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The next remarkable piece of work done in English poetry after Tottel’s Miscellany—a piece of work of greater actual poetic merit than anything in the Miscellany itself—was... the famous Mirror for Magistrates, or rather that part of it contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst.... The Induction and the Complaint of Buckingham, which Sackville furnished to it in 1559, though they were not published till four years later, completely outweigh all the rest in value. His contributions to the Mirror for Magistrates contain the best poetry written in the English language between Chaucer and Spenser, and are most certainly the originals or at least the models of some of Spenser’s finest work. He has had but faint praise of late years.... I have little hesitation in saying that no more astonishing contribution to English poetry, when the due reservations of that historical criticism which is the life of all criticism are made, is to be found anywhere. The bulk is not great: twelve or fifteen hundred lines must cover the whole of it. The form is not new, being merely the 7–line stanza already familiar in Chaucer. The arrangement is in no way novel, combining as it does the allegorical presentment of embodied virtues, vices, and qualities with the melancholy narrative common in poets for many years before. But the poetical value of the whole is extraordinary. The two constituents of that value, the formal and the material, are represented here with a singular equality of development. There is nothing here of Wyatt’s floundering prosody, nothing of the well-intentioned doggerel in which Surrey himself indulges and in which his pupils simply revel. The cadences of the verse perfect, the imagery fresh and sharp, the presentation of nature singularly original, when it is compared with the battered copies of the poets with whom Sackville must have been most familiar, the followers of Chaucer from Occleeve to Hawes. Even the general plan of the poem—the weakest part of nearly all poems of this time—is extraordinarily effective and makes one sincerely sorry that Sackville’s taste or his other occupations did not permit him to carry out the whole scheme on his own account. The Induction, in which the author is brought face to face with Sorrow, and the central passages of the Complaint of Buckingham, have a depth and fullness of poetical sound and sense for which we must look backwards a hundred and fifty years, or forwards nearly five and twenty....