an epistle of Sir Thomas Wyat's:

Thyself content with that is thee assigned,
And use it well that is to thee allotted;

Then seek no more out of thyself to find
The thing that thou hast sought so long before,
For thou shalt feel it sticking in thy mind.

Students of versification will allow me to remark that Sir Thomas was the
first English poet, so far as I know, who used the _terza rima_, Dante's
chief mode of rhyming: the above is too small a fragment to show that it
belongs to a poem in that manner. It has never been popular in England,
although to my mind it is the finest form of continuous rhyme in any
language. Again, we owe his friend Surrey far more for being the first to
write English blank verse, whether invented by himself or not, than for
any matter he has left us in poetic shape.

This period is somewhat barren of such poetry as we wa