PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 1073 
Englishmen a nation of soldiers, and the English character was 
hardened and tempered by rigid parental authority at home, and 
the inflexible, not to say brutal discipline of the schools. 
Of English thought in the sixteenth century, Wyatt and Surrey 
were the early exponents. 
‘““They were men whose minds may be said to have been cast in 
the same mould, for they differ only in those minute shades of 
character which always must exist in human nature; shades of 
difference so infinitely varied that there never were and never will 
be two persons in all respects alike.” 
They were typical samples of the northern races of Europe ; 
each was imbued with a love of virtue for its own sake, and each 
had an instinctive repugnance for vice and mental cowardice. 
They were prompt in action and keen for adventure, as befitted 
men who saw the exploitation of a new world ; they were constant 
in friendship ; they loved like men, and not like angels; they 
were unselfish, and careless of praise, yet unstinting in their 
recognition of merit in others. 
Wyatt was the better judge of character, and his irony is 
searching and pungent, and by making vice ridiculous tends to 
reformation. Surrey was a keen observer of Nature, and delighted 
in that communion with her in all her moods, which has such a 
charm for English hearts. 
Surrey’s taste and literary judgment were alike excellent. His 
translations from Petrarch do no injustice to his Italian master ; 
and, by his introduction of blank verse into English poetry, he 
prepared the way for his great successors, Shakespeare and Milton. 
Surrey employed this form of poetry in the translation of the 
second book of the Aineid, which may be regarded as one of his 
most successful compositions. 
Tn his choice of words Surrey avoids the ponderous terms filched 
from the Latin, so loved of Hoccleve, Lydgate, Dunbar, Douglas, 
and other of his predecessors—both Scots and English. His terms, 
too, are applied with a clearly-defined meaning, wholly unlike the 
wide range of application given by Chaucer’s disciples to their 
selected Latin epithets. 
According to Nott, Surrey deserves the still more conspicuous 
praise of having brought about a great revolution in our poetical 
numbers. Much archaic English seems to have been preserved 
in the poetry of the age preceding Wyatt and Surrey. These 
writers brought English verbal quantities into line with the 
accepted pronunciation of the day ; they rarely lay an unnatural 
stress on final syllables, and they ceased to give value to mute 
vowels long silent in colloquial English. 
If we compare the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey with that of 
men like Barclay and Skelton, who preceded them by some thirty 
or forty years, the contrast is striking, so much more do the first- 
3Y 
