Note 3. More properly,—says a note in Robert Bell’s edition of Surrey,—“rakel, rash, careless, reckless. Rakehel was used to designate a dissolute profligate fellow.” Some commentators, however, might choose to suppose that there was an involuntary, if not a candid, propriety in the word, when speaking of the Court of Henry VIII. [back]
Note 4. Some of the sentences in these verses are ill put together, perhaps were incorrectly copied from the manuscript; but the picture at the beginning, some of the expressions in the middle,—such as “jolly woes” and “hateless debate,”—and the evidence of passionate emotion at the close, render it worth transcribing. In a subsequent poem—not a sonnet—written when Surrey was put into confinement in the same place in consequence of a quarrel, he again mourns the pleasures he once enjoyed there:—
“Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour;
The large green courts, where we were wont to hove (hover),
With eyes cast up into the Maidens’ tower (the Maids of Honor),
