national annals upon the battle-field, that we
are here desirous of expatiating. Amusing
though it would prove to trace the relations
in which he stood on the one hand towards
the renowned physician Hadrian Junius, a
demi-semi-classic personage retained in the
earl's household at an annual stipend of fifty
angels ; and, on the other, to the once famous
poet Churchyard, then a curly-pated urchin
of ten, who owed to this princely patron the
material luxury of a refined home, and the
intellectual luxury of a yet more refined
education. Churchyard, indeed, strove afterwards
to repay his patron's generosity by
gratefully commemorating it in a volume
with the name of which the readers of
Household Words have been otherwise long
familiarised — CHIPS — a poetical miscellany in
which Earl Surrey's character is graciously
and glowingly portrayed.

To professed chroniclers may be fittingly
left the alluring task of recounting how
our noble soldier acquitted himself when,
donning the buff jerkin and shirt of mail,
he volunteered his services in the army
conducted against the French by Sir John Wallop
—name of evil omen to their adversaries!
And, continuing uninterruptedly before
Montreuil and Boulogne, a career illustrated by
many brilliant successes, and darkened by
one deplorable disaster, besides being twice
threatened with an abrupt termination,—here
by a cannon-ball, there by the stroke of a
swordsman. We also pass over Surrey's career
from the sudden termination of his successive
appointments as marshal, as king's lieutenant,
and as captain-general of his Majesty's forces
in France, downward to his final imprisonment
in Windsor Castle, to his hurried removal
thence to the Tower of London, to his
infamous trial and execution while yet in the
flower of his age; within one week of the
death of the master-murderer Henry the
Eighth on the twenty-eighth of January
fifteen hundred and forty-seven.

A happier view than any yet obtained of
Surrey, prior to the record of those dreadful
death scenes, may be caught among the
fluttering leaves of the young earl's poetry. It
is, like one of those delectable peeps caught
—here of Benedick, there of Beatrice—in the
woodbine coverture of Leonato's orchard in
Much Ado about Nothing. Yonder among
the clustered leaves of these blooming and
delicious verses, it is as if we watched again
the two lovers stealing in turn,—

"into the pleached bower
Where honeysuckles ripen'd by the sun
Forbid the sun to enter;"

but, so covertly is the Lady Geraldine hid
away in her fairy-bower, that but once
only does her name appear in the text of
Surrey's verses, which are yet the sole
guarantee for that name being still held in
the world's remembrance. Upon the
traditionary records already enumerated are
built up the incidents of a tale, the veracity
of which we have here avowed ourselves to
be obdurately bent upon believing. It
matters nothing that contemporary authorities
prove, however inferentially, quite
beyond the possibility of denial, that the
earl never at any time extended his
continental wanderings as far as Italy— where
the majority of these legendary incidents
are said to have transpired. Has not
Thomas Gray, dreamer of dreams, and,
therefore, surely a most authoritative witness,
observed succinctly, in a footnote to
his Progress of Poesy : " The Earl of
Surrey travelled in Italy, and formed his
taste there ? " Consequently, admitting this
weighty assertion of a fictionist like Mr. Gray
to be perfectly conclusive— we may readily
accept as probable the statement that, in
Italy, not only did Surrey form his taste
(which, Mr. Hallam has remarked, is even
more striking than his genius), but that
there, also, he signally vindicated it, by
maintaining with sword and lance, the matchless
beauty and excellence of the Fair Geraldine.

It is vexatious enough, no doubt, to find
ourselves obstructed in our laudable endeavour
to arrive at this satisfactory conclusion
by the stubborn fact that Geraldine was no
more than seven in the year fifteen hundred
and thirty-six, in which the earl is declared
by that honest romancer Nash, and his
two credulous followers, to have gone upon
no sleeveless errand to the ducal court of
Florence. Meaning the time, when in a
rapturous fit of knight-errantry, he tied the
sleeve of the pretty chit to the crest of his
helmet, and drove at a gallop through the
dust and blood of the Tuscan tournaments.

A Platonic passion we will suppose it to
have been (like that cherished of old by
Petrarch for Laura, — first seen and loved by
him, when a tender damsel of thirteen):
because we must candidly admit the existence
of a wife and five inopportune offspring;
who, after Lord Surrey's premature demise,
were handed over for educational purposes
to Fox the martyrologist, described by his
historian as, with thin countenance and
hollow eyes, "looking after the ghastly manner
of dying men." Our solace for those five
little witnesses against the Lady Geraldine,
is the circumstance that their widowed
mother, surviving her lord for many years,
married a commoner of Suffolk, one Thomas
Steyning of Woodford, Esquire.

The Lady Geraldine was a descendant
of the renowned house of the Geraldi of
Florence—a family said to have originally
migrated to England in the reign of Alfred
the Great. Geraldine or, more strictly speaking,
the Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald was the
daughter of the ninth Earl of Kildare, called
according to his haughty ancestral patronymic
Gerald Fitzgerald. The identity of the
Lady Elizabeth and the Fair Geraldine, was
first demonstrated by Horace Walpole.