The years of the reign of Henry VII., the first Tudor, had been spent in recovering from the disastrous Wars of the Roses, and when Henry VIII. came to the throne England was enjoying a measure of prosperity. Henry himself, and his prime minister, Cardinal Wolsey, were, until the time of their unfortunate quarrels, liberal patrons of the New Learning. Many grammar schools were founded. Oxford and Cambridge became for the moment rivals in classical scholarship and centres of philosophy and eloquence. The poor Dutch scholar, Erasmus, in despair of ever crossing the Alps, came to England for the Greek for which his soul thirsted, and in return impressed his own generous culture upon the age. The monastic orders, however, at one time fosterers of learning, were now mostly sunk in indolence and corruption, and resisted the new movement. Then came Henry's private differences with the Pope, and concurrently with the spread of Lutheran doctrines and of Scripture reading among the people, Henry began to suppress the monasteries and brought about the breach between the Church of England and the Church of Rome which was the ultimate outcome of the Reformation in England. But the change was not made without violent disturbances, both political and religious, and the very forces that were to make English nationality and literature great delayed for a season the realization of that end. At no time, for instance, in the history of England had there been such a wholesale destruction of books as took place in the troubles at the end of Henry's reign, when, among hundreds of others, the great libraries of London and Oxford totally disappeared. So far as literature is concerned, the tendencies and activities of the time may be briefly described. In the first place, the new ideas and ideals concerning the organization of society More, Berners, Tyndale, Latimer. found admirable expression in a book that has been ever since regarded as a classic. This is the Utopia (1516) of Sir Thomas More, perhaps the foremost Englishman of his day, a man who paid in the end with his life for his steadfast devotion to his principles. As the Utopia, however, was written in Latin and was not translated for many years, its bearing upon English literature is but an indirect one. In the second place, the printing press continued to encourage English prose writing and prose translation. Especially noteworthy is the translation of the French Froissart by Lord Berners (1523), which afforded lovers of romance scarcely less entertaining reading in genuine history than they could get in Caxton's stories of Troy or Malory's stories of the Knights of the Round Table. In the third place, great zeal was manifested in the translation and printing of the Bible, which scholars were now able to translate, not as formerly from the Latin Vulgate, but directly from the Greek and Hebrew. William Tyndale's version of the New Testament, which has had such a profound influence upon English style, appeared in 1534, and Miles Coverdale's Bible in 1535; and in 1539 a revision of the two, known as "The Great Bible,' was authorized by Henry VIII. In 1548 followed the English Prayer Book, edited by Archbishop Cranmer. The press also served to circulate and to preserve some of the Sermons of Hugh Latimer, bishop and preacher to the king, and a master of vigorous English. Naturally this accumulation of printed prose was giving the language a stability it had never yet possessed. Moreover, the Midland dialect of Wyclif and Chaucer, standardized and nationalized, especially through the Bible, was now become practically the modern English we all know. With the disappearance of final e from pronunciation went almost the last trace of Middle English inflection; and though the vowels were still, and for a long time to come, doubtless, pronounced more after the old way, the English as written was modern English, and there is no sufficient reason why we should attempt to pronounce it otherwise than as we do to-day.* The vocabulary, too, had begun to expand after the liberal fashion that marks it still, drawing freely on every source that could serve its needs. Such expansion, indeed, was not only facilitated by the multiplying of translations from languages both ancient and modern, but was actually compelled by the inpouring of new interests and ideas.† Roger 1515-1568. Further, a critical tendency was beginning to manifest itself, and there was a direct and conscious attempt to improve and control the language for literary purposes. Philology and composition were discussed, and Rhetorics written. Conspicuous among men of this critical and pedagogical bent was a Cambridge professor, and tutor of the young Princess Elizabeth, Roger Ascham, whose written prose possessed real distinction. His jealousy for the honor of the English tongue was shown in his Toxophilus (1545), a book on archery dedicated to Henry VIII., which he refused to write in Latin or Greek, proud to present his "Englishe matter *The spelling of extracts used henceforth in the present book will be modernized, except in the case of Spenser, who was intentionally archaic, and in a very few other instances. †Tyndale's Bible, for instance, as compared with Wyclif's, gives evidence of this expansion in such innovations as superscription for writing above, tribute for rent, physician for leech, congregation for church, doctrine for teaching, iniquity for wickedness, eternal for everlasting, provoked to anger for stirred to wrath. See Appendix. in the Englishe tongue for Englishe men." His Scholemaster (1570), a treatise on the discipline of youth, on teaching Latin, and on versification, was not published till after his death. It is remarkable for its advanced views on education, both in counselling that appeals should be made rather to the pupil's interest than to his fear of a flogging, and in substituting a general culture of the mind and body for the mechanical instillation of lifeless rules. Finally, in the field of poetry, an influence began now to be dominant which was to play a part in the shaping of the literature down to the end of the century. This was the influence of Italian writers, with the classical standards behind them. Just why that influence, which Chaucer had felt so long before and certainly to the great enrichment of his own work, should have failed to spread earlier, is not easy to say. Perhaps the lack of printing was a prime reason. Perhaps also the native resistance was too strong, or the native obtuseness too great, for there were not wanting those who regretted the foreign influence, as tending to retard native literature. But continental literature and thought were far ahead of the English, and fresh draughts from that source could not but be invigorating. Moreover, such attempts at a strictly native expression as Skelton's had not been encouraging; it is clear that in the matter of form English writers needed further foreign schooling, before Spenser and Shakespeare were possible. The two poets entitled to most of whatever credit is due for the introduction of Italian and classical models were Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. Thomas Wyatt, a Cambridge Master of Arts at seventeen, knighted at thirty-four, and dead before forty, led the typical life of a courtier of the time, one year in disfavor and Thomas in prison, and another year on active embassies for Wyatt, 15039-1542, the king. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a friend and poetic pupil of Wyatt's, led an idle but honorable and lamentably brief life at court, being beheaded on a foolish charge of treason in his thirtieth year, only nine days before the king's own death. The fruits of these two men's literary activity are best considered together. They were published, Earl of Surrey, c. 1517-1547. though not until just before Elizabeth's accession, in a collection of verse called Tottel's Miscellany, 1557, a book and a date, which, it should be borne in mind, publicly open the new era in English poetry. The contributions of the two consist, on Wyatt's part, of love lyrics in sonnet and various stanza forms, and satires; on Surrey's, of similar sonnets and lyrics, and a translation of two books of Virgil's Eneid. The love poems, personal in tone, and often composed serially, constituting a kind of diary of love, either real or fictitious, were something new in English literature and set a fashion that lasted through and long after Elizabeth's reign. The model was obtained from Italy, where both men had travelled and studied poetry. "The Lover Describeth his Restless State," "The Lover Praiseth the Beauty of his Lady's Hand," "The Lover Curseth the Time when first he Fell in Love,"--such are the themes upon which the amatory changes are rung. The fashion is particularly interesting to us because it brought with it the fourteen-line sonnet, which of all borrowed forms has taken most kindly to English conditions, yielding some of our very greatest poetry. The sonnet-form, however, was not conquered without a struggle. Chaucer's mastery of the ten-syllable (or five-foot) line seems not to have assisted Wyatt, who labored at a translation of one of Petrarch's sonnets after this fashion: "The long love that | in my thought I harbér And in my heart | doth keep his residence, And there campeth | displaying his bannér," etc. This is very literally a "sad mechanic exercise." Surrey's attempt at the same sonnet reveals great metrical improvement, though he takes liberties with the rhyme order: 'Love, that liveth and reigneth in my thought, That built his seat within my captive breast; |