from carelessness or from haste, Wyatt left his affairs in a state of confusion, and, as Thomas Cromwell tells him, "rawness," exceedingly characteristic of a poet. By April 1537, he had reached Spain, and continued there for more than two years, conducting the necessary negotiations with much skill and judgment, although considerably embarrassed, partly through the complexity of the affairs, and partly through the duplicity of the Emperor and his Counsellors. In the end of 1539, he returned to England, where he met a gratifying reception from Henry, and then hastened to the country to spend some quiet months in his own home. The end of this year the Emperor proceeded through France to the Low Countries, and Wyatt was despatched to Paris as English ambassador, with a view to watch his motions. Having first had an interview with the French king at Blois, he joined the emperor at Chateaureault, and thence attended him to Paris, to Brussels, and to Ghent. His letters home are clear and sagacious, but testify to his intense disgust at his avocations, and his eagerness to return to his own country. At length, about the middle of May 1540, his wish was gratified, and he was again welcomed by the king with the most flattering tokens of approbation. During one of his visits to the Continent, at the dissolution of the monasteries, he had requested, and through Cromwell's influence obtained, the friary of Arlesford in Kent, which adjoined his family estate at Allington. Wyatt had undoubtedly performed good service on the Continent, particularly by detecting and baffling the schemes of Cardinal Pole, who had been sent from Rome to Spain for the purpose of uniting the emperor and Francis in a league. against England; but who, through Wyatt's interference, was so coldly received at Madrid, that he retired in chagrin to Avignon. Yet our poet had scarcely reached home, till he found his conduct cruelly misrepresented by his enemies. Bonner, afterwards infamous for his treatment of the Protestants, and surnamed the "Bloody Bonner," had been united with Wyatt in the continental embassy, and had formed a bitter enmity against him; encouraged by the fall of Lord Thomas Cromwell, who had been Wyatt's patron, he accused him of holding a treasonable correspondence with Cardinal Pole, and of having treated the king with disrespect while ambassador in 1538 and 1539. Through his insinuations, Henry's wrath was roused against the poet, and he threw him into the Tower. There he was treated with great severity. This we infer from his lines in prison to Bryan : "Sighs are my food, my drink they are my tears, Clinking of fetters such music would crave; Innocency is all the hope I have. Rain, wind, and weather I judge by my ears, Malice assaults that righteousness should have, After he had been for some time in the Tower, the Privy Coun- He To this crisis in Wyatt's life, Surrey alludes in one of his poems of the "Death of Sir Thomas Wyatt :" "Divers thy death, so diversely bemoan Some that in presence of thy livelihed * Some that watched with the murderer's knife, Whose practice brake by happy end of life, With envious tears to hear thy fame so good." * "Presence of thy livelihed:" presence of thee living. Wyatt now retired to Allington, and amused himself by writing his Satires, addressed to his friend John Pointz, in which he gives a decided and eloquent preference to a country over a town life-the result, doubtless, of his own individual experience, since all his happy days had been passed at his ancestral seat, and all his miseries arose from his connexion with the Court. The winter of 1541, and the spring and summer of 1542, passed pleasantly with our poet. Besides the Satires, he wrote his version of the Seven Penitential Psalms, and occupied his leisure in improving his estate, and superintending the education of his nephew Henry Lee. In the autumn of 1542, an embassy from the emperor being expected to arrange for a war with France, Henry ordered Wyatt to meet it at Falmouth, and conduct it to London. Hasting to obey the royal mandate, our poet went through most unfavourable weather to Sherborne, overheated himself, and was seized with a malignant fever. Horsey, one of his most intimate friends, who lived close at hand, came to his aid, but in vain. His constitution speedily yielded to the disease, and he expired on the 10th or 11th of October 1542, at the early age of thirty-nine. Horsey closed his eyes, and his body being unfit for removal, buried him in his own vault in the Great Church at Sherborne, where he lies without monument or inscription. He left an only son, Sir Thomas Wyatt, called usually Wyatt the younger, who, in 1554, having joined in the Lady Jane Grey conspiracy, was condemned and executed for high treason. Thus prematurely perished the graceful, accomplished, eloquent, and gifted Wyatt the elder. He died regretted by all, except the Roman Catholics, who had long known his leaning to the Protestant faith. He seems to have been altogether a most admirable character—generous and brave, true to his friends, liberal to his dependants, full of varied learning, and actuated in his general conduct by high moral and Christian principle. In his defence he confesses, indeed, that he was not immaculate-saying, "I grant I do not profess chastity; but yet I use not abomination." In his attachment to Anne Boleyn he was to be pitied as much as blamed, and there is no other stain, whether deep or faint, upon his escutcheon. We come now to a few remarks on his poetry. It is manifestly but a small extract from the large nature of the man; but in its smallness forms an exquisitely finished miniature of its author. It naturally and logically divides itself into three parts, answering in a remarkable manner to the various epochs in the history of the writer. We have first his Lovepoetry, then his Satires, and finally his Paraphrase of David's Penitential Psalms. His Love-poetry is remarkable for its purity. The passion is clothed and disguised under the innumerable quaintnesses of expression, like Eve under her fantastic attire of fig-leaves. The love of Wyatt is neither, on the one hand, the merely animal feeling to be found in Dryden, and under a guise of refinement and a classical costume in Horace also, and Anacreon; nor is it, on the other hand, the fine etherealised rapture of a Crashaw or a Shelley-it partakes in some measure of both, and unites them into a tertium quid, blended of warm enthusiasm and homely natural feeling of the poetical and the subduedly sensuous. Such, we think, was the general character of the love-poetry of the Reformation age, as we find it in Surrey, in Spenser, and in almost all the plays of Shakspeare. It is never contaminated by corruption, and yet it never condescends to wear a gauzy veil of sentimentalism. It is plainspoken, yet pure. Its extravagances are sincere in their very absurdity. A certain chivalric fervour and grace mingle with its most fervid expressions. It is the love of Piercie Shafton, than whom Scott seldom drew a truer and better character, for the Miller's daughter, without his coxcombry. To Wyatt and those other writers of his day his beloved is a goddess indeed; but a goddess stooping from heaven into his ardent embrace, and in embracing her he himself becomes in part divine. Some may object to the minuteness with which he anatomises his love feelings, and to the endless repetitions and refrains of his amorous song, but none can deny the sincerity of the songster; and the curious and quaint modes in which he expresses his affections remind you pleasantly of Arcadia and its poetical lovers; or of Shakspeare's Arcadia of Arden, where his Rosalinds and Orlandos were wont to "fleet their time, as in the golden world." Every little song and madrigal of Wyatt's seems as if it had been first carved on the bark of a forest-tree, or perchance inscribed on the sand of the sea-shore, and thence transferred to his immortal verse. In his Satires we find what we may call a mellowed souredness of spirit, like the taste of the plum or sloe when touched by the first frosts. There is no fury, no rancour, and but little bitterness. You have simply a good and great man, who has left the public arena early and without stain, giving the results of his experience, and deliberately preferring the life of rural simplicity and peace to that of courtly etiquette and diplomatic falsehood. How different from the savage and almost fiendish eye of retrospect such men as Swift and Byron cast upon a world which they have spurned, and which, with quite as much justice, has spurned them! Wyatt and the world, on the other hand, part fair foes, and shake hands ere they diverge from each other's paths for ever. In his version of the Seven Penitential Psalms, some have fancied that they see a tacit acknowledgment, on our poet's part, of some special criminality. If it were so, it would only prove that he resembled one of the noblest characters in history in his repentance as well as in his sin. But we agree with Nott in thinking, that Wyatt's choice of such a theme for his muse arose merely from that growing solemnity and seriousness of mind which often distinguish a man in middle life more than in advanced years. As it is, his version of these psalms is very striking, more deeply impregnated with evangelical truth than anything in that age's poetry, and when he speaks at the close, in his own person, he approaches the sublime. Listen to the following picture of David in the cave: "He seemed in that place A marble image, of singular reverence Carved in the rock, with eyes and hand on high, |