The most genuine
utterance of Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor--a
cage where so many a song-bird has grown vocal. And Wiat's little piece
of eight lines, "Of his Return from Spain," is worth reams of his
amatory affectations. Nevertheless the writers in _Tottel's Miscellany_
were real reformers of English poetry. They introduced new models of
style and new metrical forms, and they broke away from the mediaeval
traditions which had hitherto obtained. The language had undergone some
changes since Chaucer's time, which made his scansion obsolete. The
accent of many words of French origin, like _nature_, _courage_,
_virtue_, _matere_, had shifted to the first syllable, and the _e_ of
the final syllables _es_, _en_, _ed_, and _e_, had largely disappeared.
But the language of poetry tends to keep up archaisms of this kind, and
in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still find such
lines as these:
But he my strokes might right well endure,
He was so great and huge of puissance.[19]
Hawes's practice is variable in this respect, and so is his
contemporary, Skelton's. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few
years later, the reader first feels sure that he is reading verse
pronounced quite in the modern fashion.
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