of Wyatt's echoed from the poets he read abroad, but cast
anew in his music, which show in him instinctive melody.
If he often appears less musical to us than he did to his con-
temporaries, it is because of the syllabic uncertainty of English,
and his tricks of using two shorts and two longs together in
an heroic line, or dropping an accent. Many of his Italian
transcripts were roughly done for his own use. Some he
corrected afterwards, some were corrected for him. But he
never saw them in print, and no doubt some of the copies
of his verse were carelessly written. Lines like--

"The sea waterles, and fishe vpon the mountain,"

or the second of this couplet closing one of his Italian octaves--

"But ye, my birds, I sweare, by all your belles.
Ye be my frende, and very few elles"--

mark the uncertainty of Wyatt's verse. The last line is a
puzzling one to scan, but it is simple compared to some others
that might be quoted. Indeed sometimes one is left asking
whether Wyatt did not often in his verse pronounce English
as if it was Italian? We all know instances of young men
who after a brief while in Paris acquired a distinct Parisian
voice.

We must not judge Wyatt only by his sonnets and his
experiments and half-corrected exercises. In about a dozen
poems he showed himself a master in the lyric, caring to attain
a grave stately rhythm that has more of the dignity than the
fluency of Italian verse, though it often suggests the use of
Italian cadences. Such is his address to his Lute, a perfect
instance of a kind of lyric that for long kept its vogue
under the Tudors, and might be called Lutanist verse--

"My lute, awake! perform the last
Labour that thou and I shall waste,
And end that I have now begun:
And when this song is sung and past,
My lute! be still, for I have done.

As to be heard where ear is none;
As lead to grave in marble stone,--
My song may pierce her heart as soon;
Should we then sing, or sigh, or moan?
No, no, my lute I for I have done.

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