In a quiet moment Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, finds Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, writing:
Suffolk: “What’s that my lord?”
Surrey: “Oh nothing, a trifle.”
Suffolk: “I dare say the other Surrey’s trifles will someday be regarded as some of our greatest poesy.”
Surrey: “Then I dare say your grace can read it. It’s a translation in sonnet form – one of Marcus’ epigrams. That is of course the Roman poet, but that doesn’t matter. It’s about the ‘happy life’, the ‘golden mean’.”
Suffolk carefully reads from the sonnet:
The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind;
The equal friend; no grudge nor strife;
No charge of rule nor governance;
Without disease, the healthful life;
Wisdom joined with simplicity;
Suffolk repeats quietly to himself gazing to the middle distance, “A quiet mind? A night discharged of all care. Wisdom joined with simplicity. My God, how I wish these things were true.”
Surrey: ”Which of these, your grace, do you not have?”
Suffolk: “All of them.”
Surrey: “Then you are like me, and like all the Romans, and all the barbarians, and all the generations before, and all those yet to come. For who does not wish, your grace, with all their heart, for the quiet mind? Tell me a single soul who has ever found it?”
