Moreover, into his conception of the Temple of Mars the father of English poetry puts nothing of that pride and splendour of war which might be supposed to appeal to a soldier poet of his earlier day: it is a 'sory place,' he says, and the paintings on its walls are all of murder, assassinations, 'open warres,' with bleeding wretches in agony, and in the midst sits Mischance,
With sory comfort and evil countenance.
True, there is a figure of Conquest painted up in a tower, but as he sits with a sword suspended above him by a single thread, it is not to be presumed that his position is worth occupying.
There is nothing whatever in the verse of the Earl of Surrey to remind you that he went fighting in France. Sir Walter Raleigh, that daring, dashing hero, never fought with his pen: all his poems are of an amatory, philosophical, or pleasantly pastoral order. And Sir Philip Sidney, our ideal soldier, made no song that boasts of his prowess or triumphs over his enemies, but wrote the loveliest sonnets
