UNIVERSIT HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF THE ENGLISH POETRY AND LANGUAGE. CHAPTER XVI. Reign of Henry VIII. (1509 to 1547.) JOHN SKELTON. WILLIAM ROY.-JOHN HEYWOOD.-SIR DAVID LINDSAY.-THE MOURNING MAIDEN. THE accession of Henry VIII. could not fail to promote the progress of elegant literature in England. His title to the crown was so undoubted that it left him no apprehension of a rival, and fully secured his subjects against the recurrence of those sanguinary civil wars which had so long desolated the country. He was young, handsome, accomplished, wealthy, and prodigal; and the nobility, effectually humbled by the policy of his father, crowded round his person, with no higher ambition than that of gaining his favour and sharing his profusion, which was exhibited in frequent tournaments, in masques, or entertainments consisting of music, dancing, gaming, banquetings, and the display of dresses at once grotesque and magnificent. All the pleasures and all the gallantry of the age were assembled at his court. The press, which VOL. II. B had already produced complete and sumptuous editions of our best early poets, furnished an abundant supply of metrical romances, Christmas carols, and other popular compositions. Henry himself is known to have been a proficient in music, and was perhaps an occasional writer of poetry1; and though his skill in the art be rather problematical, his taste for it is fully evinced by the almost universal practice of his courtiers. Accordingly, this reign forms a marked epocha in our poetical history. Chaucer, as we have seen, had formed his taste upon the model of the Italian no less than of the French poets; but the masculine beauties of Boccaccio, in the Teseide and Filostrato, had excited his admiration much more than the gentler graces of Petrarch, who now became the universal favourite. It may, perhaps, be matter of surprise, that the style of this poet was not sooner adopted as a model by our writers of love-songs, because the manners of chivalry had, in the very infancy of our literature, blended the tender passion with a very competent share of ceremonious enthusiasm. It is probable, however, that the Italian language alone possessed, at that time, sufficient pliability to form a compound of metaphor and metaphysics in the contracted shape of a sonnet. This difficult novelty seems to have been first attempted by the court poets of the reign of Henry VIII. It must be confessed, that a string of forced conceits, in which the imagination of the reader is quite bewildered,-of harsh and discordant rhymes,—and of phrases tortured 1 The following lines are, in the Nuga Antique, ascribed to this monarch: The eagle's force subdues each bird that flies. What metal can resist the flaming fire? And melt the ice, and make the frost retire? The hardest stones are pierced through with tools: |