accidentally, on his journey homewards from
the wars— where he had been valiantly drawing
corks in the suttler's camp for the officers,
and beer for the roystering troopers, getting
his head cracked occasionally, as he, doubtless,
often very richly merited, by the boosing men-
at-arms — this same tapster, during his journey
homeward from the wars, falls in, by the
likeliest chance imaginable, with no less
probable a personage, than Henry the haughty,
and courtly Earl of Surrey, then, though
still merely in the vernal flower of his age, the
boast and paragon of British chivalry. These
two extremely congenial associates— earl and
tapster— immediately begin comparing notes
conipanionably. Surrey the Earl, without any
more ado, pouring into the ear of Wilton the
Tapster the whole of the tender mystery of
his refined and idealised passion for the Lady
Geraldine ; ultimately (so probable this !)
inducing his sympathetic hearer, Jack, to
return with him to Florence, and there, as
his right trusty friend, to share with him, in
the lists, the glories and the perils of knight-
errantry.

Everything here is so clearly within the
range of probability that, while we muse
over the pages of the Unfortunate Traveller,
we can readily fancy Doctor Nott, peering
at us over the rim of one of his portentous
quartos and chuckling audibly. Yet, Thomas
Nash the Notorious, somehow, like the
Anciente Mariner, " holds us with his glittering
eye," and " hath his will," to the very end,
triumphantly. The hook is so delectably baited
that we swallow it bodily, barb, silk, and
tinsel, down to the minutest tip of the last
hackle-feather. Others have taken it in quite
as greedily. Scarcely had four years elapsed
after the appearance of Jack Wilton's astounding
Autobiography, when Michael Drayton
reproduced the whole narrative in a versified
section of his renowned Historical Epistles.

Nearly a century afterwards, namely,
in sixteen hundred and eighty-seven, we
see the bubble rise again upon the surface
of a sluggish stream; the then authoritative
Lives of our English Poets, penned by the dull
and doubtless excellent William Winstanley.
Subsequently came Anthony a Wood, presenting
bodily to the world of letters Jack Wilton
Redivivus. Then in due course appeared
Theophilus Gibber, eager to fix his subjects
like so many entomological specimens in
the dusty museum of his Biographies.
Jack sprawls there upon one of the mouldy
pages, like a mildewed gadfly with the
bloom eaten off, his wings and the colours
tarnished. Finally, trips upon the scene
in his red-heeled shoes and his powdered
peruke, the Right Honourable Horatio, Earl
of Orford, better known to us all, as Horace
Walpole, bearing tenderly in his hand from
his own patrician workshop up-stairs, down
into his luxurious and fantastic library at
Strawberry Hill, his last fastidious
compilation, radiant with gilding and smelling
sweetly of fresh morocco, the twin volumes of
his Royal and Noble Authors. Wherein of
course Earl Surrey appears conspicuously ;
and yet, more, wherein the Lady Geraldine
herself is really for the first time
identified. No marvel surely after this, that a
ripe critic like Thomas Warton, should
have ultimately accepted entire, that
exquisite narrative, of which we have here
minutely given, what may be called its literary
genesis. It is pleasant enough— before
we are startled by the ghostly spectres of
Boyce shivering in his blanket, Otway
strangling over his crust, Savage dying miserably
in a debtor's prison down at Bristol,
Butler breathing his last in abject penury, and
being huddled into the dust under the shadow
of Saint Paul's Church, Covent Garden
there lying obscurely to this day, without
epitaph or even gravestone— to feast our
eyes upon the gorgeous pageant presented
to the imagination by the short but memorable
lifetime of one of the noblest illustrators
of our national literature. Leave we modestly
to Sir Bernard Burke, Ulster king-at-arms,
or to his resplendent compeers, the amiable
Rouge Dragon, and the benignant Garter, and
the courteous Clarencieux, to sound upon
emblazoned tabards stiff with gold
embroidery, to sound in appropriate tones upon
their heraldric trumpets of silver, the pomp,
and the pride, and the glory of that ancient
lineage. Enough for us, if we here but very
briefly mention, that Henry, Earl of Surrey
and Nursling of the Muses, as they were
wont in those old days to designate him,
was eldest born of Thomas, third Duke of
Norfolk, by Elizabeth Stafford his second
Duchess, daughter of Edward, Duke of
Buckingham.

Glimpses of the princeling are caught here
and there, through the loop-holes of our
native history. At the mature age of
nine, we observe him, nimble of foot, at
the Court of Henry the Eighth, attendant
as cupbearer upon the Royal voluptuary.
Already, while dangling thus in his very
infancy at the heels of his sovereign, Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey, had won his way
to the boy-friendship with Henry Fitzroy,
Duke of Richmond—ultimately, Surrey's
brother-in-law. Be it yet more distinctly
notified with a sigh aside for the Fair
Geraldine—in his fifteenth winter, on the
thirteenth of February, fifteen hundred and
thirty- two, Surrey was formally contracted in
marriage to the lady who, in fact, but three
summers afterwards became his wife; the
Lady Frances Vere, daughter of John Earl of
Oxford; and, in the fulness of time, mother
of our boy-earl's five blooming children.

Surrey, from this starting-point, greets us
at uncertain intervals more and more vividly
as time advances.

It is, however, neither upon any phase
of his domestic history, nor even about the
conspicuous share taken by him in our