in such hurry and confusion that the bill was never en. rolled, and consequently was not to be considered as an act. But during that very night of the 27th of January, or at a very early hour on the morning of the 28th, the king died. It has been said that the Lieutenant of the Tower, believing the warrant to be informal, as it could not have received the king's signature, or knowing by secret information that the king was actually dead, refused to proceed to the execution. We think it rather more probable that the order was countermanded by the Lords of the Council as soon as Henry had breathed his last. Most of our annalists have set it down, somewhat vaguely, that the Seymour party, which succeeded to almost absolute power, did not think it advisable to begin a new reign by shedding the blood of the first nobleman of England; but, from the character of the majority of those men, we may be justified in believing that they were deterred merely by the dread of odium and of afterconsequences to themselves, in case of a failure of the schemes and forgeries which they were committing in order to secure their, as yet, unstable_power. They concealed the death of the king from Friday the 28th till Monday the 31st ; but they must have known it to be impossible to disguise for any length of time that Henry had expired before the hour which had been fixed for Norfolk's execution. If the king had lived two or three hours longer, no doubt, the head of Norfolk would have been

upon the block; but, then, it might have been made to pass as the deed of a living king, and not as the unauthorized vengeance of personal enemies. The interval between Henry's death on the night of the 27th or morning of the 28th, and the disclosure of the fact on the 31st, is said to have been spent in debating upon what was to be done with the Duke of Norfolk. This subject may have occupied a part, and that a very

a

rity Bishop Burnet is convicted of error or misrepresentation in stating

that Cranmer, to avoid concurring in the guilt of this act of attainder, withdrew to Croydon before the bill was introduced.

serious part of their attention ; but they had many other things to think about ; and much of that time must have been spent in forging the clauses of the king's will upon which they rested all their claim to all the powers and offices of the state, and their claim to the partition among them of the estates and property of the Howards and of other victims to bills of attainder. But whatever were the lucky accidents, or the motives in the hearts of his enemies, that stayed the execution, Norfolk was certainly reprieved, being left in the Tower with the iniquitous sentence hanging over him; the Seymours neither annulling that sentence, nor taking any pains to give it a greater appearance of regularity and justice. On the 20th of February, when the child Edward VI. had been crowned in Westminster Abbey, and when Lord Hertford had taken into his own hands the high state offices which had been held by Norfolk, and had made himself Duke of Somerset, Governor of the person of the king's majesty, and Protector of all his realms, a general pardon for state offences was proclaimed, but in this the Duke of Norfolk, as well as Cardinal Pole, and a few others, were excepted. The old duke lay a close prisoner in the Tower, from December, 1546, till the 3rd of August, 1553, when the accession of Queen Mary restored him to liberty and to his honours and estates. Before Mary's first parliament was dissolved the attainders were legally reversed, it being declared that no special matter had been proved either against the Duke of Norfolk, or his son the Earl of Surrey, except the wearing of part of the royal coat of arms. The old duke died in the following year, 1554.

Biographers have been accustomed to represent the Earl of Surrey as a man whose character was almost without spot or blemish, and to give him credit for qualities and virtues which have no recognizable existence in the period in which he lived. The facts which we have stated upon the best existing evidence will enable the reader to form a correcter notion of him. But the defects of the man, whatever they may have been, cannot be pleaded in extenuation of the lawless way in which

he was cut off by his enemies, nor can they obscure his fame as a poet, scholar, and refiner of the language or rhythm of English verse. The delicacy which we vainly look for in his portrait is to be found in much of his. poetry; Except in some passages in his version of the second and fourth books of the Æneid, which seem to us remarkable for their power, he is seldom very powerful ; but he is almost everywhere neat and delicate, and is not unfrequently tender. But at times his delicacy becomes absolute weakness. He is entitled to high praise as being the first to introduce the use of blank verse. This he borrowed from the Italian writers, with whom it was a novel experiment in his day. From the same rich school of verse he introduced the sonnet. He was also the first Englishman who used the elegiac quatrain, which was admired and used by Dryden, and brought to perfection by Gray in his Elegy. His best sonnet, and per.: haps the best piece he ever produced in any form, measure, or style, is his address to Spring. We subjoin it as a gentle and soothing conclusion to the harsh and tragical story of his life. We have slightly modernized the orthography, but have not otherwise altered the sonnet.

The sweet season that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale,
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her mate bath told her tale :
Summer is come, for every spray now springs.
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale,
The buck in brake his winter coat he fings,
The fishes fleet with new repaired scale,
The adder all her slough away she flings,
The swift swallow pursueth the flies small,
The busy bee her honey how she miugs;
Winter is worn that was the flower's bale :
And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs,

Our memoir of the Earl of Surrey shows in what manner the old family of the Howards was sacrificed to secure the political ascendancy of the new family of the Sey

Hertford, the mortal foe of the poet, had scarcely attained to his high eminence as Duke of Somerset, Protector of the Kingdom, Governor of the person of the King's Majesty, Lieutenant-General of all his Majesty's Forces by land and by sea, Lord High Treasurer, and Earl Marshal of England, ere he became jealous of the ambition, and alarmed at the daring intrigues of his own brother Sir Thomas Seymour, who, since the death of Henry VIII., had been raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Seymour, of Sudley, and had been appointed Lord High Admiral. This Thomas Seymour, it will be remembered, was the man to whom the Duke of Norfolk had wished to marry his daughter, the Duchess of Richmond-a match which Surrey himself is said to have strongly recommended to his sister.