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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Spenser, by R. W. Church
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Spenser
+       (English Men of Letters Series)
+
+Author: R. W. Church
+
+Release Date: January 27, 2010 [EBook #31101]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPENSER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lisa Reigel, and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been
+left as in the original. Some typographical and punctuation errors have
+been corrected. A complete list follows the text. The text contains
+three Greek words--they may not display properly. Words italicized in
+the original are surrounded by _underscores_. Words in bold in the
+original are surrounded by +plus signs+. Characters inside {braces} are
+superscripted in the original. In quoted material, a row of asterisks
+represents an ellipsis. Ellipses match the original.
+
+
+
+
+                               SPENSER
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                            R. W. CHURCH,
+
+                         DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S,
+                  HONORARY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE.
+
+
+                               London:
+                          MACMILLAN AND CO.
+                                 1879
+
+
+       _The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved._
+
+
+
+
+NOTICE.
+
+
+As the plan of these volumes does not encourage footnotes, I wish to say
+that, besides the biographies prefixed to the various editions of
+Spenser, there are two series of publications, which have been very
+useful to me. One is the series of Calendars of State Papers, especially
+the State Papers on Ireland and the Carew MSS. at Lambeth, with the
+prefaces of Mr. Hans Claude Hamilton and the late Professor Brewer. The
+other is Mr. E. Arber's series of reprints of old English books, and his
+Transcript of the Stationers' Registers, a work, I suppose, without
+parallel in its information about the early literature of a country, and
+edited by him with admirable care and public spirit. I wish also to say
+that I am much indebted to Mr. Craik's excellent little book on _Spenser
+and his Poetry_.
+
+                                                         R. W. C.
+
+_March, 1879._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+     CHAPTER I.
+                                                             PAGE
+     SPENSER'S EARLY LIFE (1552-1579)                           1
+
+
+     CHAPTER II.
+
+     THE NEW POET--THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR (1579)              29
+
+
+     CHAPTER III.
+
+     SPENSER IN IRELAND (1580)                                 51
+
+
+     CHAPTER IV.
+
+     THE FAERY QUEEN--THE FIRST PART (1580-1590)               81
+
+
+     CHAPTER V.
+
+     THE FAERY QUEEN                                          118
+
+
+     CHAPTER VI.
+
+     SECOND PART OF THE FAERY QUEEN--SPENSER'S LAST
+         YEARS (1590-1599)                                    166
+
+
+
+
+SPENSER.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+SPENSER'S EARLY LIFE.
+
+[1552-1579.]
+
+
+Spenser marks a beginning in English literature. He is the first
+Englishman who, in that great division of our history which dates from
+the Reformation, attempted and achieved a poetical work of the highest
+order. Born about the same time as Hooker (1552-1554), in the middle of
+that eventful century which began with Henry VIII., and ended with
+Elizabeth, he was the earliest of our great modern writers in poetry, as
+Hooker was the earliest of our great modern writers in prose. In that
+reviving English literature, which, after Chaucer's wonderful promise,
+had been arrested in its progress, first by the Wars of the Roses, and
+then by the religious troubles of the Reformation, these two were the
+writers who first realized to Englishmen the ideas of a high literary
+perfection. These ideas vaguely filled many minds; but no one had yet
+shown the genius and the strength to grasp and exhibit them in a way to
+challenge comparison with what had been accomplished by the poetry and
+prose of Greece, Rome, and Italy. There had been poets in England since
+Chaucer, and prose writers since Wycliffe had translated the Bible.
+Surrey and Wyatt have deserved to live, while a crowd of poets, as
+ambitious as they, and not incapable of occasional force and sweetness,
+have been forgotten. Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, Tyndale, the
+translator of the New Testament, Bishop Latimer, the writers of many
+state documents, and the framers, either by translation or composition,
+of the offices of the English Prayer Book, showed that they understood
+the power of the English language over many of the subtleties and
+difficulties of thought, and were alive to the music of its cadences.
+Some of these works, consecrated by the highest of all possible
+associations, have remained, permanent monuments and standards of the
+most majestic and most affecting English speech. But the verse of
+Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville, and the prose of More and Ascham were but
+noble and promising efforts. Perhaps the language was not ripe for their
+success; perhaps the craftsmen's strength and experience were not equal
+to the novelty of their attempt. But no one can compare the English
+styles of the first half of the sixteenth century with the contemporary
+styles of Italy, with Ariosto, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, without
+feeling the immense gap in point of culture, practice, and skill--the
+immense distance at which the Italians were ahead, in the finish and
+reach of their instruments, in their power to handle them, in command
+over their resources, and facility and ease in using them. The Italians
+were more than a century older; the English could not yet, like the
+Italians, say what they would; the strength of English was, doubtless,
+there in germ, but it had still to reach its full growth and
+development. Even the French prose of Rabelais and Montaigne was more
+mature. But in Spenser, as in Hooker, all these tentative essays of
+vigorous but unpractised minds have led up to great and lasting works.
+We have forgotten all these preliminary attempts, crude and imperfect,
+to speak with force and truth, or to sing with measure and grace. There
+is no reason why they should be remembered, except by professed
+inquirers into the antiquities of our literature; they were usually
+clumsy and awkward, sometimes grotesque, often affected, always
+hopelessly wanting in the finish, breadth, moderation, and order which
+alone can give permanence to writing. They were the necessary exercises
+by which Englishmen were recovering the suspended art of Chaucer, and
+learning to write; and exercises, though indispensably necessary, are
+not ordinarily in themselves interesting and admirable. But when the
+exercises had been duly gone through, then arose the original and
+powerful minds, to take full advantage of what had been gained by all
+the practising, and to concentrate and bring to a focus all the hints
+and lessons of art which had been gradually accumulating. Then the
+sustained strength and richness of the _Faery Queen_ became possible;
+contemporary with it, the grandeur and force of English prose began in
+Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_; and then, in the splendid Elizabethan
+Drama, that form of art which has nowhere a rival, the highest powers of
+poetic imagination became wedded, as they had never been before in
+England or in the world, to the real facts of human life, and to its
+deepest thoughts and passions.
+
+More is known about the circumstances of Spenser's life than about the
+lives of many men of letters of that time; yet our knowledge is often
+imperfect and inaccurate. The year 1552 is now generally accepted as the
+year of his birth. The date is inferred from a passage in one of his
+Sonnets,[4:1] and this probably is near the truth. That is to say that
+Spenser was born in one of the last two years of Edward VI.; that his
+infancy was passed during the dark days of Mary; and that he was about
+six years old when Elizabeth came to the throne. About the same time
+were born Ralegh, and, a year or two later (1554), Hooker and Philip
+Sidney. Bacon (1561), and Shakespere (1564), belong to the next decade
+of the century.
+
+He was certainly a Londoner by birth, and early training. This also we
+learn from himself, in the latest poem published in his life-time. It is
+a bridal ode (_Prothalamion_), to celebrate the marriage of two
+daughters of the Earl of Worcester, written late in 1596. It was a time
+in his life of disappointment and trouble, when he was only a rare
+visitor to London. In the poem he imagines himself on the banks of
+London's great river, and the bridal procession arriving at Lord Essex's
+house; and he takes occasion to record the affection with which he still
+regarded "the most kindly nurse" of his boyhood.
+
+       Calm was the day, and through the trembling air
+       Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play,
+       A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
+       Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair:
+       When I, (whom sullen care,
+       Through discontent of my long fruitless stay
+       In Princes Court, and expectation vain
+       Of idle hopes, which still do fly away,
+       Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain,)
+       Walkt forth to ease my pain
+       Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames;
+       Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems,
+       Was painted all with variable flowers,
+       And all the meads adorned with dainty gems
+       Fit to deck maidens' bowers,
+       And crown their paramours
+     Against the bridal day, which is not long:
+     Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+       At length they all _to merry London came,
+       To merry London, my most kindly nurse,
+       That to me gave this life's first native source,
+       Though from another place I take my name,
+       A house of ancient fame_.
+       There, when they came, whereas those bricky towers
+       The which on Thames broad aged back do ride,
+       Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
+       There whilome wont the Templar Knights to bide,
+       Till they decayed through pride:
+       Next whereunto there stands a stately place,
+       _Where oft I gained gifts and goodly grace[5:2]
+       Of that great Lord, which therein wont to dwell;
+       Whose want too well now feels my friendless case;
+       But ah! here fits not well
+       Old woes, but joys, to tell_
+     Against the bridal day, which is not long:
+     Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song:
+       Yet therein now doth lodge a noble peer,[5:3]
+       Great England's glory and the wide world's wonder,
+       Whose dreadful name late through all Spain did thunder,
+       And Hercules two pillars, standing near,
+       Did make to quake and fear.
+       Fair branch of honour, flower of chivalry!
+       That fillest England with thy triumph's fame,
+       Joy have thou of thy noble victory,[5:4]
+       And endless happiness of thine own name
+       That promiseth the same.
+       That through thy prowess, and victorious arms,
+       Thy country may be freed from foreign harms;
+       And great Elisa's glorious name may ring
+       Through all the world, filled with thy wide alarms.
+
+Who his father was, and what was his employment we know not. From one of
+the poems of his later years we learn that his mother bore the famous
+name of Elizabeth, which was also the cherished one of Spenser's wife.
+
+           My love, my life's best ornament,
+     By whom my spirit out of dust was raised.[6:5]
+
+But his family, whatever was his father's condition, certainly claimed
+kindred, though there was a difference in the spelling of the name, with
+a house then rising into fame and importance, the Spencers of Althorpe,
+the ancestors of the Spencers and Churchills of modern days. Sir John
+Spencer had several daughters, three of whom made great marriages.
+Elizabeth was the wife of Sir George Carey, afterwards the second Lord
+Hunsdon, the son of Elizabeth's cousin and Counsellor. Anne, first, Lady
+Compton, afterwards married Thomas Sackville, the son of the poet, Lord
+Buckhurst, and then Earl of Dorset. Alice, the youngest, whose first
+husband, Lord Strange, became Earl of Derby, after his death married
+Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper, Baron Ellesmere, and then Viscount
+Brackley. These three sisters are celebrated by him in a gallery of the
+noble ladies of the Court,[6:6] under poetical names--"Phyllis, the
+flower of rare perfection," "Charillis, the pride and primrose of the
+rest," and "Sweet Amaryllis, the youngest but the highest in degree."
+Alice, Lady Strange, Lady Derby, Lady Ellesmere and Brackley, and then
+again Dowager Lady Derby, the "Sweet Amaryllis" of the poet, had the
+rare fortune to be a personal link between Spenser and Milton. She was
+among the last whom Spenser honoured with his homage: and she was the
+first whom Milton honoured; for he composed his Arcades to be acted
+before her by her grandchildren, and the _Masque of Comus_ for her
+son-in-law, Lord Bridgewater, and his daughter, another Lady Alice. With
+these illustrious sisters Spenser claimed kindred. To each of these he
+dedicated one of his minor poems; to Lady Strange, the _Tears of the
+Muses_; to Lady Compton, the Apologue of the Fox and the Ape, _Mother
+Hubberd's Tale_; to Lady Carey, the Fable of the Butterfly and the
+Spider, _Muiopotmos_. And in each dedication he assumed on their part
+the recognition of his claim.
+
+                    The sisters three,
+     The honour of the noble family,
+     Of which I meanest boast myself to be.
+
+Whatever his degree of relationship to them, he could hardly even in the
+days of his fame have ventured thus publicly to challenge it, unless
+there had been some acknowledged ground for it. There are obscure
+indications, which antiquarian diligence may perhaps make clear, which
+point to East Lancashire as the home of the particular family of
+Spensers to which Edmund Spenser's father belonged. Probably he was,
+however, in humble circumstances.
+
+Edmund Spenser was a Londoner by education as well as birth. A recent
+discovery by Mr. R. B. Knowles, further illustrated by Dr. Grosart,[7:7]
+has made us acquainted with Spenser's school. He was a pupil, probably
+one of the earliest ones, of the grammar school, then recently (1560)
+established by the Merchant Taylors' Company, under a famous teacher,
+Dr. Mulcaster. Among the manuscripts at Townley Hall are preserved the
+account books of the executors of a bountiful London citizen, Robert
+Nowell, the brother of Dr. Alexander Nowell, who was Dean of St. Paul's
+during Elizabeth's reign, and was a leading person in the ecclesiastical
+affairs of the time. In these books, in a crowd of unknown names of
+needy relations and dependents, distressed foreigners, and parish
+paupers, who shared from time to time the liberality of Mr. Robert
+Nowell's representatives, there appear among the numerous "poor
+scholars" whom his wealth assisted, the names of Richard Hooker, and
+Lancelot Andrewes. And there, also, in the roll of the expenditure at
+Mr. Nowell's pompous funeral at St. Paul's in February, 1568/9, among
+long lists of unknown men and women, high and low, who had mourning
+given them, among bills for fees to officials, for undertakers' charges,
+for heraldic pageantry and ornamentation, for abundant supplies for the
+sumptuous funeral banquet, are put down lists of boys, from the chief
+London schools, St. Paul's, Westminster, and others, to whom two yards
+of cloth were to be given to make their gowns: and at the head of the
+six scholars named from Merchant Taylors' is the name of Edmund Spenser.
+
+He was then, probably, the senior boy of the school, and in the
+following May he went to Cambridge. The Nowells still helped him: we
+read in their account books under April 28, 1569, "to Edmond Spensore,
+scholler of the m'chante tayler scholl, at his gowinge to penbrocke
+hall in chambridge, x{s}." On the 20th of May, he was admitted sizar,
+or serving clerk at Pembroke Hall; and on more than one occasion
+afterwards, like Hooker and like Lancelot Andrewes, also a Merchant
+Taylors' boy, two or three years Spenser's junior, and a member of the
+same college, Spenser had a share in the benefactions, small in
+themselves, but very numerous, with which the Nowells after the fine
+fashion of the time, were accustomed to assist poor scholars at the
+Universities. In the visitations of Merchant Taylors' School, at which
+Grindal, Bishop of London, was frequently present,[9:8] it is not
+unlikely that his interest was attracted, in the appositions or
+examinations, to the promising senior boy of the school. At any rate
+Spenser, who afterwards celebrated Grindal's qualities as a bishop, was
+admitted to a place, one which befitted a scholar in humble
+circumstances, in Grindal's old college. It is perhaps worth noticing
+that all Spenser's early friends, Grindal, the Nowells, Dr. Mulcaster,
+his master, were north country men.
+
+Spenser was sixteen or seventeen when he left school for the university,
+and he entered Cambridge at the time when the struggle which was to
+occupy the reign of Elizabeth was just opening. At the end of the year
+1569, the first distinct blow was struck against the queen and the new
+settlement of religion, by the Rising of the North. In the first ten
+years of Elizabeth's reign, Spenser's school time at Merchant Taylors',
+the great quarrel had slumbered. Events abroad occupied men's minds; the
+religious wars in France, the death of the Duke of Guise (1563), the
+loss of Havre, and expulsion of the English garrisons, the close of the
+Council of Trent (1563), the French peace, the accession of Pius V.
+(1565/6). Nearer home, there was the marriage of Mary of Scotland with
+Henry Darnley (1565), and all the tragedy which followed, Kirk of Field
+(1567), Lochleven, Langside, Carlisle, the imprisonment of the pretender
+to the English Crown (1568). In England, the authority of Elizabeth had
+established itself, and the internal organization of the Reformed Church
+was going on, in an uncertain and tentative way, but steadily. There was
+a struggle between Genevan exiles, who were for going too fast, and
+bishops and politicians who were for going too slow; between authority
+and individual judgment, between home-born state traditions and foreign
+revolutionary zeal. But outwardly, at least, England had been peaceful.
+Now however a great change was at hand. In 1566, the Dominican
+Inquisitor, Michael Ghislieri, was elected Pope, under the title of Pius
+V.
+
+In Pius (1566-72), were embodied the new spirit and policy of the Roman
+Church, as they had been created and moulded by the great Jesuit order,
+and by reforming bishops like Ghiberti of Verona, and Carlo Borromeo of
+Milan. Devout and self-denying as a saint, fierce and inflexible against
+abuses as a puritan, resolute and uncompromising as a Jacobin idealist
+or an Asiatic despot, ruthless and inexorable as an executioner, his
+soul was bent on re-establishing, not only by preaching and martyrdom,
+but by the sword and by the stake, the unity of Christendom and of its
+belief. Eastwards and westwards, he beheld two formidable foes and two
+serious dangers; and he saw before him the task of his life in the
+heroic work of crushing English heresy and beating back Turkish
+misbelief. He broke through the temporizing caution of his predecessors
+by the Bull of Deposition against Elizabeth in 1570. He was the soul of
+the confederacy which won the day of Lepanto against the Ottomans in
+1571. And though dead, his spirit was paramount in the slaughter of St.
+Bartholomew in 1572.
+
+In the year 1569, while Spenser was passing from school to college, his
+emissaries were already in England, spreading abroad that Elizabeth was
+a bastard and an apostate, incapable of filling a Christian throne,
+which belonged by right to the captive Mary. The seed they sowed bore
+fruit. In the end of the year, southern England was alarmed by the news
+of the rebellion of the two great Earls in the north, Percy of
+Northumberland and Neville of Westmoreland. Durham was sacked and the
+mass restored by an insurgent host, before which an "aged gentleman,"
+Richard Norton with his sons, bore the banner of the Five Wounds of
+Christ. The rebellion was easily put down, and the revenge was stern. To
+the men who had risen at the instigation of the Pope and in the cause of
+Mary, Elizabeth gave, as she had sworn "such a breakfast as never was in
+the North before." The hangman finished the work on those who had
+escaped the sword. Poetry, early and late, has recorded the dreary fate
+of those brave victims of a mistaken cause, in the ballad of the _Rising
+of the North_, and in the _White Doe of Rylstone_. It was the signal
+given for the internecine war which was to follow between Rome and
+Elizabeth. And it was the first great public event which Spenser would
+hear of in all men's mouths, as he entered on manhood, the prelude and
+augury of fierce and dangerous years to come. The nation awoke to the
+certainty--one which so profoundly affects sentiment and character both
+in a nation and in an individual--that among the habitual and fixed
+conditions of life is that of having a serious and implacable enemy ever
+to reckon with.
+
+And in this year, apparently in the transition time between school and
+college, Spenser's literary ventures began. The evidence is curious, but
+it seems to be clear. In 1569, a refugee Flemish physician from Antwerp,
+who had fled to England from the "abominations of the Roman Antichrist"
+and the persecutions of the Duke of Alva, John Vander Noodt, published
+one of those odd miscellanies, fashionable at the time, half moral and
+poetical, half fiercely polemical, which he called a "_Theatre_, wherein
+be represented as well the Miseries and Calamities which follow the
+voluptuous Worldlings, as also the great Joys and Pleasures which the
+Faithful do enjoy--an argument both profitable and delectable to all
+that sincerely love the word of God." This "little treatise," was a
+mixture of verse and prose, setting forth in general, the vanity of the
+world, and, in particular, predictions of the ruin of Rome and
+Antichrist: and it enforced its lessons by illustrative woodcuts. In
+this strange jumble are preserved, we can scarcely doubt, the first
+compositions which we know of Spenser's. Among the pieces are some
+Sonnets of Petrarch, and some Visions of the French poet Joachim du
+Bellay, whose poems were published in 1568. In the collection itself,
+these pieces are said by the compiler to have been translated by him
+"out of the Brabants speech," and "out of Dutch into English." But in a
+volume of "poems of the world's vanity," and published years afterwards
+in 1591, ascribed to Spenser, and put together, apparently with his
+consent, by his publisher, are found these very pieces from Petrarch and
+Du Bellay. The translations from Petrarch are almost literally the same,
+and are said to have been "formerly translated." In the Visions of Du
+Bellay there is this difference, that the earlier translations are in
+blank verse, and the later ones are rimed as sonnets; but the change
+does not destroy the manifest identity of the two translations. So that
+unless Spenser's publisher, to whom the poet had certainly given some of
+his genuine pieces for the volume, is not to be trusted,--which, of
+course, is possible, but not probable--or unless,--what is in the last
+degree inconceivable,--Spenser had afterwards been willing to take the
+trouble of turning the blank verse of Du Bellay's unknown translator
+into rime, the Dutchman who dates his _Theatre of Worldlings_ on the
+25th May, 1569, must have employed the promising and fluent school boy,
+to furnish him with an English versified form, of which he himself took
+the credit, for compositions which he professes to have known only in
+the Brabants or Dutch translations. The sonnets from Petrarch are
+translated with much command of language; there occurs in them, what was
+afterwards a favourite thought of Spenser's:--
+
+                             --The Nymphs,
+     That sweetly in accord did _tune their voice
+     To the soft sounding of the waters' fall_.[13:9]
+
+It is scarcely credible that the translator of the sonnets could have
+caught so much as he has done of the spirit of Petrarch without having
+been able to read the Italian original; and if Spenser was the
+translator, it is a curious illustration of the fashionableness of
+Italian literature in the days of Elizabeth, that a school-boy just
+leaving Merchant Taylors' should have been so much interested in it. Dr.
+Mulcaster, his master, is said by Warton to have given special attention
+to the teaching of the English language.
+
+If these translations were Spenser's, he must have gone to Cambridge
+with a faculty of verse, which for his time may be compared to that with
+which winners of prize poems go to the universities now. But there was
+this difference, that the school-boy versifiers of our days are rich
+with the accumulated experience and practice of the most varied and
+magnificent poetical literature in the world; while Spenser had but one
+really great English model behind him; and Chaucer, honoured as he was,
+had become in Elizabeth's time, if not obsolete, yet in his diction,
+very far removed from the living language of the day. Even Milton, in
+his boyish compositions, wrote after Spenser and Shakespeare, with their
+contemporaries, had created modern English poetry. Whatever there was in
+Spenser's early verses of grace and music was of his own finding: no one
+of his own time, except in occasional and fitful snatches, like stanzas
+of Sackville's, had shown him the way. Thus equipped, he entered the
+student world, then full of pedantic and ill-applied learning, of the
+disputations of Calvinistic theology, and of the beginnings of those
+highly speculative puritanical controversies, which were the echo at the
+University of the great political struggles of the day, and were soon to
+become so seriously practical. The University was represented to the
+authorities in London as being in a state of dangerous excitement,
+troublesome and mutinous. Whitgift, afterwards Elizabeth's favourite
+archbishop, Master, first of Pembroke, and then of Trinity, was
+Vice-Chancellor of the University; but as the guardian of established
+order, he found it difficult to keep in check the violent and
+revolutionary spirit of the theological schools. Calvin was beginning to
+be set up there as the infallible doctor of Protestant theology.
+Cartwright from the Margaret Professor's chair was teaching the
+exclusive and divine claims of the Geneva platform of discipline, and in
+defiance of the bishops and the government was denouncing the received
+Church polity and ritual as Popish and anti-Christian. Cartwright, an
+extreme and uncompromising man, was deprived in 1570; but the course
+which things were taking under the influence of Rome and Spain gave
+force to his lessons and warnings, and strengthened his party. In this
+turmoil of opinions, amid these hard and technical debates, these fierce
+conflicts between the highest authorities, and this unsparing violence
+and bitterness of party recriminations, Spenser, with the tastes and
+faculties of a poet, and the love not only of what was beautiful, but of
+what was meditative and dreamy, began his university life.
+
+It was not a favourable atmosphere for the nurture of a great poet. But
+it suited one side of Spenser's mind, as it suited that of all but the
+most independent Englishmen of the time, Shakespere, Bacon, Ralegh.
+Little is known of Spenser's Cambridge career. It is probable, from the
+persons with whom he was connected, that he would not be indifferent to
+the debates around him, and that his religious prepossessions were then,
+as afterwards, in favour of the conforming puritanism in the Church, as
+opposed to the extreme and thorough-going puritanism of Cartwright. Of
+the conforming puritans, who would have been glad of a greater
+approximation to the Swiss model, but who, whatever their private wishes
+or dislikes, thought it best, for good reasons or bad, to submit to the
+strong determination of the government against it, and to accept what
+the government approved and imposed, Grindal, who held successively the
+great sees of London, York, and Canterbury, and Nowell, Dean of St.
+Paul's, Spenser's benefactor, were representative types. Grindal, a
+waverer like many others in opinion, had also a noble and manly side to
+his character, in his hatred of practical abuses, and in the courageous
+and obstinate resistance which he could offer to power, when his sense
+of right was outraged. Grindal, as has been said, was perhaps
+instrumental in getting Spenser into his own old college, Pembroke Hall,
+with the intention, it may be, as was the fashion of bishops of that
+time, of becoming his patron. But certainly after his disgrace in 1577,
+and when it was not quite safe to praise a great man under the
+displeasure of the Court, Grindal is the person whom Spenser first
+singled out for his warmest and heartiest praise. He is introduced under
+a thin disguise, "Algrind," in Spenser's earliest work after he left
+Cambridge, the _Shepherd's Calendar_, as the pattern of the true and
+faithful Christian pastor. And if Pembroke Hall retained at all the tone
+and tendencies of such masters as Ridley, Grindal, and Whitgift, the
+school in which Spenser grew up was one of their mitigated puritanism.
+But his puritanism was political and national, rather than religious. He
+went heartily with the puritan party in their intense hatred of Rome and
+Roman partisans; he went with them also in their denunciations of the
+scandals and abuses of the ecclesiastical government at home. But in
+temper of mind and intellectual bias he had little in common with the
+puritans. For the stern austerities of Calvinism, its fierce and eager
+scholasticism, its isolation from human history, human enjoyment, and
+all the manifold play and variety of human character, there could not be
+much sympathy in a man like Spenser, with his easy and flexible nature,
+keenly alive to all beauty, an admirer even when he was not a lover of
+the alluring pleasures of which the world is full, with a perpetual
+struggle going on in him, between his strong instincts of purity and
+right, and his passionate appreciation of every charm and grace. He
+shows no signs of agreement with the internal characteristics of the
+puritans, their distinguishing theology, their peculiarities of thought
+and habits, their protests, right or wrong, against the fashions and
+amusements of the world. If not a man of pleasure, he yet threw himself
+without scruple into the tastes, the language, the pursuits, of the gay
+and gallant society in which they saw so much evil: and from their
+narrow view of life, and the contempt, dislike, and fear, with which
+they regarded the whole field of human interest, he certainly was parted
+by the widest gulf. Indeed, he had not the sternness and concentration
+of purpose, which made Milton the great puritan poet.
+
+Spenser took his Master's degree in 1576, and then left Cambridge. He
+gained no Fellowship, and there is nothing to show how he employed
+himself. His classical learning, whether acquired there or elsewhere,
+was copious, but curiously inaccurate; and the only specimen remaining
+of his Latin composition in verse is contemptible in its mediæval
+clumsiness. We know nothing of his Cambridge life except the friendships
+which he formed there. An intimacy began at Cambridge of the closest and
+most affectionate kind, which lasted long into after-life, between him
+and two men of his college, one older in standing than himself, the
+other younger; Gabriel Harvey, first a fellow of Pembroke, and then a
+student or teacher of civil law at Trinity Hall, and Edward Kirke, like
+Spenser, a sizar at Pembroke, recently identified with the E. K., who
+was the editor and commentator of Spenser's earliest work, the anonymous
+_Shepherd's Calendar_. Of the younger friend this is the most that is
+known. That he was deeply in Spenser's confidence as a literary
+coadjutor, and possibly in other ways, is shown in the work which he
+did. But Gabriel Harvey was a man who had influence on Spenser's ideas
+and purposes, and on the direction of his efforts. He was a classical
+scholar of much distinction in his day, well read in the Italian authors
+then so fashionable, and regarded as a high authority on questions of
+criticism and taste. Except to students of Elizabethan literary history,
+he has become an utterly obscure personage; and he has not usually been
+spoken of with much respect. He had the misfortune, later in life, to
+plunge violently into the scurrilous quarrels of the day, and as he was
+matched with wittier and more popular antagonists, he has come down to
+us as a foolish pretender, or at least as a dull and stupid scholar who
+knew little of the real value of the books he was always ready to quote,
+like the pedant of the comedies, or Shakespere's schoolmaster
+Holofernes. Further, he was one who, with his classical learning, had
+little belief in the resources of his mother tongue, and he was one of
+the earliest and most confident supporters of a plan then fashionable,
+for reforming English verse, by casting away its natural habits and
+rhythms, and imposing on it the laws of the classical metres. In this he
+was not singular. The professed treatises of this time on poetry, of
+which there were several, assume the same theory, as the mode of
+"reforming" and duly elevating English verse. It was eagerly accepted by
+Philip Sidney and his Areopagus of wits at court, who busied themselves
+in devising rules of their own--improvements as they thought on those of
+the university men--for English hexameters and sapphics, or as they
+called it, artificial versifying. They regarded the comparative value of
+the native English rhythms and the classical metres, much as our
+ancestors of Addison's day regarded the comparison between Gothic and
+Palladian architecture. One, even if it sometimes had a certain romantic
+interest, was rude and coarse; the other was the perfection of polite
+art and good taste. Certainly in what remains of Gabriel Harvey's
+writing, there is much that seems to us vain and ridiculous enough; and
+it has been naturally surmised that he must have been a dangerous friend
+and counsellor to Spenser. But probably we are hard upon him. His
+writings, after all, are not much more affected and absurd in their
+outward fashion than most of the literary composition of the time; his
+verses are no worse than those of most of his neighbours; he was not
+above, but he was not below, the false taste and clumsiness of his age;
+and the rage for "artificial versifying" was for the moment in the air.
+And it must be said, that though his enthusiasm for English hexameters
+is of a piece with the puritan use of scripture texts in divinity and
+morals, yet there is no want of hard-headed shrewdness in his remarks;
+indeed, in his rules for the adaptation of English words and accents to
+classical metres, he shows clearness and good sense in apprehending the
+conditions of the problem, while Sidney and Spenser still appear
+confused and uncertain. But in spite of his pedantry, and though he had
+not, as we shall see, the eye to discern at first the genius of the
+_Faery Queen_, he has to us the interest of having been Spenser's first,
+and as far as we can see, to the last, dearest friend. By both of his
+younger fellow-students at Cambridge, he was looked up to with the
+deepest reverence, and the most confiding affection. Their language is
+extravagant, but there is no reason to think that it was not genuine. E.
+Kirke, the editor of Spenser's first venture, the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+commends the "new poet" to his patronage, and to the protection of his
+"mighty rhetoric," and exhorts Harvey himself to seize the poetical
+"garland which to him alone is due." Spenser speaks in the same terms;
+"_veruntamen te sequor solum; nunquam vero assequar_." Portions of the
+early correspondence between Harvey and Spenser have been preserved to
+us, possibly by Gabriel Harvey's self-satisfaction in regard to his own
+compositions. But with the pedagogue's jocoseness, and a playfulness
+which is like that of an elephant, it shows on both sides easy
+frankness, sincerity, and warmth, and not a little of the early
+character of the younger man. In Spenser's earliest poetry, his
+pastorals, Harvey appears among the imaginary rustics, as the poet's
+"special and most familiar friend," under the name of Hobbinol,--
+
+     "Good Hobbinol, that was so true."
+
+To him Spenser addresses his confidences, under the name of Colin Clout,
+a name borrowed from Skelton, a satirical poet of Henry VIII.'s time,
+which Spenser kept throughout his poetical career. Harvey reappears in
+one of Spenser's latest writings, a return to the early pastoral, _Colin
+Clout's come home again_, a picture drawn in distant Ireland, of the
+brilliant but disappointing court of Elizabeth. And from Ireland in
+1586, was addressed to Harvey by "his devoted friend during life," the
+following fine sonnet, which, whatever may have been the merit of
+Harvey's criticisms and his literary quarrels with Greene and Nash,
+shows at least Spenser's unabated honour for him.
+
+     TO THE RIGHT WORSHIPFUL, MY SINGULAR GOOD FRIEND, M.
+     GABRIEL HARVEY, DOCTOR OF THE LAWS.
+
+     HARVEY, the happy above happiest men
+     I read; that, sitting like a looker on
+     Of this world's stage, dost note with critic pen
+     The sharp dislikes of each condition;
+     And, as one careless of suspicion,
+     Ne fawnest for the favour of the great;
+     Ne fearest foolish reprehension
+     Of faulty men, which danger to thee threat;
+     But freely dost, of what thee list, entreat,
+     Like a great lord of peerless liberty;
+     Lifting the good up to high honour's seat,
+     And the evil damning over more to die;
+     For life and death is in thy doomful writing;
+     So thy renown lives ever by enditing.
+
+     Dublin, this xviii. of July, 1586. Your devoted friend, during life,
+                                                  EDMUND SPENSER.
+
+Between Cambridge and Spenser's appearance in London, there is a short
+but obscure interval. What is certain is, that he spent part of it in
+the North of England; that he was busy with various poetical works, one
+of which was soon to make him known as a new star in the poetical
+heaven; and lastly, that in the effect on him of a deep but unrequited
+passion, he then received what seems to have been a strong and
+determining influence on his character and life. It seems likely that
+his sojourn in the north, which perhaps first introduced the London-bred
+scholar, the "Southern Shepherd's Boy," to the novel and rougher country
+life of distant Lancashire, also gave form and local character to his
+first considerable work. But we do not know for certain where his abode
+was in the north; of his literary activity, which must have been
+considerable, we only partially know the fruit; and of the lady whom he
+made so famous, that her name became a consecrated word in the poetry of
+the time, of Rosalind, the "Widow's Daughter of the Glen," whose refusal
+of his suit, and preference for another, he lamented so bitterly, yet
+would allow no one else to blame, we know absolutely nothing. She would
+not be his wife; but apparently, he never ceased to love her through all
+the chances and temptations, and possibly errors of his life, even
+apparently in the midst of his passionate admiration of the lady whom,
+long afterwards, he did marry. To her kindred and condition, various
+clues have been suggested, only to provoke and disappoint us. Whatever
+her condition, she was able to measure Spenser's powers: Gabriel Harvey
+has preserved one of her compliments--"Gentle Mistress Rosalind once
+reported him to have all the intelligences at commandment; and at
+another, christened him her _Signior Pegaso_." But the unknown Rosalind
+had given an impulse to the young poet's powers, and a colour to his
+thoughts, and had enrolled Spenser in that band and order of
+poets,--with one exception, not the greatest order,--to whom the
+wonderful passion of love, in its heights and its depths, is the element
+on which their imagination works, and out of which it moulds its most
+beautiful and characteristic creations.
+
+But in October, 1579, he emerges from obscurity. If we may trust the
+correspondence between Gabriel Harvey and Spenser, which was published
+at the time, Spenser was then in London.[22:1] It was the time of the
+crisis of the Alençon courtship, while the Queen was playing fast and
+loose with her Valois lover, whom she playfully called her frog; when
+all about her, Burghley, Leicester, Sidney, and Walsingham, were
+dismayed, both at the plan itself, and at her vacillations; and just
+when the Puritan pamphleteer, who had given expression to the popular
+disgust at a French marriage, especially at a connexion with the family
+which had on its hands the blood of St. Bartholomew, was sentenced to
+lose his right hand as a seditious libeller. Spenser had become
+acquainted with Philip Sidney, and Sidney's literary and courtly
+friends. He had been received into the household of Sidney's uncle, Lord
+Leicester, and dates one of his letters from Leicester House. Among his
+employments he had written, "_Stemmata Dudleiana_." He is doubting
+whether or not to publish, "to utter," some of his poetical
+compositions: he is doubting, and asks Harvey's advice, whether or not
+to dedicate them to His Excellent Lordship, "lest by our much cloying
+their noble ears he should gather contempt of myself, or else seem
+rather for gain and commodity to do it, and some sweetness that I have
+already tasted." Yet, he thinks, that when occasion is so fairly offered
+of estimation and preferment, it may be well to use it: "while the iron
+is hot, it is good striking; and minds of nobles vary, as their
+estates." And he was on the eve of starting across the sea to be
+employed in Leicester's service, on some permanent mission in France,
+perhaps in connexion with the Alençon intrigues. He was thus launched
+into what was looked upon as the road of preferment; in his case, as it
+turned out, a very subordinate form of public employment, which was to
+continue almost for his lifetime. Sidney had recognized his unusual
+power, if not yet his genius. He brought him forward; perhaps he
+accepted him as a friend. Tradition makes him Sidney's companion at
+Penshurst; in his early poems, Kent is the county with which he seems
+most familiar. But Sidney certainly made him known to the queen; he
+probably recommended him as a promising servant to Leicester: and he
+impressed his own noble and beautiful character deeply on Spenser's
+mind. Spenser saw and learned in him what was then the highest type of
+the finished gentleman. He led Spenser astray. Sidney was not without
+his full share of that affectation, which was then thought refinement.
+Like Gabriel Harvey, he induced Spenser to waste his time on the
+artificial versifying which was in vogue. But such faults and mistakes
+of fashion, and in one shape or another they are inevitable in all ages,
+were as nothing, compared to the influence on a highly receptive nature,
+of a character so elevated and pure, so genial, so brave and true. It
+was not in vain that Spenser was thus brought so near to his
+"Astrophel."
+
+These letters tell us all that we know of Spenser's life at this time.
+During these anxious eighteen months, and connected with persons like
+Sidney and Leicester, Spenser only writes to Harvey on literary
+subjects. He is discreet, and will not indulge Harvey's "desire to hear
+of my late being with her Majesty." According to a literary fashion of
+the time, he writes and is addressed as _M. Immerito_, and the great
+business which occupies him and fills the letters is the scheme devised
+in Sidney's _Areopagus_ for the "general surceasing and silence of bald
+Rymers, and also of the very best of them too; and for prescribing
+certain laws and rules of quantities of English syllables for English
+verse." Spenser "is more in love with his English versifying than with
+ryming,"--"which," he says to Harvey, "I should have done long since, if
+I would then have followed your counsel." Harvey, of course, is
+delighted; he thanks the good angel which puts it into the heads of
+Sidney and Edward Dyer, "the two very diamonds of her Majesty's court,"
+"our very Castor and Pollux," to "help forward our new famous enterprise
+for the exchanging of barbarous rymes for artificial verses;" and the
+whole subject is discussed at great length between the two friends; "Mr.
+Drant's" rules are compared with those of "Mr. Sidney," revised by "Mr.
+Immerito;" and examples, highly illustrative of the character of the
+"famous enterprise" are copiously given. In one of Harvey's letters we
+have a curious account of changes of fashion in studies and ideas at
+Cambridge. They seem to have changed since Spenser's time.
+
+     I beseech you all this while, what news at _Cambridge_?
+     _Tully_ and _Demosthenes_ nothing so much studied as they were
+     wont: _Livy_ and _Sallust_ perhaps more, rather than less:
+     _Lucian_ never so much: _Aristotle_ much named but little
+     read: _Xenophon_ and _Plato_ reckoned amongst discoursers, and
+     conceited superficial fellows; much verbal and sophistical
+     jangling; little subtle and effectual disputing. _Machiavel_ a
+     great man: _Castilio_, of no small repute: _Petrarch_ and
+     _Boccace_ in every man's mouth: _Galateo_ and _Guazzo_ never
+     so happy: but some acquainted with _Unico Aretino_: the
+     _French_ and _Italian_ highly regarded: the _Latin_ and
+     _Greek_ but lightly. The _Queen Mother_ at the beginning or
+     end of every conference: all inquisitive after news: new
+     _books_, new fashions, new laws, new officers, and some after
+     new elements, some after new heavens and hells too. _Turkish_
+     affairs familiarly known: castles built in the air: much ado,
+     and little help: in no age so little so much made of; every
+     one highly in his own favour. Something made of nothing, in
+     spight of Nature: numbers made of cyphers, in spight of Art.
+     Oxen and asses, notwithstanding the absurdity it seemed to
+     _Plautus_, drawing in the same yoke: the Gospel taught, not
+     learnt; Charity cold; nothing good, but by imputation; the
+     Ceremonial Law in word abrogated, the Judicial in effect
+     disannull'd, the Moral abandon'd; _the Light, the Light_ in
+     every man's lips, but mark their eyes, and you will say they
+     are rather like owls than eagles. As of old books, so of
+     ancient virtue, honesty, fidelity, equity, new abridgments;
+     every day spawns new opinions: heresy in divinity, in
+     philosophy, in humanity, in manners, grounded upon hearsay;
+     doctors contemn'd; the _devil_ not so hated as the _pope_;
+     many invectives, but no amendment. No more ado about caps and
+     surplices; Mr. _Cartwright_ quite forgotten.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     _David_, _Ulysses_, and _Solon_, feign'd themselves fools and
+     madmen; our fools and madmen feign themselves _Davids_,
+     _Ulysses's_, and _Solons_. It is pity fair weather should do
+     any hurt; but I know what peace and quietness hath done with
+     some melancholy pickstraws.
+
+The letters preserve a good many touches of character which are
+interesting. This, for instance, which shows Spenser's feeling about
+Sidney. "New books," writes Spenser, "I hear of none, but only of one,
+that writing a certain book called _The School of Abuse_, [Stephen
+Gosson's _Invective against poets, pipers, players, &c._] and dedicating
+to M. Sidney, was for his labour scorned: _if at least it be in the
+goodness of that nature to scorn_." As regards Spenser himself, it is
+clear from the letters that Harvey was not without uneasiness lest his
+friend, from his gay and pleasure-loving nature, and the temptations
+round him, should be carried away into the vices of an age, which,
+though very brilliant and high-tempered, was also a very dissolute one.
+He couches his counsels mainly in Latin; but they point to real danger;
+and he adds in English,--"Credit me, I will never lin [= cease] baiting
+at you, till I have rid you quite of this yonkerly and womanly humour."
+But in the second pair of letters of April, 1580, a lady appears.
+Whether Spenser was her husband or her lover, we know not; but she is
+his "sweetheart." The two friends write of her in Latin. Spenser sends
+in Latin the saucy messages of his sweetheart, "meum corculum," to
+Harvey; Harvey, with academic gallantry, sends her in Latin as many
+thanks for her charming letter as she has hairs, "half golden, half
+silver, half jewelled, in her little head;"--she is a second little
+Rosalind--"altera Rosalindula," whom he salutes as "Domina Immerito, mea
+bellissima Colina Clouta." But whether wife or mistress, we hear of her
+no more. Further, the letters contain notices of various early works of
+Spenser. The "new" _Shepherd's Calendar_, of which more will be said,
+had just been published. And in this correspondence of April, 1580, we
+have the first mention of the _Faery Queen_. The compositions here
+mentioned have been either lost, or worked into his later poetry; his
+_Dreams_, _Epithalamion Thamesis_, apparently in the "reformed verse,"
+his _Dying Pelican_, his _Slumber_, his _Stemmata Dudleiana_, his
+_Comedies_. They show at least the activity and eagerness of the writer
+in his absorbing pursuit. But he was still in bondage to the belief that
+English poetry ought to try to put on a classical dress. It is strange
+that the man who had written some of the poetry in the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ should have found either satisfaction or promise in the
+following attempt at Trimeter Iambics.
+
+     And nowe requite I you with the like, not with the verye
+     beste, but with the verye shortest, namely, with a few
+     Iambickes: I dare warrant they be precisely perfect for the
+     feete (as you can easily judge), and varie not one inch from
+     the Rule. I will imparte yours to Maister _Sidney_ and Maister
+     _Dyer_ at my nexte going to the Courte. I praye you, keepe
+     mine close to your selfe, or your verie entire friends,
+     Maister _Preston_, Maister _Still_, and the reste.
+
+                        _Iambicum Trimetrum._
+
+          Unhappie Verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,
+            Make thy selfe fluttring wings of thy fast flying
+            Thought, and fly forth unto my Love wheresoever she be:
+
+          Whether lying reastlesse in heavy bedde, or else
+            Sitting so cheerlesse at the cheerfull boorde, or else
+            Playing alone carelesse on hir heavenlie Virginals.
+
+          If in Bed, tell hir, that my eyes can take no reste:
+            If at Boorde, tell hir that my mouth can eate no meate:
+            If at hir Virginals, tell hir, I can heare no mirth.
+
+          Asked why? say: Waking Love suffereth no sleepe:
+            Say, that raging Love dothe appall the weake stomacke:
+            Say, that lamenting Love marreth the Musicall.
+
+          Tell hir, that hir pleasures were wonte to lull me asleepe:
+            Tell hir, that hir beautie was wonte to feede mine eyes:
+            Tell hir, that hir sweete Tongue was wonte to make me mirth.
+
+          Nowe doe I nightly waste, wanting my kindely reste:
+            Nowe doe I dayly starve, wanting my lively foode:
+            Nowe doe I alwayes dye, wanting thy timely mirth.
+
+          And if I waste, who will bewaile my heavy chaunce?
+            And if I starve, who will record my cursed end?
+            And if I dye, who will saye: _this was Immerito_?
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4:1]
+
+       ----Since the winged god his planet clear
+     Began in me to move, one year is spent:
+     The which doth longer unto me appear
+     Than _all those forty_ which my life outwent.
+
+                  _Sonnet_ LX., probably written in 1593 or 1594.
+
+[5:2] Leicester House, then Essex House, in the Strand.
+
+[5:3] Earl of Essex.
+
+[5:4] At Cadiz, June 21, 1596.
+
+[6:5] _Sonnet_ LXXIV.
+
+[6:6] _Colin Clout's come Home again_, l. 536. Craik, _Spenser_, i. 9.
+10.
+
+[7:7] See _The Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell_, 1568-1580: from
+the MSS. at Towneley Hall. Edited by Rev. A. B. Grosart, 1877.
+
+[9:8] H. B. Wilson, _Hist. of Merchant Taylors' School_, p. 23.
+
+[13:9] Comp. _Sheph. Cal._ April l. 36. June l. 8. F. Q. 6. 10. 7.
+
+[22:1] Published in June, 1580. Reprinted incompletely in Haslewood,
+_Ancient Critical Essays_ (1815), ii. 255. Extracts given in editions of
+Spenser by Hughes, Todd, and Morris. The letters are of April, 1579, and
+October, 1580.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE NEW POET--THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR.
+
+[1579.]
+
+
+It is clear that when Spenser appeared in London, he had found out his
+powers and vocation as a poet. He came from Cambridge, fully conscious
+of the powerful attraction of the imaginative faculties, conscious of an
+extraordinary command over the resources of language, and with a
+singular gift of sensitiveness to the grace and majesty and
+suggestiveness of sound and rhythm, such as makes a musician. And
+whether he knew it or not, his mind was in reality made up, as to what
+his English poetry was to be. In spite of opinions and fashions round
+him, in spite of university pedantry and the affectations of the court,
+in spite of Harvey's classical enthusiasm, and Sidney's Areopagus, and
+in spite of half-fancying himself converted to their views, his own
+powers and impulses showed him the truth, and made him understand better
+than his theories what a poet could and ought to do with English speech
+in its free play and genuine melodies. When we first come upon him, we
+find that at the age of twenty-seven, he had not only realized an idea
+of English poetry far in advance of anything which his age had yet
+conceived or seen; but that, besides what he had executed or planned, he
+had already in his mind the outlines of the _Faery Queen_, and, in some
+form or other, though perhaps not yet as we have it, had written some
+portion of it.
+
+In attempting to revive for his own age Chaucer's suspended art, Spenser
+had the tendencies of the time with him. The age was looking out for
+some one to do for England what had been grandly done for Italy. The
+time in truth was full of poetry. The nation was just in that condition
+which is most favourable to an outburst of poetical life or art. It was
+highly excited; but it was also in a state of comparative peace and
+freedom from external disturbance. "An over-faint quietness," writes
+Sidney in 1581, lamenting that there were so few good poets, "should
+seem to strew the house for poets." After the first ten years of
+Elizabeth's reign, and the establishment of her authority, the country
+had begun to breathe freely, and fall into natural and regular ways.
+During the first half of the century, it had had before it the most
+astonishing changes which the world had seen for centuries. These
+changes seemed definitely to have run their course; with the convulsions
+which accompanied them, their uprootings and terrors, they were gone;
+and the world had become accustomed to their results. The nation still
+had before it great events, great issues, great perils, great and
+indefinite prospects of adventure and achievement. The old quarrels and
+animosities of Europe had altered in character: from being wars between
+princes, and disputes of personal ambition, they had attracted into them
+all that interests and divides mankind, from high to low. Their
+animating principle was a high and a sacred cause: they had become wars
+of liberty, and wars of religion. The world had settled down to the
+fixed antipathies and steady rivalries of centuries to come. But the
+mere shock of transition was over. Yet the remembrance of the great
+break-up was still fresh. For fifty years the English people had had
+before its eyes the great vicissitudes which make tragedy. They had seen
+the most unforeseen and most unexpected revolutions in what had for ages
+been held certain and immovable; the overthrow of the strongest
+institutions, and most venerable authorities; the violent shifting of
+feelings from faith to passionate rejection, from reverence to scorn and
+a hate which could not be satisfied. They had seen the strangest turns
+of fortune, the most wonderful elevations to power, the most terrible
+visitations of disgrace. They had seen the mightiest ruined, the
+brightest and most admired brought down to shame and death, men struck
+down with all the forms of law, whom the age honoured as its noblest
+ornaments. They had seen the flames of martyr or heretic, heads which
+had worn a crown laid one after another on the block, controversies, not
+merely between rivals for power, but between the deepest principles and
+the most rooted creeds, settled on the scaffold. Such a time of
+surprise,--of hope and anxiety, of horror and anguish to-day, of relief
+and exultation to-morrow,--had hardly been to England as the first half
+of the sixteenth century. All that could stir men's souls, all that
+could inflame their hearts, or that could wring them, had happened.
+
+And yet, compared with previous centuries, and with what was going on
+abroad, the time now was a time of peace, and men lived securely. Wealth
+was increasing. The Wars of the Roses had left the crown powerful to
+enforce order, and protect industry and trade. The nation was beginning
+to grow rich. When the day's work was done, men's leisure was not
+disturbed by the events of neighbouring war. They had time to open
+their imaginations to the great spectacle which had been unrolled before
+them, to reflect upon it, to put into shape their thoughts about it. The
+intellectual movement of the time had reached England, and its strong
+impulse to mental efforts in new and untried directions was acting
+powerfully upon Englishmen. But though there was order and present peace
+at home, there was much to keep men's minds on the stretch. There was
+quite enough danger and uncertainty to wind up their feelings to a high
+pitch. But danger was not so pressing as to prevent them from giving
+full place to the impressions of the strange and eventful scene round
+them, with its grandeur, its sadness, its promises. In such a state of
+things there is everything to tempt poetry. There are its materials and
+its stimulus, and there is the leisure to use its materials.
+
+But the poet had not yet been found; and everything connected with
+poetry was in the disorder of ignorance and uncertainty. Between the
+counsels of a pedantic scholarship, and the rude and hesitating, but
+true instincts of the natural English ear, every one was at sea. Yet it
+seemed as if every one was trying his hand at verse. Popular writing
+took that shape. The curious and unique record of literature preserved
+in the registers of the Stationers' Company, shows that the greater
+proportion of what was published, or at least entered for publication,
+was in the shape of ballads. The ballad vied with the sermon in doing
+what the modern newspaper does, in satisfying the public craving for
+information, amusement, or guidance. It related the last great novelty,
+the last great battle or crime, a storm or monstrous birth. It told some
+pathetic or burlesque story, or it moralized on the humours or follies
+of classes and professions, of young and old, of men and of women. It
+sang the lover's hopes or sorrows, or the adventures of some hero of
+history or romance. It might be a fable, a satire, a libel, a squib, a
+sacred song or paraphrase, a homily. But about all that it treated it
+sought to throw more or less the colour of imagination. It appealed to
+the reader's feelings, or sympathy, or passion. It attempted to raise
+its subject above the level of mere matter of fact. It sought for choice
+and expressive words; it called in the help of measure and rhythm. It
+aimed at a rude form of art. Presently the critical faculty came into
+play. Scholars, acquainted with classical models and classical rules,
+began to exercise their judgment on their own poetry, to construct
+theories, to review the performances before them, to suggest plans for
+the improvement of the poetic art. Their essays are curious, as the
+beginnings of that great critical literature, which in England, in spite
+of much infelicity, has only been second to the poetry which it judged.
+But in themselves they are crude, meagre, and helpless; interesting
+mainly, as showing how much craving there was for poetry, and how little
+good poetry to satisfy it, and what inconceivable doggrel could be
+recommended by reasonable men, as fit to be admired and imitated. There
+is fire and eloquence in Philip Sidney's _Apologie for Poetrie_ (1581);
+but his ideas about poetry were floating, loose, and ill defined, and he
+had not much to point to as of first-rate excellence in recent writers.
+Webbe's _Discourse of English Poetrie_ (1586), and the more elaborate
+work ascribed to George Puttenham (1589), works of tame and artificial
+learning without Sidney's fire, reveal equally the poverty, as a whole,
+of what had been as yet produced in England as poetry, in spite of the
+widespread passion for poetry. The specimens which they quote and praise
+are mostly grotesque to the last degree. Webbe improves some gracefully
+flowing lines of Spenser's into the most portentous Sapphics; and
+Puttenham squeezes compositions into the shapes of triangles, eggs, and
+pilasters. Gabriel Harvey is accused by his tormentor, Nash, of doing
+the same, "of having writ verse in all kinds, as in form of a pair of
+gloves, a dozen of points, a pair of spectacles, a two-hand sword, a
+poynado, a colossus, a pyramid, a painter's easel, a market cross, a
+trumpet, an anchor, a pair of pot-hooks." Puttenham's Art of Poetry,
+with its books, one on Proportion, the other on Ornament, might be
+compared to an Art of War, of which one book treated of barrack drill,
+and the other of busbies, sabretasches, and different forms of
+epaulettes and feathers. These writers do not want good sense or the
+power to make a good remark. But the stuff and material for good
+criticism, the strong and deep poetry, which makes such criticisms as
+theirs seem so absurd, had not yet appeared.
+
+A change was at hand; and the suddenness of it is one of the most
+astonishing things in literary history. The ten years from 1580 to 1590
+present a set of critical essays, giving a picture of English poetry of
+which, though there are gleams of a better hope, and praise is specially
+bestowed on a "new poet," the general character is feebleness, fantastic
+absurdity, affectation and bad taste. Force, and passion, and simple
+truth, and powerful thoughts of the world and man, are rare; and
+poetical reformers appear maundering about miserable attempts at English
+hexameters and sapphics. What was to be looked for from all that? Who
+could suppose what was preparing under it all? But the dawn was come.
+The next ten years, from 1590 to 1600, not only saw the _Faery Queen_,
+but they were the years of the birth of the English Drama. Compare the
+idea which we get of English poetry from Philip Sidney's Defense in
+1581, and Puttenham's treatise in 1589, I do not say with Shakespere,
+but with Lamb's selections from the Dramatic Poets, many of them unknown
+names to the majority of modern readers; and we see at once what a bound
+English poetry has made; we see that a new spring time of power and
+purpose in poetical thought has opened; new and original forms have
+sprung to life of poetical grandeur, seriousness, and magnificence. From
+the poor and rude play-houses, with their troops of actors most of them
+profligate and disreputable, their coarse excitements, their buffoonery,
+license, and taste for the monstrous and horrible,--denounced not
+without reason as corruptors of public morals, preached against at
+Paul's Cross, expelled the city by the Corporation, classed by the law
+with rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and patronized by the great
+and unscrupulous nobles in defiance of it--there burst forth suddenly a
+new poetry, which with its reality, depth, sweetness and nobleness took
+the world captive. The poetical ideas and aspirations of the Englishmen
+of the time had found at last adequate interpreters, and their own
+national and unrivalled expression.
+
+And in this great movement Spenser was the harbinger and announcing
+sign. But he was only the harbinger. What he did was to reveal to
+English ears as it never had been revealed before, at least, since the
+days of Chaucer, the sweet music, the refined grace, the inexhaustible
+versatility of the English tongue. But his own efforts were in a
+different direction from that profound and insatiable seeking after the
+real, in thought and character, in representation and expression, which
+made Shakespere so great, and his brethren great in proportion as they
+approached him. Spenser's genius continued to the end under the
+influences which were so powerful when it first unfolded itself. To the
+last it allied itself, in form, at least, with the artificial. To the
+last it moved in a world which was not real, which never had existed,
+which, any how, was only a world of memory and sentiment. He never threw
+himself frankly on human life as it is; he always viewed it through a
+veil of mist which greatly altered its true colours, and often distorted
+its proportions. And thus while more than any one he prepared the
+instruments and the path for the great triumph, he himself missed the
+true field for the highest exercise of poetic power; he missed the
+highest honours of that in which he led the way.
+
+Yet, curiously enough, it seems as if, early in his career, he was
+affected by the strong stream which drew Shakespere. Among the
+compositions of his first period, besides _The Shepherd's Calendar_, are
+_Nine Comedies_,--clearly real plays, which his friend Gabriel Harvey
+praised with enthusiasm. As early as 1579 Spenser had laid before
+Gabriel Harvey for his judgement and advice, a portion of the _Fairy
+Queen_ in some shape or another, and these nine comedies. He was
+standing at the parting of the ways. The allegory, with all its tempting
+associations and machinery, with its ingenuities and pictures, and
+boundless license to vagueness and to fancy, was on one side; and on the
+other, the drama, with its _prima facie_ and superficially prosaic
+aspects, and its kinship to what was customary and commonplace and
+unromantic in human life. Of the nine comedies, composed on the model of
+those of Ariosto and Machiavelli and other Italians, every trace has
+perished. But this was Gabriel Harvey's opinion of the respective value
+of the two specimens of work submitted to him, and this was his counsel
+to their author. In April, 1580, he thus writes to Spenser.
+
+     In good faith I had once again nigh forgotten your _Faerie
+     Queene_; howbeit, by good chance, I have now sent her home at
+     the last neither in better or worse case than I found her. And
+     must you of necessity have my judgement of her indeed? To be
+     plain, I am void of all judgement, if your _Nine Comedies_,
+     whereunto in imitation of Herodotus, you give the names of the
+     Nine Muses (and in one man's fancy not unworthily), come not
+     nearer Ariosto's comedies, either for the fineness of
+     plausible elocution, or the rareness of poetical invention,
+     than that _Elvish Queen_ doth to his _Orlando Furioso_, which
+     notwithstanding you will needs seem to emulate, and hope to
+     overgo, as you flatly professed yourself in one of your last
+     letters.
+
+     Besides that you know, it hath been the usual practice of the
+     most exquisite and odd wits in all nations, and specially in
+     Italy rather to show, and advance themselves that way than any
+     other: as, namely, those three notorious discoursing heads,
+     Bibiena, Machiavel, and Aretino did (to let Bembo and Ariosto
+     pass) with the great admiration and wonderment of the whole
+     country: being indeed reputed matchable in all points, both
+     for conceit of wit and eloquent deciphering of matters, either
+     with Aristophanes and Menander in Greek, or with Plautus and
+     Terence in Latin, or with any other in any other tongue. But I
+     will not stand greatly with you in your own matters. If so be
+     the _Faery Queene_ be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses,
+     and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo: mark what
+     I say, and yet I will not say that I thought, but there is an
+     end for this once, and fare you well, till God or some good
+     angel put you in a better mind.
+
+It is plain on which side Spenser's own judgement inclined. He had
+probably written the comedies, as he had written English hexameters, out
+of deference to others, or to try his hand. But the current of his own
+secret thoughts, those thoughts, with their ideals and aims, which tell
+a man what he is made for, and where his power lies, set another way.
+The _Fairy Queen was_ 'fairer in his eye than the Nine Muses, and
+Hobgoblin did run away with the garland from Apollo.' What Gabriel
+Harvey prayed for as the 'better mind' did not come. And we cannot
+repine at a decision which gave us, in the shape which it took at last,
+the allegory of the _Fairy Queen_.
+
+But the _Fairy Queen_, though already planned and perhaps begun, belongs
+to the last ten years of the century, to the season of fulfilment not of
+promise, to the blossoming, not to the opening bud. The new hopes for
+poetry which Spenser brought were given in a work, which the _Fairy
+Queen_ has eclipsed and almost obscured, as the sun puts out the morning
+star. Yet that which marked a turning-point in the history of our
+poetry, was the book which came out, timidly and anonymously, in the end
+of 1579, or the beginning of 1580, under the borrowed title of the
+_Shepherd's Calendar_, a name familiar in those days as that of an early
+medley of astrology and homely receipts from time to time reprinted,
+which was the Moore's or Zadkiel's almanac of the time. It was not
+published ostensibly by Spenser himself, though it is inscribed to
+Philip Sidney in a copy of verses signed with Spenser's masking name of
+_Immerito_. The avowed responsibility for it might have been
+inconvenient for a young man pushing his fortune among the cross
+currents of Elizabeth's court. But it was given to the world by a friend
+of the author's, signing himself E. K., now identified with Spenser's
+fellow-student at Pembroke, Edward Kirke, who dedicates it in a long,
+critical epistle of some interest to the author's friend, Gabriel
+Harvey, and after the fashion of some of the Italian books of poetry,
+accompanies it with a gloss, explaining words, and to a certain extent,
+allusions. Two things are remarkable in Kirke's epistle. One is the
+confidence with which he announces the yet unrecognized excellence of
+"this one new poet," whom he is not afraid to put side by side with
+"that good old poet," Chaucer, the "loadstar of our language." The other
+point is the absolute reliance which he places on the powers of the
+English language, handled by one who has discerned its genius, and is
+not afraid to use its wealth. "In my opinion, it is one praise of many,
+that are due to this poet, that he hath laboured to restore, as to their
+rightful heritage, such good and natural English words, as have been
+long time out of use, or almost clean disherited, which is the only
+cause, that our mother tongue, which truly of itself is both full enough
+for prose, and stately enough for verse, hath long time been counted
+most bare and barren of both." The friends, Kirke and Harvey, were not
+wrong in their estimate of the importance of Spenser's work. The "new
+poet," as he came to be customarily called, had really made one of those
+distinct steps in his art, which answer to discoveries and inventions in
+other spheres of human interest--steps which make all behind them seem
+obsolete and mistaken. There was much in the new poetry which was
+immature and imperfect, not a little that was fantastic and affected.
+But it was the first adequate effort of reviving English poetry.
+
+The _Shepherd's Calendar_ consists of twelve compositions, with no other
+internal connexion than that they are assigned respectively to the
+twelve months of the year. They are all different in subject, metre,
+character, and excellence. They are called _Æglogues_, according to the
+whimsical derivation adopted from the Italians of the word which the
+classical writers called Eclogues: "_Æglogai_, as it were αἰγῶν or
+αἰγονόμων λόγοι, that is, Goatherd's Tales." The book is in its form
+an imitation of that highly artificial kind of poetry which the later
+Italians of the Renaissance had copied from Virgil, as Virgil had copied
+it from the Sicilian and Alexandrian Greeks, and to which had been given
+the name of Bucolic or Pastoral. Petrarch, in imitation of Virgil, had
+written Latin Bucolics, as he had written a Latin Epic, his _Africa_. He
+was followed in the next century by Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516), the
+"old Mantuan," of Holofernes in _Love's Labour's Lost_, whose Latin
+"Eglogues" became a favourite school-book in England, and who was
+imitated by a writer who passed for a poet in the time of Henry VIII.,
+Alexander Barclay. In the hands of the Sicilians, pastoral poetry may
+have been an attempt at idealizing country life almost as genuine as
+some of Wordsworth's poems; but it soon ceased to be that, and in
+Alexandrian hands it took its place among the recognized departments of
+classic and literary copying, in which Virgil found and used it. But a
+further step had been made since Virgil had adopted it as an instrument
+of his genius. In the hands of Mantuan and Barclay it was a vehicle for
+general moralizing, and in particular for severe satire on women and the
+clergy. And Virgil, though he may himself speak under the the names of
+Tityrus and Menalcas, and lament Julius Cæsar as Daphnis, did not
+conceive of the Roman world as peopled by flocks and sheep-cotes, or its
+emperors and chiefs, its poets, senators, and ladies, as shepherds and
+shepherdesses, of higher or lower degree. But in Spenser's time, partly
+through undue deference to what was supposed to be Italian taste, partly
+owing to the tardiness of national culture, and because the poetic
+impulses had not yet gained power to force their way through the
+embarrassment and awkwardness which accompany reviving art,--the world
+was turned for the purposes of the poetry of civil life, into a pastoral
+scene. Poetical invention was held to consist in imagining an
+environment, a set of outward circumstances, as unlike as possible to
+the familiar realities of actual life and employment, in which the
+primary affections and passions had their play. A fantastic basis,
+varying according to the conventions of the fashion, was held essential
+for the representation of the ideal. Masquerade and hyperbole were the
+stage and scenery on which the poet's sweetness, or tenderness, or
+strength was to be put forth. The masquerade, when his subject belonged
+to peace, was one of shepherds: when it was one of war and adventure, it
+was a masquerade of knight errantry. But a masquerade was necessary, if
+he was to raise his composition above the vulgarities and trivialities
+of the street, the fire-side, the camp, or even the court; if he was to
+give it the dignity, the ornament, the unexpected results, the
+brightness, and colour, which belong to poetry. The fashion had the
+sanction of the brilliant author of the _Arcadia_, the "Courtier,
+Soldier, Scholar," who was the "mould of form," and whose judgment was
+law to all men of letters in the middle years of Elizabeth, the
+all-accomplished Philip Sidney. Spenser submitted to this fashion from
+first to last. When first he ventured on a considerable poetical
+enterprise, he spoke his thoughts, not in his own name, nor as his
+contemporaries ten years later did, through the mouth of characters in a
+tragic or comic drama, but through imaginary rustics, to whom every one
+else in the world was a rustic, and lived among the sheep-folds, with a
+background of downs or vales or fields, and the open sky above. His
+shepherds and goatherds bear the homely names of native English clowns,
+Diggon Davie, Willye, and Piers; Colin Clout, adopted from Skelton,
+stands for Spenser himself; Hobbinol, for Gabriel Harvey; Cuddie,
+perhaps for Edward Kirke; names revived by Ambrose Phillips, and laughed
+at by Pope, when pastorals again came into vogue with the wits of Queen
+Anne.[42:1] With them are mingled classical ones like Menalcas, French
+ones from Marot, anagrams like Algrind for Grindal, significant ones
+like Palinode, plain ones like Lettice, and romantic ones like Rosalind;
+and no incongruity seems to be found in matching a beautiful shepherdess
+named Dido with a Great Shepherd called Lobbin, or when the verse
+requires it, Lobb. And not merely the speakers in the dialogue are
+shepherds; every one is in their view a shepherd. Chaucer is the "god of
+shepherds," and Orpheus is a--
+
+              "Shepherd that did fetch his dame
+     From Plutoe's baleful bower withouten leave."
+
+The "fair Elisa," is the Queen of shepherds all; her great father is
+Pan, the shepherds' god, and Anne Boleyn is Syrinx. It is not unnatural
+that when the clergy are spoken of, as they are in three of the poems,
+the figure should be kept up. But it is curious to find that the
+shepherd's god, the great Pan, who stands in one connexion for Henry
+VIII., should in another represent in sober earnest the Redeemer and
+Judge of the world.[42:2]
+
+The poems framed in this grotesque setting, are on many themes, and of
+various merit, and probably of different dates. Some are simply amatory
+effusions of an ordinary character, full of a lover's despair and
+complaint. Three or four are translations or imitations; translations
+from Marot, imitations from Theocritus, Bion, or Virgil. Two of them
+contain fables told with great force and humour. The story of the Oak
+and the Briar, related as his friendly commentator, Kirke, says, "so
+lively and so feelingly, as if the thing were set forth in some picture
+before our eyes," for the warning of "disdainful younkers," is a first
+fruit, and promise of Spenser's skill in vivid narrative. The fable of
+the Fox and the Kid, a curious illustration of the popular discontent at
+the negligence of the clergy, and the popular suspicions about the arts
+of Roman intriguers, is told with great spirit, and with mingled humour
+and pathos. There is of course a poem in honour of the great queen, who
+was the goddess of their idolatry to all the wits and all the learned of
+England, the "faire Eliza," and a compliment is paid to Leicester,
+
+                 The worthy whom she loveth best,--
+     That first the White Bear to the stake did bring.
+
+Two of them are avowedly burlesque imitations of rustic dialect and
+banter, carried on with much spirit. One composition is a funeral
+tribute to some unknown lady; another is a complaint of the neglect of
+poets by the great. In three of the Æglogues he comes on a more serious
+theme; they are vigorous satires on the loose living and greediness of
+clergy forgetful of their charge, with strong invectives against foreign
+corruption and against the wiles of the wolves and foxes of Rome, with
+frequent allusions to passing incidents in the guerilla war with the
+seminary priests, and with a warm eulogy on the faithfulness and wisdom
+of Archbishop Grindal; whose name is disguised as old Algrind, and with
+whom in his disgrace the poet is not afraid to confess deep sympathy.
+They are, in a poetical form, part of that manifold and varied system of
+Puritan aggression on the established ecclesiastical order of England,
+which went through the whole scale from the "Admonition to Parliament,"
+and the lectures of Cartwright and Travers, to the libels of Martin
+Mar-prelate: a system of attack which with all its injustice and
+violence, and with all its mischievous purposes, found but too much
+justification in the inefficiency and corruption of many both of the
+bishops and clergy, and in the rapacious and selfish policy of the
+government, forced to starve and cripple the public service, while great
+men and favourites built up their fortunes out of the prodigal
+indulgence of the Queen.
+
+The collection of poems is thus a very miscellaneous one, and cannot be
+said to be in its subjects inviting. The poet's system of composition,
+also, has the disadvantage of being to a great degree unreal, forced and
+unnatural. Departing from the precedent of Virgil and the Italians, but
+perhaps copying the artificial Doric of the Alexandrians, he professes
+to make his language and style suitable to the "ragged and rustical"
+rudeness of the shepherds whom he brings on the scene, by making it both
+archaic and provincial. He found in Chaucer a store of forms and words
+sufficiently well known to be with a little help intelligible, and
+sufficiently out of common use to give the character of antiquity to a
+poetry which employed them. And from his sojourn in the North he is said
+to have imported a certain number of local peculiarities which would
+seem unfamiliar and harsh in the South. His editor's apology for this
+use of "ancient solemn words," as both proper and as ornamental, is
+worth quoting; it is an early instance of what is supposed to be not yet
+common, a sense of pleasure in that wildness which we call picturesque.
+
+     And first for the words to speak: I grant they be something
+     hard, and of most men unused: yet English, and also used of
+     most excellent Authors and most famous Poets. In whom, when as
+     this our Poet hath been much travelled and throughly read, how
+     could it be, (as that worthy Orator said,) but that 'walking
+     in the sun, although for other cause he walked, yet needs he
+     mought be sun-burnt'; and having the sound of those ancient
+     poets still ringing in his ears, he mought needs, in singing,
+     hit out some of their tunes. But whether he useth them by such
+     casualty and custom, or of set purpose and choice, as thinking
+     them fittest for such rustical rudeness of shepherds, either
+     for that their rough sound would make his rymes more ragged
+     and rustical, or else because such old and obsolete words are
+     most used of country folks, sure I think, and I think not
+     amiss, that they bring great grace, and, as one would say,
+     authority, to the verse. . . . . Yet neither everywhere must
+     old words be stuffed in, nor the common Dialect and manner of
+     speaking so corrupted thereby, that, as in old buildings, it
+     seem disorderly and ruinous. But as in most exquisite pictures
+     they use to blaze and portrait not only the dainty lineaments
+     of beauty, but also round about it to shadow the rude thickets
+     and craggy cliffs, that by the baseness of such parts, more
+     excellency may accrue to the principal--for ofttimes, we find
+     ourselves I know not how, singularly delighted with the show
+     of such natural rudeness, and take great pleasure in that
+     disorderly order:--even so do these rough and harsh terms
+     enlumine, and make more clearly to appear, the brightness of
+     brave and glorious words. So oftentimes a discord in music
+     maketh a comely concordance.
+
+But when allowance is made for an eclectic and sometimes pedantic
+phraseology, and for mannerisms to which the fashion of the age tempted
+him, such as the extravagant use of alliteration, or, as they called it,
+"hunting the letter," the _Shepherd's Calendar_ is, for its time, of
+great interest.
+
+Spenser's force, and sustained poetical power, and singularly musical
+ear are conspicuous in this first essay of his genius. In the poets
+before him of this century, fragments and stanzas, and perhaps single
+pieces might be found, which might be compared with his work. Fugitive
+pieces, chiefly amatory, meet us of real sprightliness, or grace, or
+tenderness. The stanzas which Sackville, afterwards, Lord Buckhurst,
+contributed to the collection called the _Mirror of Magistrates_,[46:3]
+are marked with a pathetic majesty, a genuine sympathy for the
+precariousness of greatness, which seem a prelude to the Elizabethan
+drama. But these fragments were mostly felicitous efforts, which soon
+passed on into the ungainly, the uncouth, the obscure or the grotesque.
+But in the _Shepherd's Calendar_ we have for the first time in the
+century, the swing, the command, the varied resources of the real poet,
+who is not driven by failing language or thought into frigid or tumid
+absurdities. Spenser is master over himself and his instrument even when
+he uses it in a way which offends our taste. There are passages in the
+_Shepherd's Calendar_ of poetical eloquence, of refined vigour, and of
+musical and imaginative sweetness, such as the English language had
+never attained to, since the days of him, who was to the age of Spenser,
+what Shakespere and Milton are to ours, the pattern and fount of poetry,
+Chaucer. Dryden is not afraid to class Spenser with Theocritus and
+Virgil, and to write that the _Shepherd's Calendar_ is not to be matched
+in any language.[46:4] And this was at once recognized. The authorship
+of it, as has been said, was not formally acknowledged. Indeed, Mr.
+Collier remarks that seven years after its publication, and after it had
+gone through three or four separate editions, it was praised by a
+contemporary poet, George Whetstone, himself a friend of Spenser's, as
+the "reputed work of Sir Philip Sidney." But if it was officially a
+secret, it was an open secret, known to every one who cared to be well
+informed. It is possible that the free language used in it about
+ecclesiastical abuses was too much in sympathy with the growing
+fierceness and insolence of Puritan invective to be safely used by a
+poet who gave his name: and one of the reasons assigned for Burghley's
+dislike to Spenser is the praise bestowed in the _Shepherd's Calendar_
+on Archbishop Grindal, then in deep disgrace for resisting the
+suppression of the puritan prophesyings. But anonymous as it was, it had
+been placed under Sidney's protection; and it was at once warmly
+welcomed. It is not often that in those remote days we get evidence of
+the immediate effect of a book; but we have this evidence in Spenser's
+case. In this year, probably, after it was published, we find it spoken
+of by Philip Sidney, not without discriminating criticism, but as one of
+the few recent examples of poetry worthy to be named after Chaucer.
+
+     I account the _Mirror of Magistrates_ meetly furnished of
+     beautiful parts; and in the Earl of Surrey's _Lyrics_ many
+     things tasting of birth, and worthy of a noble mind. The
+     _Shepherd's Calendar_ hath much poetry in his Eglogues: indeed
+     worthy the reading if I be not deceived. That same framing of
+     his style in an old rustic language I dare not allow, sith
+     neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sanazar in
+     Italian, did affect it. Besides these do I not remember to
+     have seen but few (to speak boldly) printed that have poetical
+     sinews in them.
+
+Sidney's patronage of the writer and general approval of the work
+doubtless had something to do with making Spenser's name known: but he
+at once takes a place in contemporary judgment which no one else takes,
+till the next decade of the century. In 1586, Webbe published his
+_Discourse of English Poetrie_. In this, the author of the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ is spoken of by the name given him by its Editor, E. K----, as
+the "new poet," just as earlier in the century, the _Orlando Furioso_
+was styled the "nuova poesia;" and his work is copiously used to supply
+examples and illustrations of the critic's rules and observations.
+Webbe's review of existing poetry was the most comprehensive yet
+attempted: but the place which he gives to the new poet, whose name was
+in men's mouths, though like the author of _In Memoriam_, he had not
+placed it on his title-page, was one quite apart.
+
+     This place [to wear the Laurel] have I purposely reserved for
+     one, who, if not only, yet in my judgement principally,
+     deserveth the title of the rightest English poet that ever I
+     read: that is, the author of the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+     intituled to the worthy Gentleman Master Philip Sidney,
+     whether it was Master Sp. or what rare scholar in Pembroke
+     Hall soever, because himself and his friends, for what respect
+     I know not, would not reveal it, I force not greatly to set
+     down. Sorry I am that I cannot find none other with whom I
+     might couple him in this catalogue in his rare gift of poetry:
+     although one there is, though now long since seriously
+     occupied in graver studies, Master Gabriel Harvey, yet as he
+     was once his most special friend and fellow poet, so because
+     he hath taken such pains not only in his Latin poetry . . .
+     but also to reform our English verse . . . therefore will I
+     adventure to set them together as two of the rarest wits and
+     learnedest masters of poetry in England.
+
+He even ventured to compare him favourably with Virgil.
+
+     But now yet at the last hath England hatched up one poet of
+     this sort, in my conscience comparable with the best in any
+     respect: even Master Sp., author of the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+     whose travail in that piece of English poetry I think verily
+     is so commendable, as none of equal judgement can yield him
+     less praise for his excellent skill and skilful excellency
+     showed forth in the same than they would to either Theocritus
+     or Virgil, whom in mine opinion, if the coarseness of our
+     speech, (I mean the course of custom which he would not
+     infringe,) had been no more let unto him than their pure
+     native tongues were unto them, he would have, if it might be,
+     surpassed them.
+
+The courtly author of the _Arte of English Poesie_, 1589, commonly cited
+as G. Puttenham, classes him with Sidney. And from this time his name
+occurs in every enumeration of English poetical writers, till he
+appears, more than justifying this early appreciation of his genius, as
+Chaucer's not unworthy successor, in the _Faery Queen_. Afterwards, as
+other successful poetry was written, and the standards of taste were
+multiplied, this first enthusiastic reception cooled down. In James the
+First's time, Spenser's use of "old outworn words" is criticized as
+being no more "practical English" than Chaucer or Skelton: it is not
+"courtly" enough.[49:5] The success of the _Shepherd's Calendar_ had
+also, apparently, substantial results, which some of his friends thought
+of with envy. They believed that it secured him high patronage, and
+opened to him a way to fortune. Poor Gabriel Harvey, writing in the year
+in which the _Shepherd's Calendar_ came out, contrasts his own less
+favoured lot, and his ill-repaid poetical efforts, with Colin Clout's
+good luck.
+
+     But ever and ever, methinks, your great Catoes, _Ecquid erit
+     pretii_, and our little Catoes, _Res age quæ prosunt_, make
+     such a buzzing and ringing in my head, that I have little joy
+     to animate and encourage either you or him to go forward,
+     unless ye might make account of some certain ordinary wages,
+     or at the least wise have your meat and drink for your day's
+     works. As for myself, howsoever I have toyed and trifled
+     heretofore, I am now taught, and I trust I shall shortly
+     learn, (no remedy, I must of mere necessity give you over in
+     the plain field) to employ my travail and time wholly or
+     chiefly on those studies and practices that carry, as they
+     say, meat in their mouth, having evermore their eye upon the
+     Title, _De pane lucrando_, and their hand upon their
+     halfpenny. For I pray now what saith Mr. Cuddie, alias you
+     know who, in the tenth Æglogue of the aforesaid famous new
+     Calendar.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+          The dapper ditties, that I wont devise
+            To feed youths' fancy and the flocking fry,
+          Delighten much: what I the best for thy?
+            They han the pleasure, I a sclender prize.
+          I beat the bush, the birds to them do fly.
+            What good thereof to Cuddie can arise?
+
+     But Master Colin Clout is not everybody, and albeit his old
+     companions, Master Cuddie and Master Hobinoll, be as little
+     beholding to their mistress poetry as ever you wist: yet he,
+     peradventure, by the means of her special favour, and some
+     personal privilege, may haply live by _Dying Pelicans_, and
+     purchase great lands and lordships with the money which his
+     _Calendar_ and _Dreams_ have, and will afford him.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[42:1] In the _Guardian_, No. 40. Compare Johnson's _Life of Ambrose
+Phillips_.
+
+[42:2] _Shepherd's Calendar_, May, July, and September.
+
+[46:3] First published in 1559. It was popular book, and was often
+re-edited.
+
+[46:4] Dedication to Virgil.
+
+[49:5] Bolton in Haslewood, ii. 249.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SPENSER IN IRELAND.
+
+[1580.]
+
+
+In the first week of October, 1579, Spenser was at Leicester House,
+expecting "next week" to be despatched on Leicester's service to France.
+Whether he was sent or not, we do not know. Gabriel Harvey, writing at
+the end of the month, wagers that "for all his saying, he will not be
+gone over sea, neither this week nor the next." In one of the Æglogues
+(September) there are some lines which suggest, but do not necessarily
+imply, the experience of an eye-witness of the state of religion in a
+Roman Catholic country. But we can have nothing but conjecture whether
+at this time or any other Spenser was on the Continent. The _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ was entered at Stationers' Hall, December 5, 1579. In April,
+1580, as we know from one of his letters to Harvey, he was at
+Westminster. He speaks of the _Shepherd's Calendar_ as published; he is
+contemplating the publication of other pieces, and then "he will in hand
+forthwith with his _Fairie Queene_," of which he had sent Harvey a
+specimen. He speaks especially of his _Dreams_ as a considerable work.
+
+     I take best my _Dreams_ should come forth alone, being grown
+     by means of the Gloss (running continually in manner of a
+     Paraphrase) full as great as my _Calendar_. Therein be some
+     things excellently, and many things wittily discoursed of E.
+     K., and the pictures so singularly set forth and portrayed, as
+     if Michael Angelo were there, he could (I think) nor amend the
+     best, nor reprehend the worst. I know you would like them
+     passing well.
+
+It is remarkable that of a book so spoken of, as of the _Nine Comedies_,
+not a trace, as far as appears, is to be found. He goes on to speak with
+much satisfaction of another composition, which was probably
+incorporated, like the _Epithalamion Thamesis_, in his later work.
+
+     Of my _Stemmata Dudleiana_, and specially of the sundry
+     Apostrophes therein, addressed you know to whom, much more
+     advisement he had, than so lightly to send them abroad: now
+     list, trust me (though I do never very well) yet, in mine own
+     fancy, I never did better. _Veruntamen te sequor solum:
+     nunquam vero assequar._
+
+He is plainly not dissatisfied with his success, and is looking forward
+to more. But no one in those days could live by poetry. Even scholars,
+in spite of university endowments, did not hope to live by their
+scholarship; and the poet or man of letters only trusted that his work,
+by attracting the favour of the great, might open to him the door of
+advancement. Spenser was probably expecting to push his fortunes in some
+public employment under the patronage of two such powerful favourites as
+Sidney and his uncle Leicester. Spenser's heart was set on poetry: but
+what leisure he might have for it would depend on the course his life
+might take. To have hung on Sidney's protection, or gone with him as his
+secretary to the wars, to have been employed at home or abroad in
+Leicester's intrigues, to have stayed in London filling by Leicester's
+favour some government office, to have had his habits moulded and his
+thoughts affected by the brilliant and unscrupulous society of the
+court, or by the powerful and daring minds which were fast thronging the
+political and literary scene--any of these contingencies might have
+given his poetical faculty a different direction; nay, might have even
+abridged its exercise or suppressed it. But his life was otherwise
+ordered. A new opening presented itself. He had, and he accepted, the
+chance of making his fortune another way. And to his new manner of life,
+with its peculiar conditions, may be ascribed, not indeed the original
+idea of that which was to be his great work, but the circumstances under
+which the work was carried out, and which not merely coloured it, but
+gave it some of its special and characteristic features.
+
+That which turned the course of his career, and exercised a decisive
+influence, certainly on its events and fate, probably also on the turn
+of his thoughts and the shape and moulding of his work, was his
+migration to Ireland, and his settlement there for the greater part of
+the remaining eighteen years of his life. We know little more than the
+main facts of this change from the court and the growing intellectual
+activity of England, to the fierce and narrow interests of a cruel and
+unsuccessful struggle for colonization, in a country which was to
+England much what Algeria was to France some thirty years ago. Ireland,
+always unquiet, had became a serious danger to Elizabeth's Government.
+It was its "bleeding ulcer." Lord Essex's great colonizing scheme, with
+his unscrupulous severity, had failed. Sir Henry Sidney, wise, firm, and
+wishing to be just, had tried his hand as Deputy for the third time in
+the thankless charge of keeping order; he, too, after a short gleam of
+peace, had failed also. For two years Ireland had been left to the local
+administration, totally unable to heal its wounds, or cope with its
+disorders. And now, the kingdom threatened to become a vantage-ground to
+the foreign enemy. In November, 1579, the Government turned their eyes
+on Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, a man of high character, and a soldier
+of distinction. He, or they, seem to have hesitated; or rather, the
+hesitation was on both sides. He was not satisfied with many things in
+the policy of the Queen in England: his discontent had led him, strong
+Protestant as he was, to coquet with Norfolk and the partisans of Mary
+Queen of Scots, when England was threatened with a French marriage ten
+years before. His name stands among the forty nobles on whom Mary's
+friends counted.[54:1] And on the other hand, Elizabeth did not like him
+or trust him. For some time she refused to employ him. At length, in the
+summer of 1580, he was appointed to fill that great place which had
+wrecked the reputation and broken the hearts of a succession of able and
+high-spirited servants of the English Crown, the place of Lord-Deputy in
+Ireland. He was a man who was interested in the literary enterprise of
+the time. In the midst of his public employment in Holland, he had been
+the friend and patron of George Gascoigne, who left a high reputation,
+for those days, as poet, wit, satirist, and critic. Lord Grey now took
+Spenser, the "new poet," the friend of Philip Sidney, to Ireland as his
+Secretary.
+
+Spenser was not the only scholar and poet who about this time found
+public employment in Ireland. Names which appear in literary records,
+such as Warton's _History of English Poetry_, poets like Barnaby Googe
+and Ludovic Bryskett, reappear as despatch-writers or agents in the
+Irish State Papers. But one man came over to Ireland about the same time
+as Spenser, whose fortunes were a contrast to his. Geoffrey Fenton was
+one of the numerous translators of the time. He had dedicated Tragical
+Tales from the French and Italian to Lady Mary Sidney, Guevara's
+Epistles from the Spanish to Lady Oxford, and a translation of
+Guicciardini to the Queen. About this time, he was recommended by his
+brother to Walsingham for foreign service; he was soon after in Ireland:
+and in the summer of 1580, he was made Secretary to the Government. He
+shortly became one of the most important persons in the Irish
+administration. He corresponded confidentially and continually with
+Burghley and Walsingham. He had his eye on the proceedings of Deputies
+and Presidents, and reported freely their misdoings or their
+unpopularity. His letters form a considerable part of the Irish Papers.
+He became a powerful and successful public servant. He became Sir
+Geoffrey Fenton; he kept his high place for his life; he obtained grants
+and lands; and he was commemorated as a great personage, in a pompous
+monument in St. Patrick's Cathedral. This kind of success was not to be
+Spenser's.
+
+Lord Grey of Wilton was a man in whom his friends saw a high and heroic
+spirit. He was a statesman in whose motives and actions his religion had
+a dominant influence: and his religion--he is called by the vague name
+of Puritan--was one which combined a strong and doubtless genuine zeal
+for the truth of Christian doctrine and for purity of morals, with the
+deepest and deadliest hatred of what he held to be their natural enemy,
+the Anti-Christ of Rome. The "good Lord Grey," he was, if we believe
+his secretary, writing many years after this time, and when he was dead,
+"most gentle, affable, loving, and temperate; always known to be a most
+just, sincere, godly, and right noble man, far from sternness, far from
+unrighteousness." But the infelicity of his times bore hardly upon him,
+and Spenser admits, what is known otherwise, that he left a terrible
+name behind him. He was certainly a man of severe and unshrinking sense
+of duty, and like many great Englishmen of the time, so resolute in
+carrying it out to the end, that it reached, when he thought it
+necessary, to the point of ferocity. Naturally, he had enemies, who did
+not spare his fame; and Spenser, who came to admire and reverence him,
+had to lament deeply that "that good lord was blotted with the name of a
+bloody man," one who "regarded not the life of the queen's subjects no
+more than dogs, and had wasted and consumed all, so as now she had
+nothing almost left, but to reign in their ashes."
+
+Lord Grey was sent over at a moment of the utmost confusion and danger.
+In July, 1579, Drury wrote to Burghley to stand firmly to the helm, for
+"that a great storm was at hand." The South of Ireland was in fierce
+rebellion, under the Earl of Desmond and Dr. Nicolas Sanders, who was
+acting under the commission of the Pope, and promising the assistance of
+the King of Spain; and a band of Spanish and Italian adventurers,
+unauthorized, but not uncountenanced by their Government, like Drake in
+the Indies, had landed with arms and stores, and had fortified a port at
+Smerwick, on the south-western coast of Kerry. The North was deep in
+treason, restless, and threatening to strike. Round Dublin itself, the
+great Irish Lords of the Pale, under Lord Baltinglass, in the summer of
+1580, had broken into open insurrection, and were holding out a hand to
+the rebels of the South. The English garrisons, indeed, small as they
+were, could not only hold their own against the ill-armed and
+undisciplined Irish bands, but could inflict terrible chastisement on
+the insurgents. The native feuds were turned to account; Butlers were
+set to destroy their natural enemies the Geraldines, and the Earl of
+Ormond their head, was appointed General in Munster, to execute English
+vengeance and his own on the lands and people of his rival Desmond. But
+the English chiefs were not strong enough to put down the revolt. "The
+conspiracy throughout Ireland," wrote Lord Grey, "is so general, that
+without a main force it will not be appeased. There are cold service and
+unsound dealing generally." On the 12th of August, 1580, Lord Grey
+landed, amid a universal wreck of order, of law, of mercy, of industry;
+and among his counsellors and subordinates, the only remedy thought of
+was that of remorseless and increasing severity.
+
+It can hardly be doubted that Spenser must have come over with him. It
+is likely that where he went, his Secretary would accompany him. And if
+so, Spenser must soon have become acquainted with some of the scenes and
+necessities of Irish life. Within three weeks after Lord Grey's landing,
+he and those with him were present at the disaster of Glenmalure, a
+rocky defile near Wicklow, where the rebels enticed the English captains
+into a position in which an ambuscade had been prepared, after the
+manner of Red Indians in the last century, and of South African savages
+now, and where, in spite of Lord Grey's courage, "which could not have
+been bettered by Hercules," a bloody defeat was inflicted on his troops,
+and a number of distinguished officers were cut off. But Spenser was
+soon to see a still more terrible example of this ruthless warfare. It
+was necessary, above all things to destroy the Spanish fort at Smerwick,
+in order to prevent the rebellion being fed from abroad: and in
+November, 1580, Lord Grey in person undertook the work. The incidents of
+this tragedy have been fully recorded, and they formed at the time a
+heavy charge against Lord Grey's humanity, and even his honour. In this
+instance Spenser must almost certainly have been on the spot. Years
+afterwards, in his _View of the State of Ireland_, he describes and
+vindicates Lord Grey's proceedings; and he does so, "being," as he
+writes, "as near them as any." And we have Lord Grey's own despatch to
+Queen Elizabeth, containing a full report of the tragical business. We
+have no means of knowing how Lord Grey employed Spenser, or whether he
+composed his own despatches. But from Spenser's position, the Secretary,
+if he had not some hand in the following vivid and forcible account of
+the taking of Smerwick,[58:2] must probably have been cognizant of it;
+though there are some slight differences in the despatch, and in the
+account which Spenser himself wrote afterwards in his pamphlet on Irish
+Affairs.
+
+After describing the proposal of the garrison for a parley, Lord Grey
+proceeds,--
+
+     There was presently sent unto me one Alexandro, their camp
+     master; he told me that certain Spaniards and Italians were
+     there arrived upon fair speeches and great promises, which
+     altogether vain and false they found; and that it was no part
+     of their intent to molest or take any government from your
+     Majesty; for proof, that they were ready to depart as they
+     came and deliver into my hands the fort. Mine answer was, that
+     for that I perceived their people to stand of two nations,
+     Italian and Spanish, I would give no answer unless a Spaniard
+     was likewise by. He presently went and returned with a Spanish
+     captain. I then told the Spaniard that I knew their nation to
+     have an absolute prince, one that was in good league and amity
+     with your Majesty, which made me to marvell that any of his
+     people should be found associate with them that went about to
+     maintain rebels against you. . . And taking it that it could
+     not be his king's will, I was to know by whom and for what
+     cause they were sent. His reply was that the king had not sent
+     them, but that one John Martinez de Ricaldi, Governor for the
+     king at Bilboa, had willed him to levy a band and repair with
+     it to St. Andrews (Santander), and there to be directed by
+     this their colonel here, whom he followed as a blind man, not
+     knowing whither. The other avouched that they were all sent by
+     the Pope for the defence of the _Catholica fede_. My answer
+     was, that I would not greatly have marvelled if men being
+     commanded by natural and absolute princes did sometimes take
+     in hand wrong actions; but that men, and that of account as
+     some of them made show of, should be carried into unjust,
+     desperate, and wicked actions, by one that neither from God or
+     man could claim any princely power or empire, but (was) indeed
+     a detestable shaveling, the right Antichrist and general
+     ambitious tyrant over all right principalities, and patron of
+     the _Diabolica fede_--this I could not but greatly rest in
+     wonder. Their fault therefore far to be aggravated by the
+     vileness of their commander; and that at my hands no condition
+     or composition they were to expect, other than they should
+     render me the fort, and yield their selves to my will for life
+     or death. With this answer he departed; after which there was
+     one or two courses to and fro more, to have gotten a certainty
+     for some of their lives: but finding that it would not be, the
+     colonel himself about sunsetting came forth and requested
+     respite with surcease of arms till the next morning, and then
+     he would give a resolute answer.
+
+     Finding that to be but a gain of time to them, and a loss of
+     the same for myself, I definitely answered I would not grant
+     it, and therefore presently either that he took my offer or
+     else return and I would fall to my business. He then embraced
+     my knees simply putting himself to my mercy, only he prayed
+     that for that night he might abide in the fort, and that in
+     the morning all should be put into my hands. I asked hostages
+     for the performance; they were given. Morning came; I
+     presented my companies in battle before the fort, the colonel
+     comes forth with ten or twelve of his chief gentlemen,
+     trailing their ensigns rolled up, and presented them unto me
+     with their lives and the fort. I sent straight certain
+     gentlemen in, to see their weapons and armour laid down, and
+     to guard the munition and victual there left for spoil. Then
+     put I in certain bands, who straight fell to execution. There
+     were six hundred slain. Munition and victual great store:
+     though much wasted through the disorder of the soldier, which
+     in that fury could not be helped. Those that I gave life unto,
+     I have bestowed upon the captains and gentlemen whose service
+     hath well deserved. . . Of the six hundred slain, four hundred
+     were as gallant and goodly personages as of any (soldiers) I
+     ever beheld. So hath it pleased the Lord of Hosts to deliver
+     your enemies into your Highnesses' hand, and so too as one
+     only excepted, not one of yours is either lost or hurt.
+
+Another account adds to this that "the Irish men and women were hanged,
+with an Englishman who had served Dr. Sanders, and two others whose arms
+and legs were broken for torture."
+
+Such scenes as those of Glenmalure and Smerwick, terrible as they were,
+it might have been any one's lot to witness who found himself in
+presence of the atrocious warfare of those cruel days, in which the
+ordinary exasperation of combatants was made more savage and unforgiving
+by religious hatred, and by the license which religious hatred gave to
+irregular adventure and the sanguinary repression of it. They were not
+confined to Ireland. Two years later the Marquis de Santa Cruz treated
+in exactly the same fashion a band of French adventurers, some eighty
+noblemen and gentlemen and two hundred soldiers, who were taken in an
+attempt on the Azores during a time of nominal peace between the crowns
+of France and Spain. In the Low Countries, and in the religious wars of
+France, it need not be said that even the 'execution' at Smerwick was
+continually outdone; and it is what the Spaniards would of course have
+done to Drake if they had caught him. Nor did the Spanish Government
+complain of this treatment of its subjects, who had no legal commission.
+
+But the change of scene and life to Spenser was much more than merely
+the sight of a disastrous skirmish and a capitulation without quarter.
+He had passed to an entirely altered condition of social life; he had
+passed from pleasant and merry England, with its comparative order and
+peace, its thriving homesteads and wealthy cities, its industry and
+magnificence,--
+
+                             Eliza's blessed field,
+     That still with people, peace, and plenty flows--
+
+to a land, beautiful indeed, and alluring, but of which the only law was
+disorder, and the only rule failure. The Cambridge student, the follower
+of country life in Lancashire or Kent, the scholar discussing with
+Philip Sidney and corresponding with Gabriel Harvey about classical
+metres and English rimes; the shepherd poet, Colin Clout, delicately
+fashioning his innocent pastorals, his love complaints, or his dexterous
+panegyrics or satires; the courtier, aspiring to shine in the train of
+Leicester before the eyes of the great queen,--found himself
+transplanted into a wild and turbulent savagery, where the elements of
+civil society hardly existed, and which had the fatal power of drawing
+into its own evil and lawless ways the English who came into contact
+with it. Ireland had the name and the framework of a Christian realm. It
+had its hierarchy of officers in Church and State, its Parliament, its
+representative of the Crown. It had its great earls and lords, with
+noble and romantic titles, its courts and councils and administration;
+the Queen's laws were there, and where they were acknowledged, which was
+not, however, everywhere, the English speech was current. But underneath
+this name and outside, all was coarse, and obstinately set against
+civilized order. There was nothing but the wreck and clashing of
+disintegrated customs, the lawlessness of fierce and ignorant
+barbarians, whose own laws had been destroyed, and who would recognize
+no other; the blood-feuds of rival septs; the ambitious and deadly
+treacheries of rival nobles, oppressing all weaker than themselves, and
+maintaining in waste and idleness their crowds of brutal retainers. In
+one thing only was there agreement, though not even in this was there
+union; and that was in deep, implacable hatred of their English masters.
+And with these English masters, too, amid their own jealousies and
+backbitings and mischief-making, their own bitter antipathies and
+chronic despair, there was only one point of agreement, and that was
+their deep scorn and loathing of the Irish.
+
+This is Irish dealing with Irish, in Munster at this time:--
+
+     The Lord Roche kept a freeholder, who had eight plowlands,
+     prisoner, and hand-locked him till he had surrendered seven
+     plowlands and a half, on agreement to keep the remaining
+     plowland free; but when this was done, the Lord Roche extorted
+     as many exactions from that half-plowland, as from any other
+     half-plowland in his country. . . . And even the great men
+     were under the same oppression from the greater: for the Earl
+     of Desmond forcibly took away the Seneschal of Imokilly's corn
+     from his own land, though he was one of the most considerable
+     gentlemen in Munster.[62:3]
+
+And this is English dealing with Irish:--
+
+     Mr. Henry Sheffield asks Lord Burghley's interest with Sir
+     George Carew, to be made his deputy at Leighlin, in place of
+     Mr. Bagenall, who met his death under the following
+     circumstances:--
+
+     Mr. Bagenall, after he had bought the barony of Odrone of Sir
+     George Carew, could not be contented to let the Kavanaghs
+     enjoy such lands as old Sir Peter Carew, young Sir Peter, and
+     last, Sir George were content that they should have, but
+     threatened to kill them wherever he could meet them. As it is
+     now fallen out, about the last of November, one Henry Heron,
+     Mr. Bagenall's brother-in-law, having lost four kine, making
+     that his quarrel, he being accompanied with divers others to
+     the number of twenty or thereabouts, by the procurement of his
+     brother-in-law, went to the house of Mortagh Oge, a man
+     seventy years old, the chief of the Kavanaghs, with their
+     swords drawn: which the old man seeing, for fear of his life,
+     sought to go into the woods, but was taken and brought before
+     Mr. Heron, who charged him that his son had taken the cows.
+     The old man answered that he could pay for them. Mr. Heron
+     would not be contented, but bade his men kill him, he desiring
+     to be brought for trial at the sessions. Further, the morrow
+     after they went again into the woods, and there they found
+     another old man, a servant of Mortagh Oge, and likewise killed
+     him, Mr. Heron saying that it was because he would not confess
+     the cows.
+
+     On these murders, the sons of the old man laid an ambush for
+     Mr. Bagenall; who, following them more upon will than with
+     discretion, fell into their hands, and were slain with
+     thirteen more. He had sixteen wounds above his girdle, and one
+     of his legs cut off, and his tongue drawn out of his mouth and
+     slit. There is not one man dwelling in all this country that
+     was Sir George Carew's, but every man fled, and left the whole
+     country waste; and so I fear me it will continue, now the
+     deadly feud is so great between them.[63:4]
+
+Something like this has been occasionally seen in our colonies towards
+the native races; but there it never reached the same height of
+unrestrained and frankly justified indulgence. The English officials and
+settlers knew well enough that the only thought of the native Irish was
+to restore their abolished customs, to recover their confiscated lands,
+to re-establish the crippled power of their chiefs; they knew that for
+this insurrection was ever ready, and that treachery would shrink from
+nothing. And to meet it, the English on the spot--all but a few who were
+denounced as unpractical sentimentalists for favouring an irreconcilable
+foe--could think of no way of enforcing order, except by a wholesale use
+of the sword and the gallows. They could find no means of restoring
+peace except turning the rich land into a wilderness, and rooting out by
+famine those whom the soldier or the hangman had not overtaken. "No
+governor shall do any good here," wrote an English observer in 1581,
+"except he show himself a Tamerlane."
+
+In a general account, even contemporary, such statements might suggest a
+violent suspicion of exaggeration. We possess the means of testing it.
+The Irish State Papers of the time contain the ample reports and
+letters, from day to day, of the energetic and resolute Englishmen
+employed in council or in the field--men of business like Sir William
+Pelham, Sir Henry Wallop, Edward Waterhouse, and Geoffrey
+Fenton;--daring and brilliant officers, like Sir William Drury, Sir
+Nicolas Malby, Sir Warham St. Leger, Sir John Norreys, and John Zouch.
+These papers are the basis of Mr. Froude's terrible chapters on the
+Desmond rebellion, and their substance in abstract or abridgment is
+easily accessible in the printed calendars of the Record Office. They
+show that from first to last, in principle and practice, in council and
+in act, the Tamerlane system was believed in, and carried out without a
+trace of remorse or question as to its morality. "If hell were open, and
+all the evil spirits were abroad," writes Walsingham's correspondent
+Andrew Trollope, who talked about Tamerlane, "they could never be worse
+than these Irish rogues--rather dogs, and worse than dogs, for dogs do
+but after their kind, and they degenerate from all humanity." There is
+but one way of dealing with wild dogs or wolves; and accordingly the
+English chiefs insisted that this was the way to deal with the Irish.
+The state of Ireland, writes one, "is like an old cloak often before
+patched, wherein is now made so great a gash that all the world doth
+know that there is no remedy but to make a new." This means, in the
+language of another, "that there is no way to daunt these people but by
+the edge of the sword, and to plant better in their place, or rather,
+let them cut one another's throats." These were no idle words. Every
+page of these papers contains some memorandum of execution and
+destruction. The progress of a Deputy, or the President of a province,
+through the country is always accompanied with its tale of hangings.
+There is sometimes a touch of the grotesque. "At Kilkenny," writes Sir
+W. Drury, "the jail being full, we caused sessions immediately to begin.
+Thirty-six persons were executed, among which some good ones; two for
+treason, a blackamoor, and two witches by natural law, for that we found
+no law to try them by in this realm." It is like the account of some
+unusual kind of game in a successful bag. "If taking of cows, and
+killing of kerne and churles had been worth advertizing," writes Lord
+Grey to the Queen, "I would have had every day to have troubled your
+Highness." Yet Lord Grey protests in the same letter that he has never
+taken the life of any, however evil, who submitted. At the end of the
+Desmond outbreak, the chiefs in the different provinces send in their
+tale of death. Ormond complains of the false reports of his "slackness
+in but killing three men," whereas the number was more than 3000; and he
+sends in his "brief note" of his contribution to the slaughter, "598
+persons of quality, besides 3000 or 4000 others, and 158 slain since his
+discharge." The end was that, as one of the chief actors writes, Sir
+Warham St. Leger, "Munster is nearly unpeopled by the murders done by
+the rebels, and the killings by the soldiers; 30,000 dead of famine in
+half a year, besides numbers that are hanged and killed. The realm," he
+adds, "was never in greater danger, or in like misery." But in the
+murderous work itself there was not much danger. "Our wars," writes Sir
+Henry Wallop, in the height of the struggle, "are but like fox-hunting."
+And when the English Government remonstrates against this system of
+massacre, the Lord-Deputy writes back that "he sorrows that pity for the
+wicked and evil should be enchanted into her Majesty."
+
+And of this dreadful policy, involving, as the price of the extinction
+of Desmond's rebellion, the absolute desolation of the South and West of
+Ireland, Lord Grey came to be the deliberate and unfaltering champion.
+His administration lasted only two years, and in spite of his natural
+kindness of temper, which we need not doubt, it was, from the supposed
+necessities of his position, and the unwavering consent of all English
+opinions round him, a rule of extermination. No scruple ever crossed his
+mind, except that he had not been sufficiently uncompromising in putting
+first the religious aspect of the quarrel. "If Elizabeth had allowed
+him," writes Mr. Froude, "he would have now made a Mahommedan conquest
+of the whole island, and offered the Irish the alternative of the
+Gospel or the sword." With the terrible sincerity of a Puritan, he
+reproached himself that he had allowed even the Queen's commands to come
+before the "one article of looking to God's dear service." "I confess my
+sin," he wrote to Walsingham, "I have followed man too much," and he saw
+why his efforts had been in vain. "Baal's prophets and councillors shall
+prevail. I see it is so. I see it is just. I see it past help. I rest
+despaired." His policy of blood and devastation, breaking the neck of
+Desmond's rebellion, but failing to put an end to it, became at length
+more than the home Government could bear; and with mutual
+dissatisfaction he was recalled before his work was done. Among the
+documents relating to his explanations with the English Government, is
+one of which this is the abstract: "Declaration (Dec. 1583), by Arthur,
+Lord Grey, of Wilton, to the Queen, showing the state of Ireland when he
+was appointed Deputy, with the services of his government, and the
+plight he left it in. 1485 chief men and gentlemen slain, not accounting
+those of meaner sort, nor yet executions by law, and killing of churles,
+which were innumerable."
+
+This was the world into which Spenser was abruptly thrown, and in which
+he was henceforward to have his home. He first became acquainted with it
+as Lord Grey's Secretary in the Munster war. He himself in later days
+with ample experience and knowledge reviewed the whole of this dreadful
+history, its policy, its necessities, its results: and no more
+instructive document has come down to us from those times. But his
+description of the way in which the plan of extermination was carried
+out in Munster before his eyes, may fittingly form a supplement to the
+language on the spot of those responsible for it.
+
+     _Eudox._ But what, then, shall be the conclusion of this
+     war? . . .
+
+     _Iren._--The end will I assure me be very short and much
+     sooner than can be, in so great a trouble, as it seemeth,
+     hoped for, although there should none of them fall by the
+     sword nor be slain by the soldier: yet thus being kept from
+     manurance and their cattle from running abroad, by this hard
+     restraint they would quickly consume themselves, and devour
+     one another. The proof whereof I saw sufficiently exampled in
+     these late wars of Munster; for notwithstanding that the same
+     was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle
+     that you would have thought they should have been able to
+     stand long, yet ere one year and a half they were brought to
+     such wretchedness as that any stony heart would have rued the
+     same. Out of every corner of the woods and glynnes they came
+     creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear
+     them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like
+     ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead
+     carrions, happy where they could find them, yea and one
+     another soon after, insomuch that the very carcases they
+     spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a
+     plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a
+     feast for a time, yet not able long to continue there withal;
+     that in a short space there were none almost left, and a most
+     populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and
+     beast; yet sure in all that war there perished not many by the
+     sword, but all by the extremity of famine which they
+     themselves had wrought.
+
+It is hardly surprising that Lord Grey's Secretary should share the
+opinions and the feelings of his master and patron. Certainly in his
+company and service, Spenser learned to look upon Ireland and the Irish
+with the impatience and loathing which filled most Englishmen; and it
+must be added with the same greedy eyes. In this new atmosphere, in
+which his life was henceforth spent, amid the daily talk of ravage and
+death, the daily scramble for the spoils of rebels and traitors, the
+daily alarms of treachery and insurrection, a man naturally learns
+hardness. Under Spenser's imaginative richness, and poetic delicacy of
+feeling, there appeared two features. There was a shrewd sense of the
+practical side of things: and there was a full share of that sternness
+of temper which belonged to the time. He came to Ireland for no romantic
+purpose: he came to make his fortune as well as he could: and he
+accepted the conditions of the place and scene, and entered at once into
+the game of adventure and gain which was the natural one for all English
+comers, and of which the prizes were lucrative offices and forfeited
+manors and abbeys. And in the native population and native interests, he
+saw nothing but what called forth not merely antipathy, but deep moral
+condemnation. It was not merely that the Irish were ignorant,
+thriftless, filthy, debased and loathsome in their pitiable misery and
+despair: it was that in his view, justice, truth, honesty had utterly
+perished among them, and therefore were not due to them. Of any other
+side to the picture, he like other good Englishmen, was entirely
+unconscious: he saw only on all sides of him the empire of barbarism and
+misrule which valiant and godly Englishmen were fighting to vanquish and
+destroy--fighting against apparent but not real odds. And all this was
+aggravated by the stiff adherence of the Irish to their old religion.
+Spenser came over with the common opinion of Protestant Englishmen, that
+they had at least in England the pure and undoubted religion of the
+Bible: and in Ireland, he found himself face to face with the very
+superstition in its lowest forms which he had so hated in England. He
+left it plotting in England; he found it in armed rebellion in Ireland.
+Like Lord Grey, he saw in Popery the root of all the mischiefs of
+Ireland; and his sense of true religion, as well as his convictions of
+right, conspired to recommend to him Lord Grey's pitiless government.
+The opinion was everywhere--it was undisputed and unexamined--that a
+policy of force, direct or indirect, was the natural and right way of
+reducing diverging religions to submission and uniformity: that
+religious disagreement ought as a matter of principle to be subdued by
+violence of one degree or another. All wise and good men thought so: all
+statesmen and rulers acted so. Spenser found in Ireland a state of
+things which seemed to make this doctrine the simplest dictate of common
+sense.
+
+In August, 1582, Lord Grey left Ireland. He had accepted his office with
+the utmost reluctance, from the known want of agreement between the
+Queen and himself as to policy. He had executed it in a way which
+greatly displeased the home Government. And he gave it up with his
+special work, the extinction of Desmond's rebellion, still
+unaccomplished. In spite of the thousands slain, and a province made a
+desert, Desmond was still at large and dangerous. Lord Grey had been
+ruthlessly severe, and yet not successful. For months there had been an
+interchange of angry letters between him and the Government. Burghley,
+he complains to Walsingham, was "so heavy against him." The Queen and
+Burghley wanted order restored, but did not like either the expense of
+war, or the responsibility before other governments for the severity
+which their agents on the spot judged necessary. Knowing that he did not
+please, he had begun to solicit his recall before he had been a year in
+Ireland; and at length he was recalled, not to receive thanks, but to
+meet a strict, if not hostile, inquiry into his administration. Besides
+what had been on the surface of his proceedings to dissatisfy the
+Queen, there had been, as in the case of every Deputy, a continued
+underground stream of backbiting and insinuation going home against him.
+Spenser did not forget this, when in the _Faery Queen_ he shadowed forth
+Lord Grey's career in the adventures of Arthegal, the great Knight of
+Justice, met on his return home from his triumphs by the hags, Envy and
+Detraction, and the braying of the hundred tongues of the Blatant Beast.
+Irish lords and partisans, calling themselves loyal, when they could not
+get what they wanted, or when he threatened them for their insincerity
+or insolence, at once wrote to England. His English colleagues, civil
+and military, were his natural rivals or enemies, ever on the watch to
+spy out and report, if necessary, to misrepresent, what was questionable
+or unfortunate in his proceedings. Permanent officials like Archbishop
+Adam Loftus the Chancellor, or Treasurer Wallop, or Secretary Fenton,
+knew more than he did; they corresponded directly with the ministers;
+they knew that they were expected to keep a strict watch on his
+expenditure; and they had no scruple to send home complaints against him
+behind his back, as they did against one another. A secretary in Dublin
+like Geoffrey Fenton is described as a moth in the garment of every
+Deputy. Grey himself complains of the underhand work; he cannot prevent
+"backbiters' report:" he has found of late "very suspicious dealing
+amongst all his best esteemed associates;" he "dislikes not to be
+informed of the charges against him." In fact, they were accusing him of
+one of the gravest sins of which a Deputy could be guilty; they were
+writing home that he was lavishing the forfeited estates among his
+favourites, under pretence of rewarding service, to the great loss and
+permanent damage of her Majesty's revenue; and they were forwarding
+plans for commissions to distribute these estates, of which the Deputy
+should not be a member.
+
+He had the common fate of those who accepted great responsibilities
+under the Queen. He was expected to do very hard tasks with insufficient
+means, and to receive more blame where he failed than thanks where he
+succeeded. He had every one, English and Irish, against him in Ireland,
+and no one for him in England. He was driven to violence because he
+wanted strength; he took liberties with forfeitures belonging to the
+Queen because he had no other means of rewarding public services. It is
+not easy to feel much sympathy for a man who, brave and public spirited
+as he was, could think of no remedy for the miseries of Ireland but
+wholesale bloodshed. Yet, compared with the resident officials who
+caballed against him, and who got rich on these miseries, the Wallops
+and Fentons of the Irish Council, this stern Puritan, so remorseless in
+what he believed to be his duty to his Queen and his faith, stands out
+as an honest and faithful public servant of a Government which seemed
+hardly to know its own mind, which vacillated between indulgence and
+severity, and which hampered its officers by contradictory policies,
+ignorant of their difficulties, and incapable of controlling the
+supplies for a costly and wasteful war. Lord Grey's strong hand, though
+incapable of reaching the real causes of Irish evils, undoubtedly saved
+the country at a moment of serious peril, and once more taught lawless
+Geraldines, and Eustaces, and Burkes the terrible lesson of English
+power. The work which he had half done in crushing Desmond was soon
+finished by Desmond's hereditary rival, Ormond; and under the milder,
+but not more popular, rule of his successor, the proud and irritable
+Sir John Perrot, Ireland had for a few years the peace which consisted
+in the absence of a definite rebellion, till Tyrone began to stir in
+1595, and Perrot went back a disgraced man, to die a prisoner in the
+Tower.
+
+Lord Grey left behind him unappeasable animosities, and returned to meet
+jealous rivals and an ill-satisfied mistress. But he had left behind one
+whose admiration and reverence he had won, and who was not afraid to
+take care of his reputation. Whether Spenser went back with his patron
+or not in 1582, he was from henceforth mainly resident in Ireland. Lord
+Grey's administration, and the principles on which it had been carried
+on, had made a deep impression on Spenser's mind. His first ideal had
+been Philip Sidney, the attractive and all-accomplished gentleman,--
+
+                  The President
+     Of noblesse and of chevalrie,--
+
+And to the end the pastoral Colin Clout, for he ever retained his first
+poetic name, was faithful to his ideal. But in the stern Proconsul,
+under whom he had become hardened into a keen and resolute colonist, he
+had come in contact with a new type of character; a governor under the
+sense of duty, doing the roughest of work in the roughest of ways. In
+Lord Grey, he had this character, not as he might read of it in books,
+but acting out its qualities in present life, amid the unexpected
+emergencies, the desperate alternatives, the calls for instant decision,
+the pressing necessities and the anxious hazards, of a course full of
+uncertainty and peril. He had before his eyes day by day, fearless,
+unshrinking determination, in a hateful and most unpromising task. He
+believed that he saw a living example of strength, manliness, and
+nobleness; of unsparing and unswerving zeal for order and religion, and
+good government; of single-hearted devotion to truth and right, and to
+the Queen. Lord Grey grew at last, in the poet's imagination, into the
+image and representative of perfect and masculine justice. When Spenser
+began to enshrine in a great allegory his ideas of human life and
+character, Lord Grey supplied the moral features, and almost the name,
+of one of its chief heroes. Spenser did more than embody his memory in
+poetical allegories. In Spenser's _View of the present State of
+Ireland_, written some years after Lord Grey's death, he gives his
+mature, and then at any rate, disinterested approbation of Lord Grey's
+administration, and his opinion of the causes of its failure. He kindles
+into indignation when "most untruely and maliciously, those evil tongues
+backbite and slander the sacred ashes of that most just and honourable
+personage, whose least virtue, of many most excellent, which abounded in
+his heroical spirit, they were never able to aspire unto."
+
+Lord Grey's patronage had brought Spenser into the public service;
+perhaps that patronage, the patronage of a man who had powerful enemies,
+was the cause that Spenser's preferments, after Lord Grey's recall, were
+on so moderate a scale. The notices which we glean from indirect sources
+about Spenser's employment in Ireland are meagre enough, but they are
+distinct. They show him as a subordinate public servant, of no great
+account, but yet, like other public servants in Ireland, profiting, in
+his degree, by the opportunities of the time. In the spring following
+Lord Grey's arrival (March 22, 1581), Spenser was appointed Clerk of
+Decrees and Recognizances in the Irish Court of Chancery, retaining his
+place as Secretary to the Lord-Deputy, in which character his signature
+sometimes appears in the Irish Records, certifying State documents sent
+to England. This office is said by Fuller to have been a "lucrative"
+one. In the same year he received a lease of the Abbey and Manor of
+Enniscorthy, in the County of Wexford. Enniscorthy was an important post
+in the network of English garrisons, on one of the roads from Dublin to
+the South. He held it but for a short time. It was transferred by him to
+a citizen of Wexford, Richard Synot, an agent, apparently, of the
+powerful Sir Henry Wallop, the Treasurer; and it was soon after
+transferred by Synot to his patron, an official who secured to himself a
+large share of the spoils of Desmond's rebellion. Further, Spenser's
+name appears, in a list of persons (January, 1582), among whom Lord Grey
+had distributed some of the forfeited property of the rebels--a list
+sent home by him in answer to charges of waste and damage to the Queen's
+revenue, busily urged against him in Ireland by men like Wallop and
+Fenton, and readily listened to by English ministers like Burghley, who
+complained that Ireland was a "gulf of consuming treasure." The grant
+was mostly to persons active in service, among others one to Wallop
+himself; and a certain number of smaller value to persons of Lord Grey's
+own household. There, among yeomen ushers, gentlemen ushers, gentlemen
+serving the Lord-Deputy, and Welshmen and Irishmen with uncouth names,
+to whom small gratifications had been allotted out of the spoil, we
+read--"the lease of a house in Dublin belonging to [Lord] Baltinglas for
+six years to come to Edmund Spenser, one of the Lord-Deputy's
+Secretaries, valued at 5_l._" . . . "of a 'custodiam' of John Eustace's
+[one of Baltinglas' family] land of the Newland to Edmund Spenser, one
+of the Lord-Deputy's Secretaries." In July, 1586, when every one was
+full of the project for "planting" Munster, he was still in Dublin, for
+he addresses from thence a sonnet to Gabriel Harvey. In March, 1588/9,
+we find the following, in a list of officers on the establishment of the
+province of Munster, which the government was endeavouring to colonize
+from the west of England: "Lodovick Briskett, clerk to the council (at
+20_l._ per annum), 13_l._ 6_s._ 8_d._ (this is exercised by one Spenser,
+as deputy for the said Briskett), to whom (i. e. Briskett) it was
+granted by patent 6 Nov. 25 Eliz. (1583)." (_Carew MSS._) Bryskett was a
+man much employed in Irish business. He had been Clerk to the Irish
+Council, had been a correspondent of Burghley and Walsingham, and had
+aspired to be Secretary of State when Fenton obtained the post: possibly
+in disappointment, he had retired, with an office which he exercised by
+deputy, to his lands in Wexford. He was a poet, and a friend of
+Spenser's: and it may have been by his interest with the dispensers of
+patronage, that "one Spenser," who had been his deputy, succeeded to his
+office.
+
+In this position Spenser was brought into communication with the
+powerful English chiefs on the Council of Munster, and also with the
+leading men among the Undertakers as they were called, among whom more
+than half a million of acres of the escheated and desolate lands of the
+fallen Desmond were to be divided, on condition of each Undertaker
+settling on his estate a proportionate number of English gentlemen,
+yeomen, artisans and labourers with their families, who were to bring
+the ruined province into order and cultivation. The President and
+Vice-President of the Council were the two Norreys, John and Thomas, two
+of the most gallant of a gallant family. The project for the planting of
+Munster had been originally started before the rebellion, in 1568. It
+had been one of the causes of the rebellion; but now that Desmond was
+fallen, it was revived. It had been received in England with favour and
+hope. Men of influence and enterprise, Sir Christopher Hatton,
+Walsingham, Walter Ralegh, had embarked in it: and the government had
+made an appeal to the English country gentlemen to take advantage of
+this new opening for their younger sons, and to send them over at the
+head of colonies from the families of their tenants and dependants, to
+occupy a rich and beautiful land on easy terms of rent. In the Western
+Counties, north and south, the appeal had awakened interest. In the list
+of Undertakers are found Cheshire and Lancashire names, Stanley,
+Fleetwood, Molyneux: and a still larger number for Somerset, Devon, and
+Dorset, Popham, Rogers, Coles, Ralegh, Chudleigh, Champernown. The plan
+of settlement was carefully and methodically traced out. The province
+was surveyed as well as it could be under great difficulties. Maps were
+made which Lord Burghley annotated. "Seignories" were created of varying
+size, 12,000, 8000, 6000, 4000 acres, with corresponding obligations as
+to the number and class of farms and inhabitants in each. Legal science
+in England was to protect titles by lengthy patents and leases;
+administrative watchfulness and firmness were to secure them in Ireland.
+Privileges of trade were granted to the Undertakers: they were even
+allowed to transport coin out of England to Ireland: and a long respite
+was granted them before the Crown was to claim its rents. Strict rules
+were laid down to keep the native Irish out of the English lands and
+from intermarrying with the English families. In this partition,
+Seignories were distributed by the Undertakers among themselves with the
+free carelessness of men dividing the spoil. The great people, like
+Hatton and Ralegh, were to have their two or three Seignories: the
+county of Cork with its nineteen Seignories is assigned to the gentleman
+undertakers from Somersetshire. The plan was an ambitious and tempting
+one. But difficulties soon arose. The gentleman undertakers were not in
+a hurry to leave England even on a visit to their desolate and dangerous
+seignories in Munster. The "planting" did not thrive. The Irish were
+inexhaustible in raising legal obstacles and in giving practical
+annoyance. Claims and titles were hard to discover or to extinguish.
+Even the very attainted and escheated lands were challenged by virtue of
+settlements made before the attainders. The result was that a certain
+number of Irish estates were added to the possessions of a certain
+number of English families. But Munster was not planted. Burghley's
+policy, and Walsingham's resolution, and Ralegh's daring inventiveness
+were alike baffled by the conditions of a problem harder than the
+peopling of America or the conquest of India. Munster could not be made
+English. After all its desolation, it reverted in the main to its Irish
+possessors.
+
+Of all the schemes and efforts which accompanied the attempt, and the
+records of which fill the Irish State papers of those years, Spenser was
+the near and close spectator. He was in Dublin and on the spot, as Clerk
+of the Council of Munster. And he had become acquainted, perhaps, by
+this time, had formed a friendship, with Walter Ralegh, one of the most
+active men in Irish business, whose influence was rising wherever he was
+becoming known. Most of the knowledge which Spenser thus gathered, and
+of the impressions which a practical handling of Irish affairs had left
+on him, was embodied in his interesting work, written several years
+later--_A View of the present State of Ireland_. But his connexion with
+Munster not unnaturally brought him also an accession of fortune. When
+Ralegh and the "Somersetshire men" were dividing among them the County
+of Cork, the Clerk of the Council was remembered by some of his friends.
+He was admitted among the Undertakers. His name appears in the list,
+among great statesmen and captains with their seignories of 12,000
+acres, as holding a grant of some 3000. It was the manor and castle of
+Kilcolman, a ruined house of the Desmonds, under the Galtee Hills. It
+appears to have been first assigned to another person.[79:5] But it came
+at last into Spenser's hands, probably in 1586; and henceforward, this
+was his abode and his home.
+
+Kilcolman Castle was near the high road between Mallow and Limerick,
+about three miles from Buttevant and Doneraile, in a plain at the foot
+of the last western falls of the Galtee range, watered by a stream now
+called the Awbeg, but which he celebrates under the name of the Mulla.
+In Spenser's time it was probably surrounded with woods. The earlier
+writers describe it as a pleasant abode with fine views, and so Spenser
+celebrated its natural beauties. The more recent accounts are not so
+favourable. "Kilcolman," says the writer in Murray's Handbook, "is a
+small peel tower, with cramped and dark rooms, a form which every
+gentleman's house assumed in turbulent times. It is situated on the
+margin of a small lake, and, it must be confessed, overlooking an
+extremely dreary tract of country." It was in the immediate
+neighbourhood of the wild country to the north, half forest, half bog,
+the wood and hill of Aharlo, or Arlo, as Spenser writes it, which was
+the refuge and the "great fastness" of the Desmond rebellion. It was
+amid such scenes, amid such occupations, in such society and
+companionship, that the poet of the _Faery Queen_ accomplished as much
+of his work as was given him to do. In one of his later poems, he thus
+contrasts the peace of England with his own home:--
+
+     No wayling there nor wretchednesse is heard,
+     No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,
+     No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard,
+     No nightly bordrags [= border ravage], nor no hue and cries;
+     The shepheards there abroad may safely lie,
+     On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger:
+     No ravenous wolves the good mans hope destroy,
+     Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[54:1] Froude, x. 158.
+
+[58:2] Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1574-1585. Mr. H. C. Hamilton's
+Pref. p. lxxi-lxxiii. Nov. 12, 1580.
+
+[62:3] Cox, Hist. of Ireland, 354.
+
+[63:4] Irish Papers, March 29, 1587.
+
+[79:5] Carew MSS. Calendar, 1587, p. 449. Cf. Irish Papers; Calendar,
+1587, p. 309, 450.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE FAERY QUEEN--THE FIRST PART.
+
+[1580-1590.]
+
+
+The _Faery Queen_ is heard of very early in Spenser's literary course.
+We know that in the beginning of 1580, the year in which Spenser went to
+Ireland, something under that title had been already begun and submitted
+to Gabriel Harvey's judgment; and that among other literary projects,
+Spenser was intending to proceed with it. But beyond the mere name, we
+know nothing, at this time, of Spenser's proposed _Faery Queen_.
+Harvey's criticisms on it tell us nothing of its general plan or its
+numbers. Whether the first sketch had been decided upon, whether the new
+stanza, Spenser's original creation, and its peculiar beauty and
+instrument, had yet been invented by him, while he had been trying
+experiments in metre in the _Shepherd's Calendar_, we have no means of
+determining. But he took the idea with him to Ireland; and in Ireland he
+pursued it and carried it out.
+
+The first authentic account which we have of the composition of the
+_Faery Queen_, is in a pamphlet written by Spenser's friend and
+predecessor in the service of the Council of Munster, Ludowick Bryskett,
+and inscribed to Lord Grey of Wilton: a _Discourse of Civil Life_,
+published in 1606. He describes a meeting of friends at his cottage
+near Dublin, and a conversation that took place on the "ethical" part of
+moral philosophy. The company consisted of some of the principal
+Englishmen employed in Irish affairs, men whose names occur continually
+in the copious correspondence in the Rolls and at Lambeth. There was
+Long, the Primate of Armagh; there were Sir Robert Dillon, the Chief
+Justice of the Common Pleas, and Dormer, the Queen's Solicitor; and
+there were soldiers, like Thomas Norreys, then Vice-President of
+Munster, under his brother John Norreys; Sir Warham Sentleger, on whom
+had fallen so much of the work in the South of Ireland, and who at last,
+like Thomas Norreys, fell in Tyrone's rebellion; Captain Christopher
+Carleil, Walsingham's son-in-law, a man who had gained great distinction
+on land and sea, not only in Ireland, but in the Low Countries, in
+France, and at Carthagena and San Domingo; and Captain Nicholas Dawtry,
+the Seneschal of Clandeboy, in the troublesome Ulster country,
+afterwards "Captain" of Hampshire at the time of the Armada. It was a
+remarkable party. The date of this meeting must have been after the
+summer of 1584, at which time Long was made Primate, and before the
+beginning of 1588, when Dawtry was in Hampshire. The extract is so
+curious, as a picture of the intellectual and literary wants and efforts
+of the times, especially amid the disorders of Ireland, and as a
+statement of Spenser's purpose in his poem, that an extract from it
+deserves to be inserted, as it is given in Mr. Todd's _Life of Spenser_,
+and repeated in that by Mr. Hales.
+
+     "Herein do I greatly envie," writes Bryskett, "the happiness
+     of the Italians, who have in their mother-tongue late writers
+     that have, with a singular easie method taught all that Plato
+     and Aristotle have confusedly or obscurely left written. Of
+     which, some I have begun to reade with no small delight; as
+     Alexander Piccolomini, Gio. Baptista Giraldi, and Guazzo; all
+     three having written upon the Ethick part of Morall
+     Philosophie both exactly and perspicuously. And would God that
+     some of our countrimen would shew themselves so wel affected
+     to the good of their countrie (whereof one principall and most
+     important part consisteth in the instructing men to vertue),
+     as to set downe in English the precepts of those parts of
+     Morall Philosophy, whereby our youth might, without spending
+     so much time as the learning of those other languages require,
+     speedily enter into the right course of vertuous life.
+
+     In the meane while I must struggle with those bookes which I
+     vnderstand and content myselfe to plod upon them, in hope that
+     God (who knoweth the sincerenesse of my desire) will be
+     pleased to open my vnderstanding, so as I may reape that
+     profit of my reading, which I trauell for. Yet is there _a
+     gentleman in this company_, whom I have had often a purpose to
+     intreate, that as his liesure might serue him, he would
+     vouchsafe to spend some time with me to instruct me in some
+     hard points which I cannot of myselfe understand; _knowing him
+     to be not onely perfect in the Greek tongue, but also very
+     well read in Philosophie, both morall and naturall_.
+     Neuertheless such is my bashfulness, as I neuer yet durst open
+     my mouth to disclose this my desire unto him, though I have
+     not wanted some hartning thereunto from himselfe. For of loue
+     and kindnes to me, _he encouraged me long sithens to follow
+     the reading of the Greeke tongue, and offered me his helpe to
+     make me vnderstand it_. But now that so good an opportunitie
+     is offered vnto me, to satisfie in some sort my desire; I
+     thinke I should commit a great fault, not to myselfe alone,
+     but to all this company, if I should not enter my request thus
+     farre, as to moue him to spend this time which we have now
+     destined to familiar discourse and conuersation, in declaring
+     unto us the great benefits which men obtaine by the knowledge
+     of Morall Philosophie, and in making us to know what the same
+     is, what be the parts thereof, whereby vertues are to be
+     distinguished from vices; and finally that he will be pleased
+     to run ouer in such order as he shall thinke good, such and
+     so many principles and rules thereof, as shall serue not only
+     for my better instruction, but also for the contentment and
+     satisfaction of you al. For I nothing doubt, but that euery
+     one of you will be glad to heare so profitable a discourse and
+     thinke the time very wel spent wherin so excellent a knowledge
+     shal be reuealed unto you, from which euery one may be assured
+     to gather some fruit as wel as myselfe.
+
+     Therefore (said I), turning myselfe to _M. Spenser_, It is you
+     sir, to whom it pertaineth to shew yourselfe courteous now
+     unto vs all and to make vs all beholding unto you for the
+     pleasure and profit which we shall gather from your speeches,
+     if you shall vouchsafe to open unto vs the goodly cabinet, in
+     which this excellent treasure of vertues lieth locked up from
+     the vulgar sort. And thereof in the behalfe of all as for
+     myselfe, I do most earnestly intreate you not to say vs nay.
+     Vnto which wordes of mine euery man applauding most with like
+     words of request and the rest with gesture and countenances
+     expressing as much, _M. Spenser_ answered in this maner:
+
+     Though it may seeme hard for me, to refuse the request made by
+     you all, whom euery one alone, I should for many respects be
+     willing to gratifie; yet as the case standeth, I doubt not but
+     with the consent of the most part of you, I shall be excused
+     at this time of this taske which would be laid vpon me; for
+     sure I am, that it is not vnknowne unto you, that I haue
+     alreedy vndertaken a work tending to the same effect, which is
+     in _heroical verse_ under the title of a _Faerie Queene_ to
+     represent all the moral vertues, assigning to euery vertue a
+     Knight to be the patron and defender of the same, in whose
+     actions and feates of arms and chiualry the operations of that
+     vertue, whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed, and
+     the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against
+     the same, to be beaten down and ouercome. Which work, _as I
+     haue already well entred into_, if God shall please to spare
+     me life that I may finish it according to my mind, your wish
+     (_M. Bryskett_) will be in some sort accomplished, though
+     perhaps not so effectually as you could desire. And the same
+     may very well serue for my excuse, if at this time I craue to
+     be forborne in this your request, since any discourse, that I
+     might make thus on the sudden in such a subject would be but
+     simple, and little to your satisfactions. For it would require
+     good aduisement and premeditation for any man to vndertake the
+     declaration of these points that you have proposed, containing
+     in effect the Ethicke part of Morall Philosophie. Whereof
+     since I haue taken in hand to discourse at large in my poeme
+     before spoken, I hope the expectation of that work may serue
+     to free me at this time from speaking in that matter,
+     notwithstanding your motion and all your intreaties. But I
+     will tell you how I thinke by himselfe he may very well excuse
+     my speech, and yet satisfie all you in this matter. I haue
+     seene (as he knoweth) a translation made by himselfe out of
+     the Italian tongue of a dialogue comprehending all the Ethick
+     part of Moral Philosophy written by one of those three he
+     formerly mentioned, and that is by _Giraldi_ vnder the title
+     of a Dialogue of Ciuil life. If it please him to bring us
+     forth that translation to be here read among vs, or otherwise
+     to deliuer to us, as his memory may serue him, the contents of
+     the same; he shal (I warrant you) satisfie you all at the ful,
+     and himselfe wil haue no cause but to thinke the time well
+     spent in reuiewing his labors, especially in the company of so
+     many his friends, who may thereby reape much profit, and the
+     translation happily fare the better by some mending it may
+     receiue in the perusing, as all writings else may do by the
+     often examination of the same. Neither let it trouble him that
+     I so turne ouer to him againe the taske he wold haue put me
+     to; for it falleth out fit for him to verifie the principall
+     of all this Apologie, euen now made for himselfe; because
+     thereby it will appeare that he hath not withdrawne himselfe
+     from seruice of the state to liue idle or wholly priuate to
+     himselfe, but hath spent some time in doing that which may
+     greatly benefit others, and hath serued not a little to the
+     bettering of his owne mind, and increasing of his knowledge;
+     though he for modesty pretend much ignorance, and pleade want
+     in wealth, much like some rich beggars, who either of custom,
+     or for couetousnes, go to begge of others those things whereof
+     they haue no want at home.
+
+     With this answer of _M. Spensers_ it seemed that all the
+     company were wel satisfied, for after some few speeches
+     whereby they had shewed an extreme longing after his worke of
+     the _Fairie Queene_, _whereof some parcels had been by some of
+     them seene_, they all began to presse me to produce my
+     translation mentioned by _M. Spenser_ that it might be perused
+     among them; or else that I should (as near as I could) deliuer
+     unto them the contents of the same, supposing that my memory
+     would not much faile me in a thing so studied and advisedly
+     set downe in writing as a translation must be."
+
+A poet at this time still had to justify his employment by presenting
+himself in the character of a professed teacher of morality, with a
+purpose as definite and formal, though with a different method, as the
+preacher in the pulpit. Even with this profession, he had to encounter
+many prejudices, and men of gravity and wisdom shook their heads at what
+they thought his idle trifling. But if he wished to be counted
+respectable, and to separate himself from the crowd of foolish or
+licentious rimers, he must intend distinctly, not merely to interest,
+but to instruct, by his new and deep conceits. It was under the
+influence of this persuasion that Spenser laid down the plan of the
+_Faery Queen_. It was, so he proposed to himself, to be a work on moral,
+and if time were given him, political philosophy, composed with as
+serious a didactic aim, as any treatise or sermon in prose. He deems it
+necessary to explain and excuse his work by claiming for it this design.
+He did not venture to send the _Faery Queen_ into the world without also
+telling the world its moral meaning and bearing. He cannot trust it to
+tell its own story or suggest its real drift. In the letter to Sir W.
+Ralegh, accompanying the first portion of it, he unfolds elaborately the
+sense of his allegory, as he expounded it to his friends in Dublin. "To
+some," he says, "I know this method will seem displeasant, which had
+rather have good discipline delivered plainly by way of precept, or
+sermoned at large, as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in
+allegorical devises." He thought that Homer and Virgil and Ariosto had
+thus written poetry, to teach the world moral virtue and political
+wisdom. He attempted to propitiate Lord Burghley, who hated him and his
+verses, by setting before him in a dedication sonnet, the true intent of
+his--
+
+                                Idle rimes;
+     The labour of lost time and wit unstaid;
+     Yet if their deeper sense he inly weighed,
+     And the dim veil, with which from common view
+     Their fairer parts are hid, aside be laid,
+     Perhaps not vain they may appear to you.
+
+In earlier and in later times, men do not apologize for being poets; and
+Spenser himself was deceived in giving himself credit for this direct
+purpose to instruct, when he was really following the course marked out
+by his genius. But he only conformed to the curious utilitarian spirit
+which pervaded the literature of the time. Readers were supposed to look
+everywhere for a moral to be drawn, or a lesson to be inculcated, or
+some practical rules to be avowedly and definitely deduced; and they
+could not yet take in the idea that the exercise of the speculative and
+imaginative faculties may be its own end, and may have indirect
+influences and utilities even greater than if it was guided by a
+conscious intention to be edifying and instructive.
+
+The first great English poem of modern times, the first creation of
+English imaginative power since Chaucer, and like Chaucer so thoroughly
+and characteristically English, was not written in England. Whatever
+Spenser may have done to it before he left England with Lord Grey, and
+whatever portions of earlier composition may have been used and worked
+up into the poem as it went on, the bulk of the _Faery Queen_, as we
+have it, was composed in what to Spenser and his friends was almost a
+foreign land--in the conquered and desolated wastes of wild and
+barbarous Ireland. It is a feature of his work on which Spenser himself
+dwells. In the verses which usher in his poem, addressed to the great
+men of Elizabeth's court, he presents his work to the Earl of Ormond, as
+
+     The wild fruit which salvage soil hath bred;
+     Which being through long wars left almost waste,
+     With brutish barbarism is overspread;--
+
+and in the same strain to Lord Grey, he speaks of his "rude rimes, the
+which a rustic muse did weave, in salvage soil." It is idle to speculate
+what difference of form the _Faery Queen_ might have received, if the
+design had been carried out in the peace of England and in the society
+of London. But it is certain that the scene of trouble and danger in
+which it grew up greatly affected it. This may possibly account, though
+it is questionable, for the looseness of texture, and the want of
+accuracy and finish which is sometimes to be seen in it. Spenser was a
+learned poet; and his poem has the character of the work of a man of
+wide reading, but without books to verify or correct. It cannot be
+doubted that his life in Ireland added to the force and vividness with
+which Spenser wrote. In Ireland, he had before his eyes continually, the
+dreary world which the poet of knight errantry imagines. There men might
+in good truth travel long through wildernesses and "great woods" given
+over to the outlaw and the ruffian. There the avenger of wrong need
+seldom want for perilous adventure and the occasion for quelling the
+oppressor. There the armed and unrelenting hand of right was but too
+truly the only substitute for law. There might be found in most certain
+and prosaic reality, the ambushes, the disguises, the treacheries, the
+deceits and temptations, even the supposed witchcrafts and enchantments,
+against which the fairy champions of the virtues have to be on their
+guard. In Ireland, Englishmen saw, or at any rate thought they saw, a
+universal conspiracy of fraud against righteousness, a universal battle
+going on between error and religion, between justice and the most
+insolent selfishness. They found there every type of what was cruel,
+brutal, loathsome. They saw everywhere men whose business it was to
+betray and destroy, women whose business it was to tempt and ensnare and
+corrupt. They thought that they saw too, in those who waged the Queen's
+wars, all forms of manly and devoted gallantry, of noble generosity, of
+gentle strength, of knightly sweetness and courtesy. There were those,
+too, who failed in the hour of trial; who were the victims of temptation
+or of the victorious strength of evil. Besides the open or concealed
+traitors, the Desmonds, and Kildares, and O'Neales, there were the men
+who were entrapped and overcome, and the men who disappointed hopes, and
+became recreants to their faith and loyalty; like Sir William Stanley,
+who, after a brilliant career in Ireland, turned traitor and apostate,
+and gave up Deventer and his Irish bands to the King of Spain.
+
+The realities of the Irish wars and of Irish social and political life
+gave a real subject, gave body and form to the allegory. There in actual
+flesh and blood were enemies to be fought with by the good and true.
+There in visible fact were the vices and falsehoods, which Arthur and
+his companions were to quell and punish. There in living truth were
+_Sansfoy_, and _Sansloy_, and _Sansjoy_; there were _Orgoglio_ and
+_Grantorto_, the witcheries of _Acrasia_ and _Phædria_, the insolence of
+_Briana_ and _Crudor_. And there, too, were real Knights of goodness and
+the Gospel--Grey, and Ormond, and Ralegh, the Norreyses, St. Leger, and
+Maltby--on a real mission from Gloriana's noble realm to destroy the
+enemies of truth and virtue.
+
+The allegory bodies forth the trials which beset the life of man in all
+conditions and at all times. But Spenser could never have seen in
+England such a strong and perfect image of the allegory itself--with the
+wild wanderings of its personages, its daily chances of battle and
+danger, its hairbreadth escapes, its strange encounters, its prevailing
+anarchy and violence, its normal absence of order and law--as he had
+continually and customarily before him in Ireland. "The curse of God was
+so great," writes John Hooker, a contemporary, "and the land so barren
+both of man and beast, that whosoever did travel from one end to the
+other of all Munster, even from Waterford to Smerwick, about six score
+miles, he should not meet man, woman, or child, saving in cities or
+towns, nor yet see any beast, save foxes, wolves or other ravening
+beasts." It is the desolation through which Spenser's knights pursue
+their solitary way, or join company as they can. Indeed to read the same
+writer's account, for instance, of Ralegh's adventures with the Irish
+chieftains, his challenges and single combats, his escapes at fords and
+woods, is like reading bits of the _Faery Queen_ in prose. As Spenser
+chose to write of knight errantry, his picture of it has doubtless
+gained in truth and strength by his very practical experience of what
+such life as he describes must be. The _Faery Queen_ might almost be
+called the Epic of the English wars in Ireland under Elizabeth, as much
+as the Epic of English virtue and valour at the same period.
+
+At the Dublin meeting described by Bryskett, some time later than 1584,
+Spenser had already "well entered into" his work. In 1589, he came to
+England, bringing with him the first three books; and early in 1590,
+they were published. Spenser himself has told us the story of this first
+appearance of the _Faery Queen_. The person who discovered the
+extraordinary work of genius which was growing up amid the turbulence
+and misery and despair of Ireland, and who once more brought its author
+into the centre of English life, was Walter Ralegh. Ralegh had served
+through much of the Munster war. He had shown in Ireland some of the
+characteristic points of his nature, which made him at once the glory
+and shame of English manhood. He had begun to take a prominent place in
+any business in which he engaged. He had shown his audacity, his
+self-reliance, his resource, and some signs of that boundless but
+prudent ambition which marked his career. He had shown that freedom of
+tongue, that restless and high-reaching inventiveness, and that tenacity
+of opinion, which made him a difficult person for others to work with.
+Like so many of the English captains, he hated Ormond, and saw in his
+feud with the Desmonds the real cause of the hopeless disorder of
+Munster. But also he incurred the displeasure and suspicion of Lord
+Grey, who equally disliked the great Irish Chief, but who saw in the
+"plot" which Ralegh sent to Burghley for the pacification of Munster, an
+adventurer's impracticable and self-seeking scheme. "I must be plain,"
+he writes, "I like neither his carriage nor his company." Ralegh had
+been at Smerwick: he had been in command of one of the bands put in by
+Lord Grey to do the execution. On Lord Grey's departure he had become
+one of the leading persons among the undertakers for the planting of
+Munster. He had secured for himself a large share of the Desmond lands.
+In 1587, an agreement among the undertakers assigned to Sir Walter
+Ralegh, his associates and tenants, three seignories of 12,000 acres
+a-piece, and one of 6000, in Cork and Waterford. But before Lord Grey's
+departure, Ralegh had left Ireland, and had found the true field for his
+ambition, in the English court. From 1582 to 1589, he had shared with
+Leicester and Hatton and afterwards with Essex, the special favour of
+the Queen. He had become Warden of the Stannaries and Captain of the
+Guard. He had undertaken the adventure of founding a new realm in
+America under the name of Virginia. He had obtained grants of
+monopolies, farms of wines, Babington's forfeited estates. His own great
+ship, which he had built, the Ark Ralegh, had carried the flag of the
+High Admiral of England in the glorious but terrible summer of 1588. He
+joined in that tremendous sea-chase from Plymouth to the North Sea,
+when, as Spenser wrote to Lord Howard of Effingham--
+
+         Those huge castles of Castilian King,
+     That vainly threatened kingdoms to displace,
+     Like flying doves, ye did before you chase.
+
+In the summer of 1589, Ralegh had been busy, as men of the sea were
+then, half Queen's servants, half buccaneers, in gathering the abundant
+spoils to be found on the high seas; and he had been with Sir John
+Norreys and Sir Francis Drake in a bootless but not unprofitable
+expedition to Lisbon. On his return from the Portugal voyage his court
+fortunes underwent a change. Essex, who had long scorned "that knave
+Ralegh," was in the ascendant. Ralegh found the Queen, for some reason
+or another, and reasons were not hard to find, offended and dangerous.
+He bent before the storm. In the end of the summer of 1589, he was in
+Ireland, looking after his large seignories, his law-suits with the old
+proprietors, his castle at Lismore, and his schemes for turning to
+account his woods for the manufacture of pipe staves for the French and
+Spanish wine trade.
+
+He visited Spenser, who was his neighbour, at Kilcolman, and the visit
+led to important consequences. The record of it and of the events which
+followed, is preserved in a curious poem of Spenser's written two or
+three years later, and of much interest in regard to Spenser's personal
+history. Taking up the old pastoral form of the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+with the familiar rustic names of the swains who figured in its
+dialogues,--Hobbinol, Cuddie, Rosalind, and his own Colin Clout,--he
+described under the usual poetical disguise, the circumstances which
+once more took him back from Ireland to the court. The court was the
+place to which all persons wishing to push their way in the world were
+attracted. It was not only the centre of all power, the source of
+favours and honours, the seat of all that swayed the destiny of the
+nation. It was the home of refinement, and wit, and cultivation, the
+place where eminence of all kinds was supposed to be collected, and to
+which all ambitions, literary as much as political, aspired. It was not
+only a royal court; it was also a great club. Spenser's poem shows us
+how he had sped there, and the impressions made on his mind by a closer
+view of the persons and the ways of that awful and dazzling scene,
+which exercised such a spell upon Englishmen, and which seemed to
+combine or concentrate in itself the glory and the goodness of heaven,
+and all the baseness and malignity of earth. The occasion deserved a
+full celebration; it was indeed a turning-point in his life, for it led
+to the publication of the _Faery Queen_, and to the immediate and
+enthusiastic recognition by the Englishmen of the time of his unrivalled
+pre-eminence as a poet. In this poetical record, _Colin Clout's come
+home again_, containing in it history, criticism, satire, personal
+recollections, love passages, we have the picture of his recollections
+of the flush and excitement of those months which saw the first
+appearance of the _Faery Queen_. He describes the interruption of his
+retired and, as he paints it, peaceful and pastoral life in his Irish
+home, by the appearance of Ralegh, the "Shepherd of the Ocean," from
+"the main sea deep." They may have been thrown together before. Both had
+been patronized by Leicester. Both had been together at Smerwick, and
+probably in other passages of the Munster war; both had served under
+Lord Grey, Spenser's master, though he had been no lover of Ralegh. In
+their different degrees, Ralegh with his two or three Seignories of half
+a county, and Spenser with his more modest estate, they were embarked in
+the same enterprise, the plantation of Munster. But Ralegh now appeared
+before Spenser in all the glory of a brilliant favourite, the soldier,
+the explorer, the daring sea-captain, the founder of plantations across
+the ocean, and withal, the poet, the ready and eloquent discourser, the
+true judge and measurer of what was great or beautiful.
+
+The time, too, was one at once of excitement and repose. Men felt as
+they feel after a great peril, a great effort, a great relief; as the
+Greeks did after Salamis and Platæa, as our fathers did after Waterloo.
+In the struggle in the Channel with the might of Spain, England had
+recognized its force and its prospects. One of those solemn moments had
+just passed when men see before them the course of the world turned one
+way, when it might have been turned another. All the world had been
+looking out to see what would come to pass; and nowhere more eagerly
+than in Ireland. Every one, English and Irish alike, stood agaze to "see
+how the game would be played." The great fleet, as it drew near, "worked
+wonderfully uncertain yet calm humours in the people, not daring to
+disclose their real intention." When all was decided, and the distressed
+ships were cast away on the western coast, the Irish showed as much zeal
+as the English in fulfilling the orders of the Irish council, to
+"apprehend and execute all Spaniards found there of what quality
+soever." These were the impressions under which the two men met. Ralegh,
+at the moment, was under a cloud. In the poetical fancy picture set
+before us--
+
+     His song was all a lamentable lay
+     Of great unkindnesse, and of usage hard,
+     Of Cynthia the Ladie of the Sea,
+     Which from her presence faultlesse him debard.
+     And ever and anon, with singults rife,
+     He cryed out, to make his undersong;
+     Ah! my loves queene, and goddesse of my life,
+     Who shall me pittie, when thou doest me wrong?
+
+At Kilcolman, Ralegh became acquainted with what Spenser had done of the
+_Faery Queen_. His rapid and clear judgment showed him how immeasurably
+it rose above all that had yet been produced under the name of poetry in
+England. That alone is sufficient to account for his eager desire that
+it should be known in England. But Ralegh always had an eye to his own
+affairs, marred as they so often were by ill-fortune and his own
+mistakes; and he may have thought of making his peace with Cynthia, by
+reintroducing at Court the friend of Philip Sidney, now ripened into a
+poet not unworthy of Gloriana's greatness. This is Colin Clout's
+account:--
+
+     When thus our pipes we both had wearied well,
+     (Quoth he) and each an end of singing made,
+     He gan to cast great lyking to my lore,
+     And great dislyking to my lucklesse lot,
+     That banisht had my selfe, like wight forlore,
+     Into that waste, where I was quite forgot.
+     The which to leave, thenceforth he counseld mee,
+     Unmeet for man, in whom was ought regardfull,
+     And wend with him, his Cynthia to see:
+     Whose grace was great, and bounty most rewardfull;
+     Besides her peerlesse skill in making well,
+     And all the ornaments of wondrous wit,
+     Such as all womankynd did far excell,
+     Such as the world admyr'd, and praised it.
+     So what with hope of good, and hate of ill,
+     He me perswaded forth with him to fare.
+     Nought tooke I with me, but mine oaten quill:
+     Small needments else need shepheard to prepare.
+     So to the sea we came; the sea, that is
+     A world of waters heaped up on hie,
+     Rolling like mountaines in wide wildernesse,
+     Horrible, hideous, roaring with hoarse crie.
+
+This is followed by a spirited description of a sea-voyage, and of that
+empire of the seas in which, since the overthrow of the Armada, England
+and England's mistress were now claiming to be supreme, and of which
+Ralegh was one of the most active and distinguished officers:--
+
+     And yet as ghastly dreadfull, as it seemes,
+     Bold men, presuming life for gaine to sell,
+     Dare tempt that gulf, and in those wandring stremes
+     Seek waies unknowne, waies leading down to hell.
+     For, as we stood there waiting on the strond,
+     Behold! an huge great vessell to us came,
+     Dauncing upon the waters back to lond,
+     As if it scornd the daunger of the same;
+     Yet was it but a wooden frame and fraile,
+     Glewed togither with some subtile matter.
+     Yet had it armes and wings, and head and taile,
+     And life to move it selfe upon the water.
+     Strange thing! how bold and swift the monster was,
+     That neither car'd for wind, nor haile, nor raine,
+     Nor swelling waves, but thorough them did passe
+     So proudly, that she made them roare againe.
+     The same aboord us gently did receave,
+     And without harme us farre away did beare,
+     So farre that land, our mother, us did leave,
+     And nought but sea and heaven to us appeare.
+     Then hartlesse quite, and full of inward feare,
+     That shepheard I besought to me to tell,
+     Under what skie, or in what world we were,
+     In which I saw no living people dwell.
+     Who, me recomforting all that he might,
+     Told me that that same was the Regiment
+     Of a great Shepheardesse, that Cynthia hight,
+     His liege, his Ladie, and his lifes Regent.
+
+This is the poetical version of Ralegh's appreciation of the treasure
+which he had lighted on in Ireland, and of what he did to make it known
+to the admiration and delight of England. He returned to the Court, and
+Spenser with him. Again, for what reason we know not, he was received
+into favour. The poet, who accompanied him, was brought to the presence
+of the lady, who saw herself in "various mirrors,"--Cynthia, Gloriana,
+Belphoebe, as she heard him read portions of the great poem which was
+to add a new glory to her reign.
+
+       "The Shepheard of the Ocean (quoth he)
+     Unto that Goddesse grace me first enhanced,
+     And to mine oaten pipe enclin'd her eare,
+     That she thenceforth therein gan take delight;
+     And it desir'd at timely houres to heare,
+     All were my notes but rude and roughly dight;
+     For not by measure of her owne great mynde,
+     And wondrous worth, she mott my simple song,
+     But joyd that country shepheard ought could fynd
+     Worth harkening to, emongst the learned throng."
+
+He had already too well caught the trick of flattery--flattery in a
+degree almost inconceivable to us--which the fashions of the time, and
+the Queen's strange self-deceit, exacted from the loyalty and enthusiasm
+of Englishmen. In that art Ralegh was only too apt a teacher. Colin
+Clout, in his story of his recollections of the Court, lets us see how
+he was taught to think and to speak there:--
+
+     But if I her like ought on earth might read,
+     I would her lyken to a crowne of lillies,
+     Upon a virgin brydes adorned head,
+     With Roses dight and Goolds and Daffadillies;
+     Or like the circlet of a Turtle true,
+     In which all colours of the rainbow bee;
+     Or like faire Phebes garlond shining new,
+     In which all pure perfection one may see.
+     But vaine it is to thinke, by paragone
+     Of earthly things, to judge of things divine:
+     Her power, her mercy, her wisdome, none
+     Can deeme, but who the Godhead can define.
+     Why then do I, base shepheard, bold and blind,
+     Presume the things so sacred to prophane?
+     More fit it is t' adore, with humble mind,
+     The image of the heavens in shape humane.
+
+The Queen, who heard herself thus celebrated, celebrated not only as a
+semi-divine person, but as herself unrivalled in the art of "making" or
+poetry,--"her peerless skill in making well,"--granted Spenser a pension
+of 50_l._ a year, which, it is said, the prosaic and frugal Lord
+Treasurer, always hard-driven for money and not caring much for poets,
+made difficulties about paying. But the new poem was not for the
+Queen's ear only. In the registers of the Stationers' Company occurs the
+following entry:--
+
+                                      Primo die Decembris [1589].
+
+     Mr. Ponsonbye--Entered for his Copye, a book intytuled the
+     _fayrye Queene_ dysposed into xij bookes &c., authorysed under
+     thandes of the Archbishop of Canterbery and bothe the Wardens.
+
+                                                           vj{d.}
+
+Thus, between pamphlets of the hour,--an account of the Arms of the City
+Companies on one side, and the last news from France on the other,--the
+first of our great modern English poems was licensed to make its
+appearance. It appeared soon after, with the date of 1590. It was not
+the twelve books, but only the first three. It was accompanied and
+introduced, as usual, by a great host of commendatory and laudatory
+sonnets and poems. All the leading personages at Elizabeth's court were
+appealed to; according to their several tastes or their relations to the
+poet, they are humbly asked to befriend, or excuse, or welcome his
+poetical venture. The list itself is worth quoting:--Sir Christopher
+Hatton, then Lord Chancellor, the Earls of Essex, Oxford,
+Northumberland, Ormond, Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord Grey of Wilton,
+Sir Walter Ralegh, Lord Burleigh, the Earl of Cumberland, Lord Hunsdon,
+Lord Buckhurst, Walsingham, Sir John Norris, President of Munster. He
+addresses Lady Pembroke, in remembrance of her brother, that "heroic
+spirit," "the glory of our days,"
+
+     Who first my Muse did lift out of the floor,
+     To sing his sweet delights in lowly lays.
+
+And he finishes with a sonnet to Lady Carew, one of Sir John Spencer's
+daughters, and another to "all the gracious and beautiful ladies of the
+Court," in which "the world's pride seems to be gathered." There come
+also congratulations and praises for himself. Ralegh addressed to him a
+fine but extravagant sonnet, in which he imagined Petrarch weeping for
+envy at the approval of the _Faery Queen_, while "Oblivion laid him down
+on Laura's hearse," and even Homer trembled for his fame. Gabriel Harvey
+revoked his judgment on the _Elvish Queen_, and not without some regret
+for less ambitious days in the past, cheered on his friend in his noble
+enterprise. Gabriel Harvey has been so much, and not without reason,
+laughed at, and yet his verses welcoming the _Faery Queen_ are so full
+of true and warm friendship, and of unexpected refinement and grace,
+that it is but just to cite them. In the eyes of the world he was an
+absurd personage: but Spenser saw in him perhaps his worthiest and
+trustiest friend. A generous and simple affection has almost got the
+better in them of pedantry and false taste.
+
+     Collyn, I see, by thy new taken taske,
+       Some sacred fury hath enricht thy braynes,
+     That leades thy muse in haughty verse to maske,
+       And loath the layes that longs to lowly swaynes;
+     That lifts thy notes from Shepheardes unto kinges:
+     So like the lively Larke that mounting singes.
+
+     Thy lovely Rosolinde seemes now forlorne,
+       And all thy gentle flockes forgotten quight:
+     Thy chaunged hart now holdes thy pypes in scorne,
+       Those prety pypes that did thy mates delight;
+     Those trusty mates, that loved thee so well;
+     Whom thou gav'st mirth, as they gave thee the bell.
+
+     Yet, as thou earst with thy sweete roundelayes
+       Didst stirre to glee our laddes in homely bowers;
+     So moughtst thou now in these refyned layes
+       Delight the daintie eares of higher powers:
+     And so mought they, in their deepe skanning skill,
+     Alow and grace our Collyns flowing quyll.
+
+     And faire befall that _Faery Queene_ of thine,
+       In whose faire eyes love linckt with vertue sittes;
+     Enfusing, by those bewties fyers devyne,
+       Such high conceites into thy humble wittes,
+     As raised hath poore pastors oaten reedes
+     From rustick tunes, to chaunt heroique deedes.
+
+     So mought thy _Redcrosse Knight_ with happy hand
+       Victorious be in that faire Ilands right,
+     Which thou dost vayle in Type of Faery land,
+       Elizas blessed field, that _Albion_ hight:
+     That shieldes her friendes, and warres her mightie foes,
+     Yet still with people, peace, and plentie flowes.
+
+     But (jolly shepheard) though with pleasing style
+       Thou feast the humour of the Courtly trayne,
+     Let not conceipt thy setled sence beguile,
+       Ne daunted be through envy or disdaine.
+     Subject thy dome to her Empyring spright,
+     From whence thy Muse, and all the world, takes light.
+
+                                                        HOBYNOLL.
+
+And to the Queen herself Spenser presented his work, in one of the
+boldest dedications perhaps ever penned:--
+
+                                  To
+               The Most High, Mightie, and Magnificent
+                              Empresse,
+       Renowmed for piety, vertve, and all gratiovs government,
+                              ELIZABETH,
+                         By the Grace of God,
+      Qveene of England, Fravnce, and Ireland, and of Virginia,
+                     Defendovr of the Faith, &c.
+                       Her most hvmble Servavnt
+                           EDMVND SPENSER,
+                       Doth, in all hvmilitie,
+                  Dedicate, present, and consecrate
+                          These his labovrs,
+               To live with the eternitie of her fame.
+
+"To live with the eternity of her fame,"--the claim was a proud one, but
+it has proved a prophecy. The publication of the _Faery Queen_ placed
+him at once and for his lifetime at the head of all living English
+poets. The world of his day immediately acknowledged the charm and
+perfection of the new work of art which had taken it by surprise. As far
+as appears, it was welcomed heartily and generously. Spenser speaks in
+places of envy and detraction, and he, like others, had no doubt his
+rivals and enemies. But little trace of censure appears, except in the
+stories about Burghley's dislike of him, as an idle rimer, and perhaps
+as a friend of his opponents. But his brother poets, men like Lodge and
+Drayton, paid honour, though in quaint phrases, to the learned Colin,
+the reverend Colin, the excellent and cunning Colin. A greater than
+they, if we may trust his editors, takes him as the representative of
+poetry, which is so dear to him.
+
+     If music and sweet poetry agree,
+     As they must needs, the sister and the brother,
+     Then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me,
+     Because thou lov'st the one, and I the other.
+     _Dowland_ to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
+     Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
+     _Spenser_ to me, whose deep conceit is such
+     As passing all conceit, needs no defence.
+     Thou lov'st to hear the sweet melodious sound
+     That Phoebus' lute, the queen of music, makes;
+     And I in deep delight am chiefly drown'd
+     Whenas himself to singing he betakes.
+     One god is god of both, as poets feign;
+     One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.
+
+               (_Shakespere_, in the _Passionate Pilgrim_, 1599.)
+
+Even the fierce pamphleteer, Thomas Nash, the scourge and torment of
+poor Gabriel Harvey, addresses Harvey's friend as heavenly Spenser, and
+extols "the Faery Singers' stately tuned verse." Spenser's title to be
+the "Poet of poets," was at once acknowledged as by acclamation. And he
+himself has no difficulty in accepting his position. In some lines on
+the death of a friend's wife, whom he laments and praises, the idea
+presents itself that the great queen may not approve of her Shepherd
+wasting his lays on meaner persons; and he puts into his friend's mouth
+a deprecation of her possible jealousy. The lines are characteristic,
+both in their beauty and music, and in the strangeness, in our eyes, of
+the excuse made for the poet.
+
+     Ne let Eliza, royall Shepheardesse,
+     The praises of my parted love envy,
+     For she hath praises in all plenteousnesse
+     Powr'd upon her, like showers of Castaly,
+     By her own Shepheard, Colin, her owne Shepheard,
+     That her with heavenly hymnes doth deifie,
+     Of rustick muse full hardly to be betterd.
+
+     She is the Rose, the glorie of the day,
+     And mine the Primrose in the lowly shade:
+     Mine, ah! not mine; amisse I mine did say:
+     Not mine, but His, which mine awhile her made;
+     Mine to be His, with him to live for ay.
+     O that so faire a flower so soone should fade,
+     And through untimely tempest fall away!
+
+     She fell away in her first ages spring,
+     Whil'st yet her leafe was greene, and fresh her rinde,
+     And whilst her braunch faire blossomes foorth did bring,
+     She fell away against all course of kinde.
+     For age to dye is right, but youth is wrong;
+     She fel away like fruit blowne downe with winde.
+     Weepe, Shepheard! weepe, to make my undersong.
+
+Thus in both his literary enterprises, Spenser had been signally
+successful. The _Shepherd's Calendar_ in 1580 had immediately raised
+high hopes of his powers. The _Faery Queen_ in 1590 had more than
+fulfilled them. In the interval a considerable change had happened in
+English cultivation. Shakespere had come to London, though the world
+did not yet know all that he was. Sidney had published his _Defense of
+Poesie_, and had written the _Arcadia_, though it was not yet published.
+Marlowe had begun to write, and others beside him were preparing the
+change which was to come on the English Drama. Two scholars who had
+shared with Spenser in the bounty of Robert Newell were beginning, in
+different lines, to raise the level of thought and style. Hooker was
+beginning to give dignity to controversy, and to show what English prose
+might rise to. Lancelot Andrewes, Spenser's junior at school and
+college, was training himself at St. Paul's, to lead the way to a larger
+and higher kind of preaching than the English clergy had yet reached.
+The change of scene from Ireland to the centre of English interests,
+must have been, as Spenser describes it, very impressive. England was
+alive with aspiration and effort; imaginations were inflamed and hearts
+stirred by the deeds of men who described with the same energy with
+which they acted. Amid such influences, and with such a friend as
+Ralegh, Spenser may naturally have been tempted by some of the dreams of
+advancement of which Ralegh's soul was full. There is strong
+probability, from the language of his later poems, that he indulged such
+hopes, and that they were disappointed. A year after the entry in the
+Stationers' Register of the _Faery Queen_ (29 Dec., 1590), Ponsonby, his
+publisher, entered a volume of "_Complaints, containing sundry small
+poems of the World's Vanity_," to which he prefixed the following
+notice.
+
+     THE PRINTER TO THE GENTLE READER.
+
+     SINCE my late setting foorth of the _Faerie Queene_, finding
+     that it hath found a favourable passage amongst you, I have
+     sithence endevoured by all good meanes (for the better
+     encrease and accomplishment of your delights,) to get into my
+     handes such smale Poemes of the same Authors, as I heard were
+     disperst abroad in sundrie hands, and not easie to bee come
+     by, by himselfe; some of them having bene diverslie imbeziled
+     and purloyned from him since his departure over Sea. Of the
+     which I have, by good meanes, gathered togeather these fewe
+     parcels present, which I have caused to bee imprinted
+     altogeather, for that they al seeme to containe like matter of
+     argument in them; being all complaints and meditations of the
+     worlds vanitie, verie grave and profitable. To which effect I
+     understand that he besides wrote sundrie others, namelie
+     _Ecclesiastes_ and _Canticum canticorum_ translated, _A
+     senights slumber_, _The hell of lovers_, _his Purgatorie_,
+     being all dedicated to Ladies; so as it may seeme he ment them
+     all to one volume. Besides some other Pamphlets looselie
+     scattered abroad, as _The dying Pellican_, _The howers of the
+     Lord_, _The sacrifice of a sinner_, _The seven Psalmes_, &c.,
+     which when I can, either by himselfe or otherwise, attaine
+     too, I meane likewise for your favour sake to set foorth. In
+     the meane time, praying you gentlie to accept of these, and
+     graciouslie to entertaine the new Poet, _I take leave_.
+
+The collection is a miscellaneous one, both as to subjects and date: it
+contains among other things, the translations from Petrarch and Du
+Bellay, which had appeared in Vander Noodt's _Theatre of Worldlings_, in
+1569. But there are also some pieces of later date; and they disclose
+not only personal sorrows and griefs, but also an experience which had
+ended in disgust and disappointment. In spite of Ralegh's friendship, he
+had found that in the Court he was not likely to thrive. The two
+powerful men who had been his earliest friends had disappeared. Philip
+Sidney had died in 1586; Leicester, soon after the destruction of the
+Armada, in 1588. And they had been followed (April, 1590) by Sidney's
+powerful father-in-law, Francis Walsingham. The death of Leicester,
+untended, unlamented, powerfully impressed Spenser, always keenly alive
+to the pathetic vicissitudes of human greatness. In one of these pieces,
+_The Ruins of Time_, addressed to Sidney's sister, the Countess of
+Pembroke, Spenser thus imagines the death of Leicester,--
+
+     It is not long, since these two eyes beheld
+     A mightie Prince, of most renowmed race,
+     Whom England high in count of honour held,
+     And greatest ones did sue to gaine his grace;
+     Of greatest ones he, greatest in his place,
+     Sate in the bosome of his Soveraine,
+     And _Right and loyall_ did his word maintaine.
+
+     I saw him die, I saw him die, as one
+     Of the meane people, and brought foorth on beare;
+     I saw him die, and no man left to mone
+     His dolefull fate, that late him loved deare:
+     Scarse anie left to close his eylids neare;
+     Scarse anie left upon his lips to laie
+     The sacred sod, or Requiem to saie.
+
+     O! trustless state of miserable men,
+     That builde your blis on hope of earthly thing,
+     And vainlie thinke your selves halfe happie then,
+     When painted faces with smooth flattering
+     Doo fawne on you, and your wide praises sing;
+     And, when the courting masker louteth lowe,
+     Him true in heart and trustie to you trow.
+
+For Sidney, the darling of the time, who had been to him not merely a
+cordial friend, but the realized type of all that was glorious in
+manhood, and beautiful in character and gifts, his mourning was more
+than that of a looker-on at a moving instance of the frailty of
+greatness. It was the poet's sorrow for the poet, who had almost been to
+him what the elder brother is to the younger. Both now, and in later
+years, his affection for one who was become to him a glorified saint,
+showed itself in deep and genuine expression, through the affectations
+which crowned the "herse" of Astrophel and Philisides. He was persuaded
+that Sidney's death had been a grave blow to literature and learning.
+The _Ruins of Time_, and still more the _Tears of the Muses_, are full
+of lamentations over returning barbarism and ignorance, and the slight
+account made by those in power of the gifts and the arts of the writer,
+the poet, and the dramatist. Under what was popularly thought the
+crabbed and parsimonious administration of Burghley, and with the
+churlishness of the Puritans, whom he was supposed to foster, it seemed
+as if the poetry of the time was passing away in chill discouragement.
+The effect is described in lines which, as we now naturally suppose, and
+Dryden also thought, can refer to no one but Shakespere. But it seems
+doubtful whether all this could have been said of Shakespere in 1590. It
+seems more likely that this also is an extravagant compliment to Philip
+Sidney, and his masking performances. He was lamented elsewhere under
+the poetical name of _Willy_. If it refers to him, it was probably
+written before his death, though not published till after it; for the
+lines imply, not that he is literally dead, but that he is in
+retirement. The expression that he is "dead of late," is explained in
+four lines below, as "choosing to sit in idle cell," and is one of
+Spenser's common figures for inactivity or sorrow.[107:1]
+
+The verses are the lamentations of the Muse of Comedy.
+
+     THALIA.
+
+     Where be the sweete delights of learning's treasure
+     That wont with Comick sock to beautefie
+     The painted Theaters, and fill with pleasure
+     The listners eyes and eares with melodie;
+     In which I late was wont to raine as Queene,
+     And maske in mirth with Graces well bescene?
+
+     O! all is gone; and all that goodly glee,
+     Which wont to be the glorie of gay wits,
+     Is layed abed, and no where now to see;
+     And in her roome unseemly Sorrow sits,
+     With hollow browes and greisly countenaunce,
+     Marring my joyous gentle dalliaunce.
+
+     And him beside sits ugly Barbarisme,
+     And brutish Ignorance, ycrept of late
+     Out of dredd darknes of the deepe Abysme,
+     Where being bredd, he light and heaven does hate:
+     They in the mindes of men now tyrannize,
+     And the faire Scene with rudenes foule disguize.
+
+     All places they with follie have possest,
+     And with vaine toyes the vulgare entertaine;
+     But me have banished, with all the rest
+     That whilome wont to wait upon my traine,
+     Fine Counterfesaunce, and unhurtfull Sport,
+     Delight, and Laughter, deckt in seemly sort.
+
+     All these, and all that els the Comick Stage
+     With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced,
+     By which mans life in his likest image
+     Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced;
+     And those sweete wits, which wont the like to frame,
+     Are now despizd, and made a laughing game.
+
+     And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made
+     To mock her selfe, and truth to imitate,
+     With kindly counter under Mimick shade,
+     Our pleasant Willy, ah! _is dead of late_;
+     With whom all joy and jolly merriment
+     Is also deaded, and in dolour drent.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     But that same gentle Spirit, from whose pen
+     Large streames of honnie and sweete Nectar flowe,
+     Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men,
+     Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,
+     Doth rather choose to sit in idle Cell,
+     Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell.
+
+But the most remarkable of these pieces is a satirical fable, _Mother
+Hubberd's Tale of the Ape and Fox_, which may take rank with the
+satirical writings of Chaucer and Dryden for keenness of touch, for
+breadth of treatment, for swing and fiery scorn, and sustained strength
+of sarcasm. By his visit to the Court, Spenser had increased his
+knowledge of the realities of life. That brilliant Court, with a goddess
+at its head, and full of charming swains and divine nymphs, had also
+another side. It was still his poetical heaven. But with that odd
+insensibility to anomaly and glaring contrasts, which is seen in his
+time, and perhaps exists at all times, he passed from the celebration of
+the dazzling glories of Cynthia's Court, into a fierce vein of invective
+against its treacheries, its vain shows, its unceasing and mean
+intrigues, its savage jealousies, its fatal rivalries, the scramble
+there for preferment in Church and State. When it is considered what
+great persons might easily and naturally have been identified at the
+time with the _Ape and the Fox_, the confederate impostors, charlatans,
+and bullying swindlers, who had stolen the lion's skin, and by it
+mounted to the high places of the State, it seems to be a proof of the
+indifference of the Court to the power of mere literature, that it
+should have been safe to write and publish so freely, and so cleverly.
+Dull Catholic lampoons and Puritan scurrilities did not pass thus
+unnoticed. They were viewed as dangerous to the State, and dealt with
+accordingly. The fable contains what we can scarcely doubt to be some of
+that wisdom which Spenser learnt by his experience of the Court.
+
+     So pitifull a thing is Suters state!
+     Most miserable man, whom wicked fate
+     Hath brought to Court, to sue for _had-ywist_,
+     That few have found, and manie one hath mist!
+     Full little knowest thou, that hast not tride,
+     What hell it is in suing long to bide:
+     To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;
+     To wast long nights in pensive discontent;
+     To speed to day, to be put back to morrow;
+     To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow;
+     To have thy Princes grace, yet want her Peeres;
+     To have thy asking, yet waite manie yeeres;
+     To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;
+     To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires;
+     To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,
+     To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.
+     Unhappie wight, borne to disastrous end,
+     That doth his life in so long tendance spend!
+       Who ever leaves sweete home, where meane estate
+     In safe assurance, without strife or hate,
+     Findes all things needfull for contentment meeke,
+     And will to Court for shadowes vaine to seeke,
+     Or hope to gaine, himselfe will a daw trie:
+     That curse God send unto mine enemie!
+
+Spenser probably did not mean his characters to fit too closely to
+living persons. That might have been dangerous. But it is difficult to
+believe that he had not distinctly in his eye a very great personage,
+the greatest in England next to the Queen, in the following picture of
+the doings of the Fox installed at Court.
+
+       But the false Foxe most kindly plaid his part;
+     For whatsoever mother-wit or arte
+     Could worke, he put in proofe: no practise slie,
+     No counterpoint of cunning policie,
+     No reach, no breach, that might him profit bring,
+     But he the same did to his purpose wring.
+     Nought suffered he the Ape to give or graunt,
+     But through his hand must passe the Fiaunt.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     He chaffred Chayres in which Churchmen were set,
+     And breach of lawes to privie ferme did let:
+     No statute so established might bee,
+     Nor ordinaunce so needfull, but that hee
+     Would violate, though not with violence,
+     Yet under colour of the confidence
+     The which the Ape repos'd in him alone,
+     And reckned him the kingdomes corner stone.
+     And ever, when he ought would bring to pas,
+     His long experience the platforme was:
+     And, when he ought not pleasing would put by
+     The cloke was care of thrift, and husbandry,
+     For to encrease the common treasures store;
+     But his owne treasure he encreased more,
+     And lifted up his loftie towres thereby,
+     That they began to threat the neighbour sky;
+     The whiles the Princes pallaces fell fast
+     To ruine (for what thing can ever last?)
+     And whilest the other Peeres, for povertie,
+     Were forst their auncient houses to let lie,
+     And their olde Castles to the ground to fall,
+     Which their forefathers, famous over-all,
+     Had founded for the Kingdome's ornament,
+     And for their memories long moniment:
+     But he no count made of Nobilitie,
+     Nor the wilde beasts whom armes did glorifie,
+     The Realmes chiefe strength and girlond of the crowne.
+     All these through fained crimes he thrust adowne,
+     Or made them dwell in darknes of disgrace;
+     For none, but whom he list, might come in place.
+       Of men of armes he had but small regard,
+     But kept them lowe, and streigned verie hard.
+     For men of learning little he esteemed;
+     His wisdome he above their learning deemed.
+     As for the rascall Commons, least he cared,
+     For not so common was his bountie shared.
+     Let God, (said he) if please, care for the manie,
+     I for my selfe must care before els anie.
+     So did he good to none, to manie ill,
+     So did he all the kingdome rob and pill;
+     Yet none durst speake, ne none durst of him plaine,
+     So groat he was in grace, and rich through gaine.
+     Ne would he anie let to have accesse
+     Unto the Prince, but by his owne addresse,
+     For all that els did come were sure to faile.
+
+Even at Court, however, the poet finds a contrast to all this: he had
+known Philip Sidney, and Ralegh was his friend.
+
+     Yet the brave Courtier, in whose beauteous thought
+     Regard of honour harbours more than ought,
+     Doth loath such base condition, to backbite
+     Anies good name for envie or despite:
+     He stands on tearmes of honourable minde,
+     Ne will be carried with the common winde
+     Of Courts inconstant mutabilitie,
+     Ne after everie tattling fable flie;
+     But heares and sees the follies of the rest,
+     And thereof gathers for himselfe the best.
+     He will not creepe, nor crouche with fained face,
+     But walkes upright with comely stedfast pace,
+     And unto all doth yeeld due curtesie;
+     But not with kissed hand belowe the knee,
+     As that same Apish crue is wont to doo:
+     For he disdaines himselfe t' embase theretoo.
+     He hates fowle leasings, and vile flatterie,
+     Two filthie blots in noble gentrie;
+     And lothefull idlenes he doth detest,
+     The canker worme of everie gentle brest.
+
+     Or lastly, when the bodie list to pause,
+     His minde unto the Muses he withdrawes:
+     Sweete Ladie Muses, Ladies of delight,
+     Delights of life, and ornaments of light!
+     With whom he close confers with wise discourse,
+     Of Natures workes, of heavens continuall course,
+     Of forreine lands, of people different,
+     Of kingdomes change, of divers gouvernment,
+     Of dreadfull battailes of renowned Knights;
+     With which he kindleth his ambitious sprights
+     To like desire and praise of noble fame,
+     The onely upshot whereto he doth ayme:
+     For all his minde on honour fixed is,
+     To which he levels all his purposis,
+     And in his Princes service spends his dayes,
+     Not so much for to gaine, or for to raise
+     Himselfe to high degree, as for his grace,
+     And in his liking to winne worthie place,
+     Through due deserts and comely carriage.
+
+The fable also throws light on the way in which Spenser regarded the
+religious parties, whose strife was becoming loud and threatening.
+Spenser is often spoken of as a Puritan. He certainly had the Puritan
+hatred of Rome; and in the Church system as it existed in England he saw
+many instances of ignorance, laziness, and corruption; and he agreed
+with the Puritans in denouncing them. His pictures of the "formal
+priest," with his excuses for doing nothing, his new-fashioned and
+improved substitutes for the ornate and also too lengthy ancient
+service, and his general ideas of self-complacent comfort, has in it an
+odd mixture of Roman Catholic irony with Puritan censure. Indeed, though
+Spenser hated with an Englishman's hatred all that he considered Roman
+superstition and tyranny, he had a sense of the poetical impressiveness
+of the old ceremonial, and the ideas which clung to it, its pomp, its
+beauty, its suggestiveness, very far removed from the iconoclastic
+temper of the Puritans. In his _View of the State of Ireland_, he notes
+as a sign of its evil condition the state of the churches, "most of them
+ruined and even with the ground," and the rest "so unhandsomely patched
+and thatched, that men do even shun the places, for the uncomeliness
+thereof." "The outward form (assure yourself)," he adds, "doth greatly
+draw the rude people to the reverencing and frequenting thereof,
+_whatever some of our late too nice fools may say_, that there is
+nothing in the seemly form and comely order of the church."
+
+     "Ah! but (said th' Ape) the charge is wondrous great,
+     To feede mens soules, and hath an heavie threat."
+     "To feed mens soules (quoth he) is not in man;
+     For they must feed themselves, doo what we can.
+     We are but charged to lay the meate before:
+     Eate they that list, we need to doo no more.
+     But God it is that feeds them with his grace,
+     The bread of life powr'd downe from heavenly place.
+     Therefore said he, that with the budding rod
+     Did rule the Jewes, _All shalbe taught of God_.
+     That same hath Jesus Christ now to him raught,
+     By whom the flock is rightly fed, and taught:
+     He is the Shepheard, and the Priest is hee;
+     We but his shepheard swaines ordain'd to bee.
+     Therefore herewith doo not your selfe dismay;
+     Ne is the paines so great, but beare ye may,
+     For not so great, as it was wont of yore,
+     It's now a dayes, ne halfe so streight and sore.
+     They whilome used duly everie day
+     Their service and their holie things to say,
+     At morne and even, besides their Anthemes sweete,
+     Their penie Masses, and their Complynes meete,
+     Their Diriges, their Trentals, and their shrifts,
+     Their memories, their singings, and their gifts.
+     Now all those needlesse works are laid away;
+     Now once a weeke, upon the Sabbath day,
+     It is enough to doo our small devotion,
+     And then to follow any merrie motion.
+     Ne are we tyde to fast, but when we list;
+     Ne to weare garments base of wollen twist,
+     But with the finest silkes us to aray,
+     That before God we may appeare more gay,
+     Resembling Aarons glorie in his place:
+     For farre unfit it is, that person bace
+     Should with vile cloaths approach Gods majestie,
+     Whom no uncleannes may approachen nie;
+     Or that all men, which anie master serve,
+     Good garments for their service should deserve;
+     But he that serves the Lord of hoasts most high,
+     And that in highest place, t' approach him nigh,
+     And all the peoples prayers to present
+     Before his throne, as on ambassage sent
+     Both too and fro, should not deserve to weare
+     A garment better than of wooll or heare.
+     Beside, we may have lying by our sides
+     Our lovely Lasses, or bright shining Brides:
+     We be not tyde to wilfull chastitie,
+     But have the Gospell of free libertie."
+
+But his weapon is double-edged, and he had not much more love for
+
+     That ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace.
+
+The first prescription which the Priest gives to the Fox who desires to
+rise to preferment in the Church is to win the favour of some great
+Puritan noble.
+
+     First, therefore, when ye have in handsome wise
+     Your selfe attyred, as you can devise,
+     Then to some Noble-man your selfe applye,
+     Or other great one in the worldës eye,
+     That hath a zealous disposition
+     To God, and so to his religion.
+     There must thou fashion eke a godly zeale,
+     Such as no carpers may contrayre reveale;
+     For each thing fained ought more warie bee.
+     There thou must walke in sober gravitee,
+     And seeme as Saintlike as Sainte Radegund:
+     Fast much, pray oft, looke lowly on the ground,
+     And unto everie one doo curtesie meeke:
+     These lookes (nought saying) doo a benefice seeke,
+     And be thou sure one not to lack or long.
+
+But he is impartial, and points out that there are other ways of
+rising--by adopting the fashions of the Court, "facing, and forging, and
+scoffing, and crouching to please," and so to "mock out a benefice;" or
+else, by compounding with a patron to give him half the profits, and in
+the case of a bishopric, to submit to the alienation of its manors to
+some powerful favourite, as the Bishop of Salisbury had to surrender
+Sherborn to Sir Walter Ralegh. Spenser, in his dedication of _Mother
+Hubberd's Tale_ to one of the daughters of Sir John Spencer, Lady
+Compton and Monteagle, speaks of it as "long sithence composed in the
+raw conceit of youth." But, whatever this may mean, and it was his way
+thus to deprecate severe judgments, his allowing the publication of it
+at this time, shows, if the work itself did not show it, that he was in
+very serious earnest in his bitter sarcasms on the base and evil arts
+which brought success at the Court.
+
+He stayed in England about a year and a half [1590-91], long enough
+apparently to make up his mind that he had not much to hope for from his
+great friends, Ralegh and perhaps Essex, who were busy on their own
+schemes. Ralegh, from whom Spenser might hope most, was just beginning
+to plunge into that extraordinary career, in the thread of which, glory
+and disgrace, far-sighted and princely public spirit and insatiate
+private greed, were to be so strangely intertwined. In 1592 he planned
+the great adventure which astonished London by the fabulous plunder of
+the Spanish treasure-ships; in the same year he was in the Tower, under
+the Queen's displeasure for his secret marriage, affecting the most
+ridiculous despair at her going away from the neighbourhood, and pouring
+forth his flatteries on this old woman of sixty as if he had no bride of
+his own to love:--"I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander,
+hunting like Diana, walking like Venus; the gentle wind blowing her fair
+hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph; sometimes, sitting in the shade
+like a goddess; sometimes, singing like an angel; sometimes, playing
+like Orpheus--behold the sorrow of this world--once amiss, hath bereaved
+me of all." Then came the exploration of Guiana, the expedition to
+Cadiz, the Island voyage [1595-1597]. Ralegh had something else to do
+than to think of Spenser's fortunes.
+
+Spenser turned back once more to Ireland, to his clerkship of the
+Council of Munster, which he soon resigned; to be worried with law-suits
+about "lands in Shanballymore and Ballingrath," by his time-serving and
+oppressive Irish neighbour, Maurice Roche, Lord Fermoy; to brood still
+over his lost ideal and hero, Sidney; to write the story of his visit in
+the pastoral supplement to the _Shepherd's Calendar_, _Colin Clout's
+come home again_; to pursue the story of Gloriana's knights; and to find
+among the Irish maidens another Elizabeth, a wife instead of a queen,
+whose wooing and winning were to give new themes to his imagination.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[107:1] _v. Colin Clout_, l. 31. _Astrophel_, l. 175.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE FAERY QUEEN.
+
+
+"_Uncouth_ [= unknown], _unkist_," are the words from Chaucer,[118:1]
+with which the friend, who introduced Spenser's earliest poetry to the
+world, bespeaks forbearance, and promises matter for admiration and
+delight in the _Shepherd's Calendar_. "You have to know my new poet, he
+says in effect: and when you have learned his ways, you will find how
+much you have to honour and love him." "I doubt not," he says, with a
+boldness of prediction, manifestly sincere, which is remarkable about an
+unknown man, "that so soon as his name shall come into the knowledge of
+men, and his worthiness be sounded in the trump of fame, but that he
+shall be not only kissed, but also beloved of all, embraced of the most,
+and wondered at of the best." Never was prophecy more rapidly and more
+signally verified, probably beyond the prophet's largest expectation.
+But he goes on to explain and indeed apologize for certain features of
+the new poet's work, which even to readers of that day might seem open
+to exception. And to readers of to-day, the phrase, _uncouth, unkist_,
+certainly expresses what many have to confess, if they are honest, as to
+their first acquaintance with the _Faery Queen_. Its place in
+literature is established beyond controversy. Yet its first and
+unfamiliar aspect inspires respect, perhaps interest, rather than
+attracts and satisfies. It is not the remoteness of the subject alone,
+nor the distance of three centuries which raises a bar between it and
+those to whom it is new. Shakespere becomes familiar to us from the
+first moment. The impossible legends of Arthur have been made in the
+language of to-day once more to touch our sympathies, and have lent
+themselves to express our thoughts. But at first acquaintance the _Faery
+Queen_ to many of us has been disappointing. It has seemed not only
+antique, but artificial. It has seemed fantastic. It has seemed, we
+cannot help avowing, tiresome. It is not till the early appearances have
+worn off, and we have learned to make many allowances and to surrender
+ourselves to the feelings and the standards by which it claims to affect
+and govern us, that we really find under what noble guidance we are
+proceeding, and what subtle and varied spells are ever round us.
+
+I. The _Faery Queen_ is the work of an unformed literature, the product
+of an unperfected art. English poetry, English language, in Spenser's,
+nay in Shakespere's day, had much to learn, much to unlearn. They never,
+perhaps, have been stronger or richer, than in that marvellous burst of
+youth, with all its freedom of invention, of observation, of reflection.
+But they had not that which only the experience and practice of eventful
+centuries could give them. Even genius must wait for the gifts of time.
+It cannot forerun the limitations of its day, nor anticipate the
+conquests and common possessions of the future. Things are impossible to
+the first great masters of art which are easy to their second-rate
+successors. The possibility, or the necessity of breaking through some
+convention, of attempting some unattempted effort, had not, among other
+great enterprises, occurred to them. They were laying the steps in a
+magnificent fashion on which those after them were to rise. But we ought
+not to shut our eyes to mistakes or faults to which attention had not
+yet been awakened, or for avoiding which no reasonable means had been
+found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognize, both what is
+still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is
+no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon,
+which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the
+scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But
+all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, is always
+limited and imperfect.
+
+The _Faery Queen_, as a whole, bears on its face a great fault of
+construction. It carries with it no adequate account of its own story;
+it does not explain itself, or contain in its own structure what would
+enable a reader to understand how it arose. It has to be accounted for
+by a prose explanation and key outside of itself. The poet intended to
+reserve the central event, which was the occasion of all the adventures
+of the poem, till they had all been related, leaving them as it were in
+the air, till at the end of twelve long books the reader should at last
+be told how the whole thing had originated, and what it was all about.
+He made the mistake of confounding the answer to a riddle with the
+crisis which unties the tangle of a plot and satisfies the suspended
+interest of a tale. None of the great model poems before him, however
+full of digression and episode, had failed to arrange their story with
+clearness. They needed no commentary outside themselves to say why they
+began as they did, and out of what antecedents they arose. If they
+started at once from the middle of things, they made their story, as it
+unfolded itself, explain, by more or less skilful devices, all that
+needed to be known about their beginnings. They did not think of rules
+of art. They did of themselves naturally what a good story-teller does,
+to make himself intelligible and interesting; and it is not easy to be
+interesting, unless the parts of the story are in their place.
+
+The defect seems to have come upon Spenser when it was too late to
+remedy it in the construction of his poem; and he adopted the somewhat
+clumsy expedient of telling us what the poem itself ought to have told
+us of its general story, in a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. Ralegh
+himself, indeed, suggested the letter: apparently (from the date, Jan.
+23, 1590), after the first part had gone through the press. And without
+this after-thought, as the twelfth book was never reached, we should
+have been left to gather the outline and plan of the story, from
+imperfect glimpses and allusions, as we have to fill up from hints and
+assumptions the gaps of an unskilful narrator, who leaves out what is
+essential to the understanding of his tale.
+
+Incidentally, however, this letter is an advantage: for we have in it
+the poet's own statement of his purpose in writing, as well as a
+necessary sketch of his story. His allegory, as he had explained to
+Bryskett and his friends, had a moral purpose. He meant to shadow forth,
+under the figures of twelve knights, and in their various exploits, the
+characteristics of "a gentleman or noble person," "fashioned in virtuous
+and gentle discipline." He took his machinery from the popular legends
+about King Arthur, and his heads of moral philosophy from the current
+Aristotelian catalogue of the Schools.
+
+     Sir, knowing how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed,
+     and this booke of mine, which I have entituled the Faery
+     Queene, being a continued Allegory, or darke conceit, I haue
+     thought good, as well for avoyding of gealous opinions and
+     misconstructions, as also for your better light in reading
+     thereof, (being so by you commanded,) to discover unto you the
+     general intention and meaning, which in the whole course
+     thereof I have fashioned, without expressing of any particular
+     purposes, or by accidents, therein occasioned. The generall
+     end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or
+     noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline: Which for that
+     I conceived shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being
+     coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part
+     of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter then for
+     profite of the ensample, I chose the historye of King Arthure,
+     as most fitte for the excellency of his person, being made
+     famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the
+     daunger of envy, and suspition of present time. In which I
+     have followed all the antique Poets historicall; first Homere,
+     who in the Persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a
+     good governour and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the
+     other in his Odysseis: then Virgil, whose like intention was
+     to doe in the person of Aeneas: after him Ariosto comprised
+     them both in his Orlando: and lately Tasso dissevered them
+     againe, and formed both parts in two persons, namely that part
+     which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a private
+     man, coloured in his Rinaldo; the other named Politice in his
+     Godfredo. By ensample of which excellente Poets, I labour to
+     pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a
+     brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues,
+     as Aristotle hath devised; the which is the purpose of these
+     first twelve bookes: which if I finde to be well accepted, I
+     may be perhaps encoraged to frame the other part of polliticke
+     vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king.
+
+Then, after explaining that he meant the _Faery Queen_ "for glory in
+general intention, but in particular" for Elizabeth, and his Faery Land
+for her kingdom, he proceeds to explain, what the first three books
+hardly explain, what the Faery Queen had to do with the structure of the
+poem.
+
+     But, because the beginning of the whole worke seemeth abrupte,
+     and as depending upon other antecedents, it needs that ye know
+     the occasion of these three knights seuerall adventures. For
+     the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an
+     Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of
+     affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the
+     times as the actions; but a Poet thrusteth into the middest,
+     even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the
+     thinges forepaste, and divining of thinges to come, maketh a
+     pleasing Analysis of all.
+
+     The beginning therefore of my history, if it were to be told
+     by an Historiographer should be the twelfth booke, which is
+     the last; where I devise that the Faery Queene kept her
+     Annuall feaste xii. dayes; uppon which xii. severall dayes,
+     the occasions of the xii. severall adventures hapned, which,
+     being undertaken by xii. severall knights, are in these xii.
+     books severally handled and discoursed. The first was this. In
+     the beginning of the feast, there presented him selfe a tall
+     clownishe younge man, who falling before the Queene of Faries
+     desired a boone (as the manner then was) which during that
+     feast she might not refuse; which was that hee might have the
+     atchievement of any adventure, which during that feaste should
+     happen: that being graunted, he rested him on the floore,
+     unfitte through his rusticity for a better place. Soone after
+     entred a faire Ladye in mourning weedes, riding on a white
+     Asse, with a dwarfe behinde her leading a warlike steed, that
+     bore the Armes of a knight, and his speare in the dwarfes
+     hand. Shee, falling before the Queene of Faeries, complayned
+     that her father and mother, an ancient King and Queene, had
+     beene by an huge dragon many years shut up in a brasen Castle,
+     who thence suffred them not to yssew; and therefore besought
+     the Faery Queene to assygne her some one of her knights to
+     take on him that exployt. Presently that clownish person,
+     upstarting, desired that adventure: whereat the Queene much
+     wondering, and the Lady much gainesaying, yet he earnestly
+     importuned his desire. In the end the Lady told him, that
+     unlesse that armour which she brought would serve him (that
+     is, the armour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul, vi.
+     Ephes.) that he could not succeed in that enterprise; which
+     being forthwith put upon him, with dewe furnitures thereunto,
+     he seemed the goodliest man in al that company, and was well
+     liked of the Lady. And eftesoones taking on him knighthood,
+     and mounting on that straunge courser, he went forth with her
+     on that adventure: where beginneth the first booke, viz.
+
+          A gentle knight was pricking on the playne, &c.
+
+That it was not without reason that this explanatory key was prefixed to
+the work, and that either Spenser or Ralegh felt it to be almost
+indispensable, appear from the concluding paragraph.
+
+     Thus much, Sir, I have briefly overronne to direct your
+     understanding to the wel-head of the History; that from thence
+     gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as in a
+     handfull gripe al the discourse, which otherwise may happily
+     seeme tedious and confused.
+
+According to the plan thus sketched out, we have but a fragment of the
+work. It was published in two parcels, each of three books, in 1590 and
+1596; and after his death two cantos, with two stray stanzas, of a
+seventh book were found and printed. Each perfect book consists of
+twelve cantos of from thirty-five to sixty of his nine-line stanzas. The
+books published in 1590 contain, as he states in his prefatory letter,
+the legends of _Holiness_, of _Temperance_, and of _Chastity_. Those
+published in 1596, contain the legends of _Friendship_, of _Justice_,
+and of _Courtesy_. The posthumous cantos are entitled, _Of Mutability_,
+and are said to be apparently parcel of a legend of _Constancy_. The
+poem which was to treat of the "politic" virtues was never approached.
+Thus we have but a fourth part of the whole of the projected work. It is
+very doubtful whether the remaining six books were completed. But it is
+probable that a portion of them was written, which, except the cantos
+_On Mutability_, has perished. And the intended titles or legends of the
+later books have not been preserved.
+
+Thus the poem was to be an allegorical story; a story branching out into
+twelve separate stories, which themselves would branch out again and
+involve endless other stories. It is a complex scheme to keep well in
+hand, and Spenser's art in doing so has been praised by some of his
+critics. But the art, if there is any, is so subtle that it fails to
+save the reader from perplexity. The truth is that the power of ordering
+and connecting a long and complicated plan was not one of Spenser's
+gifts. In the first two books, the allegorical story proceeds from point
+to point with fair coherence and consecutiveness. After them the attempt
+to hold the scheme together, except in the loosest and most general way,
+is given up as too troublesome or too confined. The poet prefixes indeed
+the name of a particular virtue to each book, but, with slender
+reference to it, he surrenders himself freely to his abundant flow of
+ideas, and to whatever fancy or invention tempts him, and ranges
+unrestrained over the whole field of knowledge and imagination. In the
+first two books, the allegory is transparent and the story connected.
+The allegory is of the nature of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. It starts
+from the belief that religion, purified from falsehood, superstition,
+and sin, is the foundation of all nobleness in man; and it portrays,
+under images and with names, for the most part easily understood, and
+easily applied to real counterparts, the struggle which every one at
+that time supposed to be going on, between absolute truth and
+righteousness on one side, and fatal error and bottomless wickedness on
+the other. Una, the Truth, the one and only Bride of man's spirit,
+marked out by the tokens of humility and innocence, and by her power
+over wild and untamed natures--the single Truth, in contrast to the
+counterfeit Duessa, false religion, and its actual embodiment in the
+false rival Queen of Scots--Truth, the object of passionate homage, real
+with many, professed with all, which after the impostures and scandals
+of the preceding age, had now become characteristic of that of
+Elizabeth--Truth, its claims, its dangers, and its champions, are the
+subject of the first book: and it is represented as leading the manhood
+of England, in spite, not only of terrible conflict, but of defeat and
+falls, through the discipline of repentance, to holiness and the
+blessedness which comes with it. The Red Cross Knight, St. George of
+England, whose name Georgos, the Ploughman, is dwelt upon, apparently to
+suggest that from the commonalty, the "tall clownish young men," were
+raised up the great champions of the Truth,--though sorely troubled by
+the wiles of Duessa, by the craft of the arch-sorcerer, by the force and
+pride of the great powers of the Apocalyptic Beast and Dragon, finally
+overcomes them, and wins the deliverance of Una and her love.
+
+The second book, _Of Temperance_, pursues the subject, and represents
+the internal conquests of self-mastery, the conquests of a man over his
+passions, his violence, his covetousness, his ambition, his despair, his
+sensuality. Sir Guyon, after conquering many foes of goodness, is the
+destroyer of the most perilous of them all, Acrasia, licentiousness, and
+her ensnaring Bower of Bliss. But after this, the thread at once of
+story and allegory, slender henceforth at the best, is neglected and
+often entirely lost. The third book, the _Legend of Chastity_, is a
+repetition of the ideas of the latter part of the second, with a
+heroine, Britomart, in place of the Knight of the previous book, Sir
+Guyon, and with a special glorification of the high-flown and romantic
+sentiments about purity, which wore the poetic creed of the courtiers of
+Elizabeth, in flagrant and sometimes in tragic contrast to their
+practical conduct of life. The loose and ill-compacted nature of the
+plan becomes still more evident in the second instalment of the work.
+Even the special note of each particular virtue becomes more faint and
+indistinct. The one law to which the poet feels bound is to have twelve
+cantos in each book; and to do this he is sometimes driven to what in
+later times has been called padding. One of the cantos of the third book
+is a genealogy of British kings from Geoffrey of Monmouth; one of the
+cantos of the _Legend of Friendship_ is made up of an episode,
+describing the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, with an elaborate
+catalogue of the English and Irish rivers, and the names of the
+sea-nymphs. In truth, he had exhausted his proper allegory, or he got
+tired of it. His poem became an elastic framework, into which he could
+fit whatever interested him and tempted him to composition. The gravity
+of the first books disappears. He passes into satire and caricature. We
+meet with Braggadochio and Trompart, with the discomfiture of Malecasta,
+with the conjugal troubles of Malbecco and Helenore, with the imitation
+from Ariosto of the Squire of Dames. He puts into verse a poetical
+physiology of the human body; he translates Lucretius, and speculates on
+the origin of human souls; he speculates, too, on social justice, and
+composes an argumentative refutation of the Anabaptist theories of right
+and equality among men. As the poem proceeds, he seems to feel himself
+more free to introduce what he pleases. Allusions to real men and events
+are sometimes clear, at other times evident, though they have now ceased
+to be intelligible to us. His disgust and resentment breaks out at the
+ways of the Court in sarcastic moralizing, or in pictures of dark and
+repulsive imagery. The characters and pictures of his friends furnish
+material for his poem; he does not mind touching on the misadventures of
+Ralegh, and even of Lord Grey, with sly humour or a word of candid
+advice. He becomes bolder in the distinct introduction of contemporary
+history. The defeat of Duessa was only figuratively shown in the first
+portion; in the second the subject is resumed. As Elizabeth is the "one
+form of many names," Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, so
+"under feigned colours shading a true case" he deals with her rival.
+Mary seems at one time the false Florimel, the creature of enchantment,
+stirring up strife, and fought for by the foolish knights whom she
+deceives, Blandamour and Paridell, the counterparts of Norfolk and the
+intriguers of 1571. At another, she is the fierce Amazonian queen,
+Radegund, by whom for a moment, even Arthegal is brought into
+disgraceful thraldom, till Britomart, whom he has once fought against,
+delivers him. And finally the fate of the typical Duessa is that of the
+real Mary Queen of Scots described in great detail--a liberty in dealing
+with great affairs of state for which James of Scotland actually desired
+that he should be tried and punished.[128:2] So Philip II. is at one
+time the Soldan, at another the Spanish monster Geryoneo, at another the
+fosterer of Catholic intrigues in France and Ireland, Grantorto. But
+real names are also introduced with scarcely any disguise: Guizor, and
+Burbon, the Knight who throws away his shield, Henry IV., and his Lady
+Flourdelis, the Lady Beige, and her seventeen sons: the Lady Irena, whom
+Arthegal delivers. The overthrow of the Armada, the English war in the
+Low Countries, the apostasy of Henry IV., the deliverance of Ireland
+from the "great wrong" of Desmond's rebellion, the giant Grantorto,
+form, under more or less transparent allegory, great part of the _Legend
+of Justice_. Nay, Spenser's long fostered revenge on the lady who had
+once scorned him, the _Rosalind_ of the _Shepherd's Calendar_, the
+_Mirabella_ of the _Faery Queen_, and his own late and happy marriage in
+Ireland, are also brought in to supply materials for the _Legend of
+Courtesy_. So multifarious is the poem, full of all that he thought, or
+observed, or felt; a receptacle, without much care to avoid repetition,
+or to prune, correct, and condense, for all the abundance of his ideas,
+as they welled forth in his mind day by day. It is really a collection
+of separate tales and allegories, as much as the _Arabian Nights_, or,
+as its counterpart and rival of our own century, the _Idylls of the
+King_. As a whole it is confusing: but we need not treat it as a whole.
+Its continued interest soon breaks down. But it is probably best that
+Spenser gave his mind the vague freedom which suited it, and that he did
+not make efforts to tie himself down to his pre-arranged but too
+ambitious plan. We can hardly lose our way in it, for there is no way to
+lose. It is a wilderness in which we are left to wander. But there may
+be interest and pleasure in a wilderness, if we are prepared for the
+wandering.
+
+Still, the complexity, or rather, the uncared-for and clumsy arrangement
+of the poem is matter which disturbs a reader's satisfaction, till he
+gets accustomed to the poet's way, and resigns himself to it. It is a
+heroic poem, in which the heroine, who gives her name to it, never
+appears: a story, of which the basis and starting-point is whimsically
+withheld for disclosure in the last book, which was never written. If
+Ariosto's jumps and transitions are more audacious, Spenser's intricacy
+is more puzzling. Adventures begin which have no finish. Actors in them
+drop from the clouds, claim an interest, and we ask in vain what has
+become of them. A vein of what are manifestly contemporary allusions
+breaks across the moral drift of the allegory, with an apparently
+distinct yet obscured meaning, and one of which it is the work of
+dissertations to find the key. The passion of the age was for ingenious
+riddling in morality as in love. And in Spenser's allegories we are not
+seldom at a loss to make out what and how much was really intended, amid
+a maze of overstrained analogies and over-subtle conceits, and attempts
+to hinder a too close and dangerous identification.
+
+Indeed Spenser's mode of allegory, which was historical as well as
+moral, and contains a good deal of history, if we knew it, often seems
+devised to throw curious readers off the scent. It was purposely
+baffling and hazy. A characteristic trait was singled out. A name was
+transposed in anagram, like Irena, or distorted, as if by imperfect
+pronunciation, like Burbon and Arthegal, or invented to express a
+quality, like Una, or Gloriana, or Corceca, or Fradubio, or adopted with
+no particular reason from the _Morte d'Arthur_, or any other old
+literature. The personage is introduced with some feature, or amid
+circumstances which seem for a moment to fix the meaning. But when we
+look to the sequence of history being kept up in the sequence of the
+story, we find ourselves thrown out. A character which fits one person
+puts on the marks of another: a likeness which we identify with one real
+person passes into the likeness of some one else. The real, in person,
+incident, institution, shades off into the ideal; after showing itself
+by plain tokens, it turns aside out of its actual path of fact, and
+ends, as the poet thinks it ought to end, in victory or defeat, glory or
+failure. Prince Arthur passes from Leicester to Sidney, and then back
+again to Leicester. There are double or treble allegories; Elizabeth is
+Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, perhaps Amoret; her rival is
+Duessa, the false Florimel, probably the fierce temptress, the Amazon
+Radegund. Thus, what for a moment was clear and definite, fades like the
+changing fringe of a dispersing cloud. The character which we identified
+disappears in other scenes and adventures, where we lose sight of all
+that identified it. A complete transformation destroys the likeness
+which was begun. There is an intentional dislocation of the parts of the
+story, when they might make it imprudently close in its reflection of
+facts or resemblance in portraiture. A feature is shown, a manifest
+allusion made, and then the poet starts off in other directions, to
+confuse and perplex all attempts at interpretation, which might be too
+particular and too certain. This was no doubt merely according to the
+fashion of the time, and the habits of mind into which the poet had
+grown. But there were often reasons for it, in an age so suspicious, and
+so dangerous to those who meddled with high matters of state.
+
+2. Another feature which is on the surface of the _Faery Queen_, and
+which will displease a reader who has been trained to value what is
+natural and genuine, is its affectation of the language and the customs
+of life belonging to an age which is not its own. It is indeed redolent
+of the present: but it is almost avowedly an imitation of what was
+current in the days of Chaucer: of what were supposed to be the words,
+and the social ideas and conditions, of the age of chivalry. He looked
+back to the fashions and ideas of the Middle Ages, as Pindar sought his
+materials in the legends and customs of the Homeric times, and created a
+revival of the spirit of the age of the Heroes in an age of tyrants and
+incipient democracies.[132:3] The age of chivalry, in Spenser's day far
+distant, had yet left two survivals, one real, the other formal. The
+real survival was the spirit of armed adventure, which was never
+stronger or more stirring than in the gallants and discoverers of
+Elizabeth's reign, the captains of the English companies in the Low
+Countries, the audacious sailors who explored unknown oceans and
+plundered the Spaniards, the scholars and gentlemen equally ready for
+work on sea and land, like Ralegh and Sir Richard Grenville, of the
+"Revenge." The formal survival was the fashion of keeping up the
+trappings of knightly times, as we keep up Judge's wigs, court dresses,
+and Lord Mayor's shows. In actual life it was seen in pageants and
+ceremonies, in the yet lingering parade of jousts and tournaments, in
+the knightly accoutrements still worn in the days of the bullet and the
+cannon-ball. In the apparatus of the poet, as all were shepherds, when
+he wanted to represent the life of peace and letters, so all were
+knights or the foes and victims of knights, when his theme was action
+and enterprise. It was the custom that the Muse masked, to use Spenser's
+word, under these disguises; and this conventional masquerade of
+pastoral poetry or knight errantry was the form under which the poetical
+school that preceded the dramatists naturally expressed their ideas. It
+seems to us odd that peaceful sheepcotes and love-sick swains should
+stand for the world of the Tudors and Guises, or that its cunning
+statecraft and relentless cruelty should be represented by the generous
+follies of an imaginary chivalry. But it was the fashion which Spenser
+found, and he accepted it. His genius was not of that sort which breaks
+out from trammels, but of that which makes the best of what it finds.
+And whatever we may think of the fashion, at least he gave it new
+interest and splendour by the spirit with which he threw himself into
+it.
+
+The condition which he took as the groundwork of his poetical fabric
+suggested the character of his language. Chaucer was then the "God of
+English poetry;" his was the one name which filled a place apart in the
+history of English verse. Spenser was a student of Chaucer, and borrowed
+as he judged fit, not only from his vocabulary, but from his grammatical
+precedents and analogies, with the object of giving an appropriate
+colouring to what was to be raised as far as possible above familiar
+life. Besides this, the language was still in such an unsettled state
+that from a man with resources like Spenser's, it naturally invited
+attempts to enrich and colour it, to increase its flexibility and power.
+The liberty of reviving old forms, of adopting from the language of the
+street and market homely but expressive words or combinations, of
+following in the track of convenient constructions, of venturing on new
+and bold phrases, was rightly greater in his time than at a later stage
+of the language. Many of his words, either invented or preserved, are
+happy additions; some which have not taken root in the language, we may
+regret. But it was a liberty which he abused. He was extravagant and
+unrestrained in his experiments on language. And they were made not
+merely to preserve or to invent a good expression. On his own authority,
+he cuts down, or he alters a word, or he adopts a mere corrupt
+pronunciation, to suit a place in his metre, or because he wants a rime.
+Precedents, as Mr. Guest has said, may no doubt be found for each one of
+these sacrifices to the necessities of metre or rime, in some one or
+other living dialectic usage, or even in printed books--"_blend_" for
+"_blind_," "_misleeke_" for "_mislike_," "_kest_" for "_cast_,"
+"_cherry_" for "_cherish_," "_vilde_" for "_vile_," or even "_wawes_"
+for "_waves_," because it has to rime to "_jaws_." But when they are
+profusely used as they are in Spenser, they argue, as critics of his own
+age such as Puttenham, remarked,--either want of trouble, or want of
+resource. In his impatience he is reckless in making a word which he
+wants--"fortunize," "mercified," "unblindfold," "relive"--he is reckless
+in making one word do the duty of another, interchanging actives and
+passives, transferring epithets from their proper subjects. The "humbled
+grass," is the grass on which a man lies humbled: the "lamentable eye,"
+is the eye which laments. "His treatment of words," says Mr. Craik, "on
+such occasions"--occasions of difficulty to his verse--"is like nothing
+that ever was seen, unless it might be Hercules breaking the back of the
+Nemean lion. He gives them any sense and any shape that the case may
+demand. Sometimes he merely alters a letter or two; sometimes he twists
+off the head or the tail of the unfortunate vocable altogether. But this
+fearless, lordly, truly royal style makes one only feel the more how
+easily, if he chose, he could avoid the necessity of having recourse to
+such outrages."
+
+His own generation felt his licence to be extreme. "In affecting the
+ancients," said Ben Jonson, "he writ no language." Daniel writes
+sarcastically, soon after the _Faery Queen_ appeared, of those who
+
+     Sing of knights and Palladines,
+     In aged accents and untimely words.
+
+And to us, though students of the language must always find interest in
+the storehouse of ancient or invented language to be found in Spenser,
+this mixture of what is obsolete or capriciously new is a bar, and not
+an unreasonable one, to a frank welcome at first acquaintance. Fuller
+remarks with some slyness, that "the many Chaucerisms used (for I will
+not say, affected) by him, are thought by the ignorant to be blemishes,
+known by the learned to be beauties, in his book; which notwithstanding
+had been more saleable, if more conformed to our modern language." The
+grotesque, though it has its place as one of the instruments of poetical
+effect, is a dangerous element to handle. Spenser's age was very
+insensible to the presence and the dangers of the grotesque, and he was
+not before his time in feeling what was unpleasing in incongruous
+mixtures. Strong in the abundant but unsifted learning of his day, a
+style of learning, which in his case was strangely inaccurate, he not
+only mixed the past with the present, fairyland with politics, mythology
+with the most serious Christian ideas, but he often mixed together the
+very features which are most discordant, in the colours, forms, and
+methods by which he sought to produce the effect of his pictures.
+
+3. Another source of annoyance and disappointment is found in the
+imperfections and inconsistencies of the poet's standard of what is
+becoming to say and to write about. Exaggeration, diffuseness,
+prolixity, were the literary diseases of the age; an age of great
+excitement and hope, which had suddenly discovered its wealth and its
+powers, but not the rules of true economy in using them. With the
+classics open before it, and alive to much of the grandeur of their
+teaching, it was almost blind to the spirit of self-restraint,
+proportion, and simplicity which governed the great models. It was left
+to a later age to discern these and appreciate them. This unresisted
+proneness to exaggeration produced the extravagance and the horrors of
+the Elizabethan Drama, full, as it was, nevertheless, of insight and
+originality. It only too naturally led the earlier Spenser astray. What
+Dryden, in one of his interesting critical prefaces says of himself, is
+true of Spenser; "Thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast
+upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject; to run them
+into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose." There was in
+Spenser a facility for turning to account all material, original or
+borrowed, an incontinence of the descriptive faculty, which was ever
+ready to exercise itself on any object, the most unfitting and
+loathsome, as on the noblest, the purest, or the most beautiful. There
+are pictures in him which seem meant to turn our stomach. Worse than
+that there are pictures which for a time rank the poet of _Holiness_ or
+_Temperance_, with the painters who used their great art to represent at
+once the most sacred and holiest forms, and also scenes which few people
+now like to look upon in company--scenes and descriptions which may
+perhaps from the habits of the time may have been playfully and
+innocently produced, but which it is certainly not easy to dwell upon
+innocently now. And apart from these serious faults, there is
+continually haunting us, amid incontestable richness, vigour, and
+beauty, a sense that the work is over-done. Spenser certainly did not
+want for humour and an eye for the ridiculous. There is no want in him,
+either, of that power of epigrammatic terseness, which, in spite of its
+diffuseness, his age valued and cultivated. But when he gets on a story
+or a scene, he never knows where to stop. His duels go on stanza after
+stanza till there is no sound part left in either champion. His palaces,
+landscapes, pageants, feasts, are taken to pieces in all their parts,
+and all these parts are likened to some other things. "His abundance,"
+says Mr. Craik, "is often oppressive; _it is like wading among unmown
+grass_." And he drowns us in words. His abundant and incongruous
+adjectives may sometimes, perhaps, startle us unfairly, because their
+associations and suggestions have quite altered; but very often they are
+the idle outpouring of an unrestrained affluence of language. The
+impression remains that he wants a due perception of the absurd, the
+unnatural, the unnecessary; that he does not care if he makes us smile,
+or does not know how to help it, when he tries to make us admire or
+sympathize.
+
+Under this head comes a feature which the "charity of history" may lead
+us to treat as simple exaggeration, but which often suggests something
+less pardonable, in the great characters, political or literary, of
+Elizabeth's reign. This was the gross, shameless, lying flattery paid to
+the Queen. There is really nothing like it in history. It is unique as a
+phenomenon that proud, able, free-spoken men, with all their high
+instincts of what was noble and true, with all their admiration of the
+Queen's high qualities, should have offered it, even as an unmeaning
+custom; and that a proud and free-spoken people should not, in the very
+genuineness of their pride in her and their loyalty, have received it
+with shouts of derision and disgust. The flattery of Roman emperors and
+Roman Popes, if as extravagant, was not so personal. Even Louis XIV. was
+not celebrated in his dreary old age, as a model of ideal beauty and a
+paragon of romantic perfection. It was no worship of a secluded
+and distant object of loyalty: the men who thus flattered knew
+perfectly well, often by painful experience, what Elizabeth was:
+able, indeed, high-spirited, successful, but ungrateful to her
+servants, capricious, vain, ill-tempered, unjust, and in her old age,
+ugly. And yet the Gloriana of the _Faery Queen_, the Empress of
+all nobleness,--Belphoebe, the Princess of all sweetness and
+beauty,--Britomart, the armed votaress of all purity,--Mercilla, the
+lady of all compassion and grace,--were but the reflections of the
+language in which it was then agreed upon by some of the greatest of
+Englishmen to speak, and to be supposed to think, of the Queen.
+
+II. But when all these faults have been admitted, faults of design and
+faults of execution--and when it is admitted, further, that there is a
+general want of reality, substance, distinctness, and strength in the
+personages of the poem--that, compared with the contemporary drama,
+Spenser's knights and ladies and villains are thin and ghostlike, and
+that, as Daniel says, he
+
+     Paints shadows in imaginary lines--
+
+it yet remains that our greatest poets since his day have loved him and
+delighted in him. He had Shakespere's praise. Cowley was made a poet by
+reading him. Dryden calls Milton "the poetical son of Spenser:"
+"Milton," he writes, "has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his
+original." Dryden's own homage to him is frequent and generous. Pope
+found as much pleasure in the _Faery Queen_ in his later years as he had
+found in reading it when he was twelve years old: and what Milton,
+Dryden, and Pope admired, Wordsworth too found full of nobleness,
+purity, and sweetness. What is it that gives the _Faery Queen_ its hold
+on those who appreciate the richness and music of English language, and
+who in temper and moral standard are quick to respond to English
+manliness and tenderness? The spell is to be found mainly in three
+things--(1) in the quaint stateliness of Spenser's imaginary world and
+its representatives; (2) in the beauty and melody of his numbers, the
+abundance and grace of his poetic ornaments, in the recurring and
+haunting rhythm of numberless passages, in which thought and imagery and
+language and melody are interwoven in one perfect and satisfying
+harmony; and (3) in the intrinsic nobleness of his general aim, his
+conception of human life, at once so exacting and so indulgent, his high
+ethical principles and ideals, his unfeigned honour for all that is pure
+and brave and unselfish and tender, his generous estimate of what is due
+from man to man of service, affection, and fidelity. His fictions
+embodied truths of character which with all their shadowy incompleteness
+were too real and too beautiful to lose their charm with time.
+
+1. Spenser accepted from his age the quaint stateliness which is
+characteristic of his poem. His poetry is not simple and direct like
+that of the Greeks. It has not the exquisite finish and felicity of the
+best of the Latins. It has not the massive grandeur, the depth, the
+freedom, the shades and subtle complexities of feeling and motive, which
+the English dramatists found by going straight to nature. It has the
+stateliness of highly artificial conditions of society, of the Court,
+the pageant, the tournament, as opposed to the majesty of the great
+events in human life and history, its real vicissitudes, its
+catastrophes, its tragedies, its revolutions, its sins. Throughout the
+prolonged crisis of Elizabeth's reign, her gay and dashing courtiers,
+and even her serious masters of affairs, persisted in pretending to look
+on the world in which they lived, as if through the side-scenes of a
+masque, and relieved against the background of a stage-curtain. Human
+life, in those days, counted for little; fortune, honour, national
+existence hung in the balance; the game was one in which the heads of
+kings and queens and great statesmen were the stakes,--yet the players
+could not get out of their stiff and constrained costume, out of their
+artificial and fantastic figments of thought, out of their conceits and
+affectations of language. They carried it, with all their sagacity, with
+all their intensity of purpose, to the council-board, and the
+judgment-seat. They carried it to the scaffold. The conventional
+supposition was that at the Court, though every one knew better, all was
+perpetual sunshine, perpetual holiday, perpetual triumph, perpetual
+love-making. It was the happy reign of the good and wise and lovely. It
+was the discomfiture of the base, the faithless, the wicked, the
+traitors. This is what is reflected in Spenser's poem; at once, its
+stateliness, for there was no want of grandeur and magnificence in the
+public scene ever before Spenser's imagination; and its quaintness,
+because the whole outward apparatus of representation was borrowed from
+what was past, or from what did not exist, and implied surrounding
+circumstances in ludicrous contrast with fact, and men taught themselves
+to speak in character, and prided themselves on keeping it up by
+substituting for the ordinary language of life and emotion a cumbrous
+and involved indirectness of speech.
+
+And yet that quaint stateliness is not without its attractions. We have
+indeed to fit ourselves for it. But when we have submitted to its
+demands on our imagination, it carries us along as much as the fictions
+of the stage. The splendours of the artificial are not the splendours of
+the natural; yet the artificial has its splendours, which impress and
+captivate and repay. The grandeur of Spenser's poem is a grandeur like
+that of a great spectacle, a great array of the forces of a nation, a
+great series of military effects, a great ceremonial assemblage of all
+that is highest and most eminent in a country, a coronation, a royal
+marriage, a triumph, a funeral. So, though Spenser's knights and ladies
+do what no men ever could do, and speak what no man ever spoke, the
+procession rolls forward with a pomp which never forgets itself, and
+with an inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and incident.
+Nor is it always solemn and high-pitched. Its gravity is relieved from
+time to time with the ridiculous figure or character, the ludicrous
+incident, the jests and antics of the buffoon. It has been said that
+Spenser never smiles. He not only smiles, with amusement or sly irony;
+he wrote what he must have laughed at as he wrote, and meant us to laugh
+at. He did not describe with a grave face the terrors and misadventures
+of the boaster Braggadochio and his Squire, whether or not a caricature
+of the Duke of Alençon and his "gentleman," the "petit singe," Simier.
+He did not write with a grave face the Irish row about the false
+Florimel (IV. 5),--
+
+       Then unto Satyran she was adjudged,
+     Who was right glad to gaine so goodly meed:
+     But Blandamour thereat full greatly grudged,
+     And litle prays'd his labours evill speed,
+     That for to winne the saddle lost the steed.
+     Ne lesse thereat did Paridell complaine,
+     And thought t'appeale from that which was decreed
+     To single combat with Sir Satyrane:
+     Thereto him Atè stird, new discord to maintaine.
+
+       And eke, with these, full many other Knights
+     She through her wicked working did incense
+     Her to demaund and chalenge as their rights,
+     Deserved for their perils recompense.
+     Amongst the rest, with boastfull vaine pretense,
+     Stept Braggadochio forth, and as his thrall
+     Her claym'd, by him in battell wonne long sens:
+     Whereto her selfe he did to witnesse call:
+     Who, being askt, accordingly confessed all.
+
+       Thereat exceeding wroth was Satyran;
+     And wroth with Satyran was Blandamour;
+     And wroth with Blandamour was Erivan;
+     And at them both Sir Paridell did loure.
+     So all together stird up strifull stoure,
+     And readie were new battell to darraine.
+     Each one profest to be her paramoure,
+     And vow'd with speare and shield it to maintaine;
+     Ne Judges powre, ne reasons rule, mote them restraine.
+
+Nor the behaviour of the "rascal many" at the sight of the dead Dragon
+(I. 12),--
+
+       And after all the raskall many ran,
+     Heaped together in rude rablement,
+     To see the face of that victorious man,
+     Whom all admired as from heaven sent,
+     And gazd upon with gaping wonderment;
+     But when they came where that dead Dragon lay,
+     Stretcht on the ground in monstrous large extent,
+     The sight with ydle feare did them dismay,
+     Ne durst approch him nigh to touch, or once assay.
+
+       Some feard, and fledd; some feard, and well it fayned;
+     One, that would wiser seeme then all the rest,
+     Warnd him not touch, for yet perhaps remaynd
+     Some lingring life within his hollow brest,
+     Or in his wombe might lurke some hidden nest
+     Of many Dragonettes, his fruitfull seede:
+     Another saide, that in his eyes did rest
+     Yet sparckling fyre, and badd thereof take heed;
+     Another said, he saw him move his eyes indeed.
+
+       One mother, whenas her foolehardy chyld
+     Did come too neare, and with his talants play,
+     Halfe dead through feare, her litle babe revyld,
+     And to her gossibs gan in counsell say;
+     'How can I tell, but that his talants may
+     Yet scratch my sonne, or rend his tender hand?'
+     So diversly them selves in vaine they fray;
+     Whiles some more bold to measure him nigh stand,
+     To prove how many acres he did spred of land.
+
+And his humour is not the less real that it affects serious argument, in
+the excuse which he urges for his fairy tales (II. 1).
+
+       Right well I wote, most mighty Soveraine,
+     That all this famous antique history
+     Of some th' aboundance of an ydle braine
+     Will judged be, and painted forgery,
+     Rather then matter of just memory;
+     Sith none that breatheth living aire dees know
+     Where is that happy land of Faery,
+     Which I so much doe vaunt, yet no where show,
+     But vouch antiquities, which no body can know.
+
+       But let that man with better sence advize,
+     That of the world least part to us is red;
+     And daily how through hardy enterprize
+     Many great Regions are discovered,
+     Which to late age were never mentioned
+     Who ever heard of th' Indian Peru?
+     Or who in venturous vessell measured
+     The Amazon huge river, now found trew
+     Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?
+
+       Yet all these were, when no man did them know,
+     Yet have from wisest ages hidden beene;
+     And later times thinges more unknowne shall show.
+     Why then should witlesse man so much misweene,
+     That nothing is but that which he hath seene?
+     What if within the Moones fayre shining spheare,
+     What if in every other starre unseene
+     Of other worldes he happily should heare,
+     He wonder would much more; yet such to some appeare.
+
+The general effect is almost always lively and rich: all is buoyant and
+full of movement. That it is also odd, that we see strange costumes and
+hear a language often formal and obsolete, that we are asked to take for
+granted some very unaccustomed supposition and extravagant assumption,
+does not trouble us more than the usages and sights, so strange to
+ordinary civil life, of a camp, or a royal levée. All is in keeping,
+whatever may be the details of the pageant; they harmonize with the
+effect of the whole, like the gargoyles and quaint groups in a Gothic
+building harmonize with its general tone of majesty and subtle
+beauty;--nay, as ornaments, in themselves of bad taste, like much of the
+ornamentation of the Renaissance styles, yet find a not unpleasing place
+in compositions grandly and nobly designed:
+
+     So discord oft in music makes the sweeter lay.
+
+Indeed, it is curious how much of real variety is got out of a limited
+number of elements and situations. The spectacle, though consisting only
+of knights, ladies, dwarfs, pagans, "salvage men," enchanters, and
+monsters, and other well-worn machinery of the books of chivalry, is
+ever new, full of vigour and fresh images, even if, as sometimes
+happens, it repeats itself. There is a majestic unconsciousness of all
+violations of probability, and of the strangeness of the combinations
+which it unrolls before us.
+
+2. But there is not only stateliness: there is sweetness and beauty.
+Spenser's perception of beauty of all kinds was singularly and
+characteristically quick and sympathetic. It was one of his great gifts;
+perhaps the most special and unstinted. Except Shakespere, who had it
+with other and greater gifts, no one in that time approached to Spenser,
+in feeling the presence of that commanding and mysterious idea,
+compounded of so many things, yet of which, the true secret escapes us
+still, to which we give the name of beauty. A beautiful scene, a
+beautiful person, a beautiful poem, a mind and character with that
+combination of charms, which, for want of another word, we call by that
+half-spiritual, half-material word "beautiful," at once set his
+imagination at work to respond to it and reflect it. His means of
+reflecting it were as abundant as his sense of it was keen. They were
+only too abundant. They often betrayed him by their affluence and
+wonderful readiness to meet his call. Say what we will, and a great deal
+may be said, of his lavish profusion, his heady and uncontrolled excess,
+in the richness of picture and imagery in which he indulges,--still
+there it lies before us, like the most gorgeous of summer gardens, in
+the glory and brilliancy of its varied blooms, in the wonder of its
+strange forms of life, in the changefulness of its exquisite and
+delicious scents. No one who cares for poetic beauty can be insensible
+to it. He may criticize it. He may have too much of it. He may prefer
+something more severe and chastened. He may observe on the waste of
+wealth and power. He may blame the prodigal expense of language, and the
+long spaces which the poet takes up to produce his effect. He may often
+dislike or distrust the moral aspect of the poet's impartial
+sensitiveness to all outward beauty,--the impartiality which makes him
+throw all his strength into his pictures of Acrasia's Bower of Bliss,
+the Garden of Adonis, and Busirane's Masque of Cupid. But there is no
+gainsaying the beauty which never fails and disappoints, open the poem
+where you will. There is no gainsaying its variety, often so unexpected
+and novel. Face to face with the Epicurean idea of beauty and pleasure
+is the counter-charm of purity, truth, and duty. Many poets have done
+justice to each one separately. Few have shown, with such equal power,
+why it is that both have their roots in man's divided nature, and
+struggle, as it were, for the mastery. Which can be said to be the most
+exquisite in all beauty of imagination, of refined language, of
+faultless and matchless melody, of these two passages, in which the same
+image is used for the most opposite purposes;--first, in that song of
+temptation, the sweetest note in that description of Acrasia's Bower of
+Bliss, which, as a picture of the spells of pleasure, has never been
+surpassed; and next, to represent that stainless and glorious purity
+which is the professed object of his admiration and homage. In both the
+beauty of the rose furnishes the theme of the poet's treatment. In the
+first, it is the "lovely lay" which meets the knight of Temperance amid
+the voluptuousness which he is come to assail and punish.
+
+       The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay:
+     Ah! see, whoso fayre thing doest faine to see,
+     In springing flowre the image of thy day.
+     Ah! see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee
+     Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestee,
+     That fairer seemes the lesse ye see her may.
+     Lo! see soone after how more bold and free
+     Her bared bosome she doth broad display;
+     Lo! see soone after how she fades and falls away.
+
+       So passeth, in the passing of a day,
+     Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre;
+     Ne more doth florish after first decay,
+     That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre
+     Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre.
+     Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime,
+     For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre;
+     Gather the Rose of love whilest yet is time,
+     Whilest loving thou mayst loved be with equall crime.
+
+In the other, it images the power of the will--that power over
+circumstance and the storms of passion, to command obedience to reason
+and the moral law, which Milton sung so magnificently in _Comus_:--
+
+       That daintie Rose, the daughter of her Morne,
+     More deare then life she tendered, whose flowre
+     The girlond of her honour did adorne:
+     Ne suffred she the Middayes scorching powre,
+     Ne the sharp Northerne wind thereon to showre;
+     But lapped up her silken leaves most chayre,
+     When so the froward skye began to lowre;
+     But, soone as calmed was the christall ayre,
+     She did it fayre dispred and let to florish fayre.
+
+       Eternall God, in his almightie powre,
+     To make ensample of his heavenly grace,
+     In Paradize whylome did plant this flowre;
+     Whence he it fetcht out of her native place,
+     And did in stocke of earthly flesh enrace,
+     That mortall men her glory should admyre.
+     In gentle Ladies breste, and bounteous race
+     Of woman kind, it fayrest Flowre doth spyre,
+     And beareth fruit of honour and all chast desyre.
+
+     Fayre ympes of beautie, whose bright shining beames
+     Adorne the worlde with like to heavenly light,
+     And to your willes both royalties and Reames
+     Subdew, through conquest of your wondrous might,
+     With this fayre flowre your goodly girlonds dight
+     Of chastity and vertue virginall,
+     That shall embellish more your beautie bright,
+     And crowne your heades with heavenly coronall,
+     Such as the Angels weare before Gods tribunall!
+
+This sense of beauty, and command of beautiful expression is not seen
+only in the sweetness of which both these passages are examples. Its
+range is wide. Spenser had in his nature besides sweetness, his full
+proportion of the stern and high manliness of his generation; indeed, he
+was not without its severity, its hardness, its unconsidering and cruel
+harshness, its contemptuous indifference to suffering and misery when on
+the wrong side. Noble and heroic ideals captivate him by their
+attractions. He kindles naturally and genuinely at what proves and draws
+out men's courage, their self-command, their self-sacrifice. He
+sympathizes as profoundly with the strangeness of their condition, with
+the sad surprises in their history and fate, as he gives himself up with
+little restraint to what is charming and even intoxicating in it. He can
+moralize with the best in terse and deep-reaching apophthegms of
+melancholy or even despairing experience. He can appreciate the
+mysterious depths and awful outlines of theology--of what our own age
+can see nothing in, but a dry and scholastic dogmatism. His great
+contemporaries were, more perhaps than the men of any age, many-sided.
+He shared their nature; and he used all that he had of sensitiveness and
+of imaginative and creative power, in bringing out its manifold aspects,
+and sometimes contradictory feelings and aims. Not that beauty, even
+varied beauty, is the uninterrupted attribute of his work. It alternates
+with much that no indulgence can call beautiful. It passes but too
+easily into what is commonplace, or forced, or unnatural, or
+extravagant, or careless and poor, or really coarse and bad. He was a
+negligent corrector. He only at times gave himself the trouble to
+condense and concentrate. But for all this, the _Faery Queen_ glows and
+is ablaze with beauty; and that beauty is so rich, so real, and so
+uncommon, that for its sake the severest readers of Spenser have
+pardoned much that is discordant with it, much that in the reading has
+wasted their time and disappointed them.
+
+There is one portion of the beauty of the _Faery Queen_, which in its
+perfection and fulness had never yet been reached in English poetry.
+This was the music and melody of his verse. It was this wonderful,
+almost unfailing sweetness of numbers which probably as much as anything
+set the _Faery Queen_ at once above all contemporary poetry. The English
+language is really a musical one, and say what people will, the English
+ear is very susceptible to the infinite delicacy and suggestiveness of
+musical rhythm and cadence. Spenser found the secret of it. The art has
+had many and consummate masters since, as different in their melody as
+in their thoughts from Spenser. And others at the time, Shakespere
+pre-eminently, heard, only a little later, the same grandeur, and the
+same subtle beauty in the sounds of their mother-tongue, only waiting
+the artist's skill to be combined and harmonized into strains of
+mysterious fascination. But Spenser was the first to show that he had
+acquired a command over what had hitherto been heard only in exquisite
+fragments, passing too soon into roughness and confusion. It would be
+too much to say that his cunning never fails, that his ear is never dull
+or off its guard. But when the length and magnitude of the composition
+are considered, with the restraints imposed by the new nine-line stanza,
+however convenient it may have been, the vigour, the invention, the
+volume and rush of language, and the keenness and truth of ear amid its
+diversified tasks are indeed admirable, which could keep up so prolonged
+and so majestic a stream of original and varied poetical melody. If his
+stanzas are monotonous, it is with the grand monotony of the seashore,
+where billow follows billow, each swelling diversely, and broken into
+different curves and waves upon its mounting surface, till at last it
+falls over, and spreads and rushes up in a last long line of foam upon
+the beach.
+
+3. But all this is but the outside shell and the fancy framework in
+which the substance of the poem is enclosed. Its substance is the poet's
+philosophy of life. It shadows forth, in type and parable, his ideal of
+the perfection of the human character, with its special features, its
+trials, its achievements. There were two accepted forms in poetry in
+which this had been done by poets. One was under the image of warfare.
+The other was under the image of a journey or voyage. Spenser chose the
+former, as Dante and Bunyan chose the latter. Spenser looks on the scene
+of the world as a continual battle-field. It was such in fact to his
+experience in Ireland, testing the mettle of character, its loyalty, its
+sincerity, its endurance. His picture of character is by no means
+painted with sentimental tenderness. He portrays it in the rough work of
+the struggle and the toil, always hardly tested by trial, often
+overmatched, deceived, defeated, and even delivered by its own default
+to disgrace and captivity. He had full before his eyes what abounded in
+the society of his day, often in its noblest representatives--the
+strange perplexing mixture of the purer with the baser elements, in the
+high-tempered and aspiring activity of his time. But it was an ideal of
+character which had in it high aims and serious purposes, which was
+armed with fortitude and strength, which could recover itself after
+failure and defeat.
+
+The unity of a story, or an allegory--that chain and backbone of
+continuous interest, implying a progress and leading up to a climax,
+which holds together the great poems of the world, the _Iliad_ and
+_Odyssey_, the _Æneid_, the _Commedia_, the _Paradise Lost_, the
+_Jerusalem Delivered_--this is wanting in the _Faery Queen_. The unity
+is one of character and its ideal. That character of the completed man,
+raised above what is poor and low, and governed by noble tempers and
+pure principles, has in Spenser two conspicuous elements. In the first
+place, it is based on manliness. In the personages which illustrate the
+different virtues, Holiness, Justice, Courtesy, and the rest, the
+distinction is not in nicely discriminated features or shades of
+expression, but in the trials and the occasions which call forth a
+particular action or effort: yet the manliness which is at the
+foundation of all that is good in them is a universal quality common to
+them all, rooted and imbedded in the governing idea or standard of moral
+character in the poem. It is not merely courage, it is not merely
+energy, it is not merely strength. It is the quality of soul which
+frankly accepts the conditions in human life, of labour, of obedience,
+of effort, of unequal success, which does not quarrel with them or evade
+them, but takes for granted with unquestioning alacrity that man is
+called--by his call to high aims and destiny--to a continual struggle
+with difficulty, with pain, with evil, and makes it the point of honour
+not to be dismayed or wearied out by them. It is a cheerful and serious
+willingness for hard work and endurance, as being inevitable and very
+bearable necessities, together with even a pleasure in encountering
+trials which put a man on his mettle, an enjoyment of the contest and
+the risk, even in play. It is the quality which seizes on the paramount
+idea of duty, as something which leaves a man no choice; which despises
+and breaks through the inferior considerations and motives--trouble,
+uncertainty, doubt, curiosity--which hang about and impede duty; which
+is impatient with the idleness and childishness of a life of mere
+amusement, or mere looking on, of continued and self-satisfied levity,
+of vacillation, of clever and ingenious trifling. Spenser's manliness is
+quite consistent with long pauses of rest, with intervals of change,
+with great craving for enjoyment--nay, with great lapses from its ideal,
+with great mixtures of selfishness, with coarseness, with
+licentiousness, with injustice and inhumanity. It may be fatally
+diverted into bad channels; it may degenerate into a curse and scourge
+to the world. But it stands essentially distinct from the nature which
+shrinks from difficulty, which is appalled at effort, which has no
+thought of making an impression on things around it, which is content
+with passively receiving influences and distinguishing between emotions,
+which feels no call to exert itself, because it recognizes no aim
+valuable enough to rouse it, and no obligation strong enough to command
+it. In the character of his countrymen round him, in its highest and in
+its worst features, in its noble ambition, its daring enterprise, its
+self-devotion, as well as in its pride, its intolerance, its fierce
+self-will, its arrogant claims of superiority, moral, political,
+religious, Spenser saw the example of that strong and resolute
+manliness, which, once set on great things, feared nothing--neither toil
+nor disaster nor danger, in their pursuit. Naturally and unconsciously,
+he laid it at the bottom of all his portraitures of noble and virtuous
+achievement in the _Faery Queen_.
+
+All Spenser's "virtues" spring from a root of manliness. Strength,
+simplicity of aim, elevation of spirit, courage are presupposed as their
+necessary conditions. But they have with him another condition as
+universal. They all grow and are nourished from the soil of love; the
+love of beauty, the love and service of fair women. This of course, is a
+survival from the ages of chivalry, an inheritance bequeathed from the
+minstrels of France, Italy, and Germany to the rising poetry of Europe.
+Spenser's types of manhood are imperfect without the idea of an
+absorbing and overmastering passion of love; without a devotion, as to
+the principal and most worthy object of life, to the service of a
+beautiful lady, and to winning her affection and grace. The influence of
+this view of life comes out in numberless ways. Love comes on the scene
+in shapes which are exquisitely beautiful, in all its purity, its
+tenderness, its unselfishness. But the claims of its all-ruling and
+irresistible might are also only too readily verified in the passions of
+men; in the follies of love, its entanglements, its mischiefs, its
+foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never
+absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the
+poem. The picture of life held up before us is the literal rendering of
+Coleridge's lines:--
+
+     All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
+     Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
+     Are all but ministers of Love,
+           And feed his sacred flame.
+
+We still think with Spenser about the paramount place of manliness, as
+the foundation of all worth in human character. We have ceased to think
+with him about the rightful supremacy of love, even in the imaginative
+conception of human life. We have ceased to recognize in it the public
+claims of almost a religion, which it has in Spenser. Love will ever
+play a great part in human life to the end of time. It will be an
+immense element in its happiness, perhaps a still greater one in its
+sorrows, its disasters, its tragedies. It is still an immense power in
+shaping and colouring it, both in fiction and reality; in the family, in
+the romance, in the fatalities and the prosaic ruin of vulgar fact. But
+the place given to it by Spenser is to our thoughts and feelings even
+ludicrously extravagant. An enormous change has taken place in the ideas
+of society on this point: it is one of the things which make a wide
+chasm between centuries and generations which yet are of "the same
+passions," and have in temper, tradition and language, so much in
+common. The ages of the Courts of Love, whom Chaucer reflected and whose
+ideas passed on through him to Spenser, are to us simply strange and
+abnormal states through which society has passed, to us beyond
+understanding and almost belief. The perpetual love-making, as one of
+the first duties and necessities of a noble life, the space which it
+must fill in the cares and thoughts of all gentle and high-reaching
+spirits, the unrestrained language of admiration and worship, the
+unrestrained yielding to the impulses, the anxieties, the pitiable
+despair and agonies of love, the subordination to it of all other
+pursuits and aims, the weeping and wailing and self-torturing which it
+involves, all this is so far apart from what we know of actual life, the
+life not merely of work and business, but the life of affection, and
+even of passion, that it makes the picture of which it is so necessary a
+part, seem to us in the last degree, unreal, unimaginable, grotesquely
+ridiculous. The quaint love sometimes found among children, so quickly
+kindled, so superficial, so violent in its language and absurd in its
+plans, is transferred with the utmost gravity to the serious proceedings
+of the wise and good. In the highest characters it is chastened,
+refined, purified: it appropriates, indeed, language due only to the
+divine, it almost simulates idolatry; yet it belongs to the best part of
+man's nature. But in the lower and average characters, it is not so
+respectable; it is apt to pass into mere toying pastime and frivolous
+love of pleasure: it astonishes us often by the readiness with which it
+displays an affinity for the sensual and impure, the corrupting and
+debasing sides of the relations between the sexes. But however it
+appears, it is throughout a very great affair, not merely with certain
+persons, or under certain circumstances, but with every one: it obtrudes
+itself in public, as the natural and recognized motive of plans of life
+and trials of strength; it is the great spur of enterprise, and its
+highest and most glorious reward. A world of which this is the law, is
+not even in fiction a world which we can conceive possible, or with
+which experience enables us to sympathize.
+
+It is, of course, a purely artificial and conventional reading of the
+facts of human life and feeling. Such conventional readings and
+renderings belong in a measure to all art; but in its highest forms they
+are corrected, interpreted, supplemented by the presence of interspersed
+realities which every one recognizes. But it was one of Spenser's
+disadvantages, that two strong influences combined to entangle him in
+this fantastic and grotesque way of exhibiting the play and action of
+the emotions of love. This all-absorbing, all-embracing passion of love,
+at least, this way of talking about it, was the fashion of the Court.
+Further, it was the fashion of poetry, which he inherited; and he was
+not the man to break through the strong bands of custom and authority.
+In very much he was an imitator. He took what he found; what was his
+own was his treatment of it. He did not trouble himself with
+inconsistencies, or see absurdities and incongruities. Habit and
+familiar language made it not strange that in the Court of Elizabeth,
+the most high-flown sentiments should be in every one's mouth about the
+sublimities and refinements of love, while every one was busy with keen
+ambition, and unscrupulous intrigue. The same blinding power kept him
+from seeing the monstrous contrast between the claims of the queen to be
+the ideal of womanly purity--claims recognized and echoed in ten
+thousand extravagant compliments--and the real licentiousness common all
+round her among her favourites. All these strange contradictions, which
+surprise and shock us, Spenser assumed as natural. He built up his
+fictions on them, as the dramatist built on a basis, which, though more
+nearly approaching to real life, yet differed widely from it in many of
+its preliminary and collateral suppositions; or as the novelist builds
+up his on a still closer adherence to facts and experience. In this
+matter Spenser appears with a kind of double self. At one time he speaks
+as one penetrated and inspired by the highest and purest ideas of love,
+and filled with aversion and scorn for the coarser forms of passion--for
+what is ensnaring and treacherous, as well as for what is odious and
+foul. At another, he puts forth all his power to bring out its most
+dangerous and even debasing aspects in highly coloured pictures, which
+none could paint without keen sympathy with what he takes such pains to
+make vivid and fascinating. The combination is not like anything modern,
+for both the elements are in Spenser so unquestionably and simply
+genuine. Our modern poets are, with all their variations in this
+respect, more homogeneous; and where one conception of love and beauty
+has taken hold of a man, the other does not easily come in. It is
+impossible to imagine Wordsworth dwelling with zest on visions and
+imagery, on which Spenser has lavished all his riches. There can be no
+doubt of Byron's real habits of thought and feeling on subjects of this
+kind, even when his language for the occasion is the chastest; we detect
+in it the mood of the moment, perhaps spontaneous, perhaps put on, but
+in contradiction to the whole movement of the man's true nature. But
+Spenser's words do not ring hollow. With a kind of unconsciousness and
+innocence, which we now find hard to understand, and which perhaps
+belongs to the early childhood or boyhood of a literature, he passes
+abruptly from one standard of thought and feeling to another; and is
+quite as much in earnest when he is singing the pure joys of chastened
+affections, as he is when he is writing with almost riotous luxuriance
+what we are at this day ashamed to read. Tardily, indeed, he appears to
+have acknowledged the contradiction. At the instance of two noble ladies
+of the Court, he composed two Hymns of Heavenly Love and Heavenly
+Beauty, to "retract" and "reform" two earlier ones composed in praise of
+earthly love and beauty. But, characteristically, he published the two
+pieces together, side by side in the same volume.
+
+In the _Faery Queen_, Spenser has brought out, not the image of the
+great Gloriana, but in its various aspects, a form of character which
+was then just coming on the stage of the world, and which has played a
+great part in it since. As he has told us, he aimed at presenting before
+us, in the largest sense of the word, the English gentleman. It was as a
+whole a new character in the world. It had not really existed in the
+days of feudalism and chivalry, though features of it had appeared, and
+its descent was traced from those times: but they were too wild and
+coarse, too turbulent and disorderly, for a character which, however
+ready for adventure and battle, looked to peace, refinement, order, and
+law as the true conditions of its perfection. In the days of Elizabeth
+it was beginning to fill a large place in English life. It was formed
+amid the increasing cultivation of the nation, the increasing varieties
+of public service, the awakening responsibilities to duty and calls to
+self-command. Still making much of the prerogative of noble blood and
+family honours, it was something independent of nobility and beyond it.
+A nobleman might have in him the making of a gentleman: but it was the
+man himself of whom the gentleman was made. Great birth, even great
+capacity, were not enough; there must be added a new delicacy of
+conscience, a new appreciation of what is beautiful and worthy of
+honour, a new measure of the strength and nobleness of self-control, of
+devotion to unselfish interests. This idea of manhood, based not only on
+force and courage, but on truth, on refinement, on public spirit, on
+soberness and modesty, on consideration for others, was taking
+possession of the younger generation of Elizabeth's middle years. Of
+course the idea was very imperfectly apprehended, still more imperfectly
+realized. But it was something which on the same scale had not been yet,
+and which was to be the seed of something greater. It was to grow into
+those strong, simple, noble characters, pure in aim and devoted to duty,
+the Falklands, the Hampdens, who amid so much evil form such a
+remarkable feature in the Civil Wars, both on the Royalist and the
+Parliamentary sides. It was to grow into that high type of cultivated
+English nature, in the present and the last century, common both to its
+monarchical and its democratic embodiments, than which, with all its
+faults and defects, our western civilization has produced few things
+more admirable.
+
+There were three distinguished men of that time, who one after another
+were Spenser's friends and patrons, and who were men in whom he saw
+realized his conceptions of human excellence and nobleness. They were
+Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Grey of Wilton, and Sir Walter Ralegh: and the
+_Faery Queen_ reflects, as in a variety of separate mirrors and
+spiritualized forms, the characteristics of these men and of such as
+they. It reflects their conflicts, their temptations, their weaknesses,
+the evils they fought with, the superiority with which they towered over
+meaner and poorer natures. Sir Philip Sidney may be said to have been
+the first typical example in English society of the true gentleman. The
+charm which attracted men to him in life, the fame which he left behind
+him, are not to be accounted for simply by his accomplishments as a
+courtier, a poet, a lover of literature, a gallant soldier; above all
+this there was something not found in the strong or brilliant men about
+him, a union and harmony of all high qualities differing from any of
+them separately, which gave a fire of its own to his literary
+enthusiasm, and a sweetness of its own to his courtesy. Spenser's
+admiration for that bright but short career was strong and lasting.
+Sidney was to him a verification of what he aspired to and imagined; a
+pledge that he was not dreaming, in portraying Prince Arthur's greatness
+of soul, the religious chivalry of the Red Cross Knight of Holiness, the
+manly purity and self-control of Sir Guyon. It is too much to say that
+in Prince Arthur, the hero of the poem, he always intended Sidney. In
+the first place, it is clear that under that character Spenser in places
+pays compliments to Leicester, in whose service he began life, and
+whose claims on his homage he ever recognized. Prince Arthur is
+certainly Leicester, in the historical passages in the Fifth Book
+relating to the war in the Low Countries in 1576: and no one can be
+meant but Leicester in the bold allusion in the First Book (ix. 17) to
+Elizabeth's supposed thoughts of marrying him. In the next place,
+allegory, like caricature, is not bound to make the same person and the
+same image always or perfectly coincide; and Spenser makes full use of
+this liberty. But when he was painting the picture of the Kingly
+Warrior, in whom was to be summed up in a magnificent unity the
+diversified graces of other men, and who was to be ever ready to help
+and support his fellows in their hour of need, and in their conflict
+with evil, he certainly had before his mind the well-remembered
+lineaments of Sidney's high and generous nature. And he further
+dedicated a separate book, the last that he completed, to the
+celebration of Sidney's special "virtue" of Courtesy. The martial strain
+of the poem changes once more to the pastoral of the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ to describe Sidney's wooing of Frances Walsingham, the fair
+Pastorella; his conquests by his sweetness and grace over the
+churlishness of rivals; and his triumphant war against the monster
+spirit of ignorant and loud-tongued insolence, the "Blatant Beast" of
+religious, political, and social slander.
+
+Again, in Lord Grey of Wilton, gentle by nature, but so stern in the
+hour of trial, called reluctantly to cope not only with anarchy, but
+with intrigue and disloyalty, finding selfishness and thanklessness
+everywhere, but facing all and doing his best with a heavy heart, and
+ending his days prematurely under detraction and disgrace, Spenser had
+before him a less complete character than Sidney, but yet one of grand
+and severe manliness, in which were conspicuous a religious hatred of
+disorder, and an unflinching sense of public duty. Spenser's admiration
+of him was sincere and earnest. In his case the allegory almost becomes
+history. Arthur, Lord Grey, is Sir Arthegal, the Knight of Justice. The
+story touches apparently on some passages of his career, when his
+dislike of the French marriage placed him in opposition to the Queen,
+and even for a time threw him with the supporters of Mary. But the
+adventures of Arthegal mainly preserve the memory of Lord Grey's
+terrible exploits against wrong and rebellion in Ireland. These exploits
+are represented in the doings of the iron man Talus, his squire, with
+his destroying flail, swift, irresistible, inexorable; a figure,
+borrowed and altered, after Spenser's wont, from a Greek legend. His
+overthrow of insolent giants, his annihilation of swarming "rascal
+routs," idealize and glorify that unrelenting policy, of which, though
+condemned in England, Spenser continued to be the advocate. In the story
+of Arthegal, long separated by undeserved misfortunes from the favour of
+the armed lady, Britomart, the virgin champion of right, of whom he was
+so worthy, doomed in spite of his honours to an early death, and
+assailed on his return from his victorious service by the furious
+insults of envy and malice, Spenser portrays almost without a veil, the
+hard fate of the unpopular patron whom he to the last defended and
+honoured.
+
+Ralegh, his last protector, the Shepherd of the Ocean, to whose judgment
+he referred the work of his life, and under whose guidance he once more
+tried the quicksands of the Court, belonged to a different class from
+Sidney or Lord Grey; but of his own class he was the consummate and
+matchless example. He had not Sidney's fine enthusiasm and nobleness; he
+had not either Sidney's affectations. He had not Lord Grey's
+single-minded hatred of wrong. He was a man to whom his own interests
+were much; he was unscrupulous; he was ostentatious; he was not above
+stooping to mean, unmanly compliances with the humours of the Queen. But
+he was a man with a higher ideal than he attempted to follow. He saw,
+not without cynical scorn, through the shows and hollowness of the
+world. His intellect was of that clear and unembarrassed power which
+takes in as wholes things which other men take in part by part. And he
+was in its highest form a representative of that spirit of adventure
+into the unknown and the wonderful of which Drake was the coarser and
+rougher example, realizing in serious earnest, on the sea and in the New
+World, the life of knight-errantry feigned in romances. With Ralegh, as
+with Lord Grey, Spenser comes to history; and he even seems to have been
+moved, as the poem went on, partly by pity, partly by amusement, to
+shadow forth in his imaginary world, not merely Ralegh's brilliant
+qualities, but also his frequent misadventures and mischances in his
+career at Court. Of all her favourites Ralegh was the one whom his
+wayward mistress seemed to find most delight in tormenting. The offence
+which he gave by his secret marriage suggested the scenes describing the
+utter desolation of Prince Arthur's squire, Timias, at the jealous wrath
+of the Virgin Huntress, Belphoebe,--scenes, which extravagant as they
+are, can hardly be called a caricature of Ralegh's real behaviour in the
+Tower in 1593. But Spenser is not satisfied with this one picture. In
+the last Book Timias appears again, the victim of slander and ill-usage,
+even after he had recovered Belphoebe's favour; he is baited like a
+wild bull, by mighty powers of malice, falsehood, and calumny; he is
+wounded by the tooth of the Blatant Beast; and after having been cured,
+not without difficulty, and not without significant indications on the
+part of the poet that his friend had need to restrain and chasten his
+unruly spirit, he is again delivered over to an ignominious captivity,
+and the insults of Disdain and Scorn.
+
+       Then up he made him rise, and forward fare,
+     Led in a rope which both his hands did bynd;
+     Ne ought that foole for pity did him spare,
+     But with his whip, him following behynd,
+     Him often scourg'd, and forst his feete to fynd:
+     And other-whiles with bitter mockes and mowes
+     He would him scorne, that to his gentle mynd
+     Was much more grievous then the others blowes:
+     Words sharpely wound, but greatest griefe of scorning growes.
+
+Spenser knew Ralegh only in the promise of his adventurous prime--so
+buoyant and fearless, so inexhaustible in project and resource, so
+unconquerable by checks and reverses. The gloomier portion of Ralegh's
+career was yet to come: its intrigues, its grand yet really gambling and
+unscrupulous enterprises, the long years of prison and authorship, and
+its not unfitting close, in the English statesman's death by the
+headsman--so tranquil though violent, so ceremoniously solemn, so
+composed, so dignified;--such a contrast to all other forms of capital
+punishment, then or since.
+
+Spenser has been compared to Pindar, and contrasted with Cervantes. The
+contrast, in point of humour, and the truth that humour implies, is
+favourable to the Spaniard: in point of moral earnestness and sense of
+poetic beauty, to the Englishman. What Cervantes only thought
+ridiculous Spenser used, and not in vain, for a high purpose. The ideas
+of knight-errantry were really more absurd than Spenser allowed himself
+to see. But that idea of the gentleman which they suggested, that
+picture of human life as a scene of danger, trial, effort, defeat,
+recovery, which they lent themselves to image forth, was more worth
+insisting on, than the exposure of their folly and extravagance. There
+was nothing to be made of them, Cervantes thought; and nothing to be
+done, but to laugh off what they had left, among living Spaniards, of
+pompous imbecility or mistaken pretensions. Spenser, knowing that they
+must die, yet believed that out of them might be raised something nobler
+and more real, enterprise, duty, resistance to evil, refinement, hatred
+of the mean and base. The energetic and high-reaching manhood which he
+saw in the remarkable personages round him he shadowed forth in the
+_Faery Queen_. He idealized the excellences and the trials of this first
+generation of English gentlemen, as Bunyan afterwards idealized the
+piety, the conflicts, and the hopes of Puritan religion. Neither were
+universal types; neither were perfect. The manhood in which Spenser
+delights, with all that was admirable and attractive in it, had still
+much of boyish incompleteness and roughness: it had noble aims, it had
+generosity, it had loyalty, it had a very real reverence for purity and
+religion; but it was young in experience of a new world, it was wanting
+in self-mastery, it was often pedantic and self-conceited; it was an
+easier prey than it ought to have been to discreditable temptations. And
+there is a long interval between any of Spenser's superficial and thin
+conceptions of character, and such deep and subtle creations as Hamlet
+or Othello, just as Bunyan's strong but narrow ideals of religion, true
+as they are up to a certain point, fall short of the length and breadth
+and depth of what Christianity has made of man, and may yet make of him.
+But in the ways which Spenser chose, he will always delight and teach
+us. The spectacle of what is heroic and self-devoted, of honour for
+principle and truth, set before us with so much insight and sympathy,
+and combined with so much just and broad observation on those accidents
+and conditions of our mortal state which touch us all, will never appeal
+to English readers in vain, till we have learned a new language, and
+adopted new canons of art, of taste, and of morals. It is not merely
+that he has left imperishable images which have taken their place among
+the consecrated memorials of poetry and the household thoughts of all
+cultivated men. But he has permanently lifted the level of English
+poetry by a great and sustained effort of rich and varied art, in which
+one main purpose rules, loyalty to what is noble and pure, and in which
+this main purpose subordinates to itself every feature and every detail,
+and harmonizes some that by themselves seem least in keeping with it.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[118:1]
+
+     "Unknow, unkyst; and lost, that is unsoght."
+
+                                  _Troylus and Cryseide_, lib. i.
+
+[128:2] Hales' _Life_, Globe Edition.
+
+[132:3] _Vid._ Keble, _Prælect. Acad._, xxiv. p. 479, 480.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+SECOND PART OF THE FAERY QUEEN.--SPENSER'S LAST YEARS (1590-1599).
+
+
+The publication of the _Faery Queen_ in 1590 had made the new poet of
+the _Shepherd's Calendar_ a famous man. He was no longer merely the
+favourite of a knot of enthusiastic friends, and outside of them only
+recognized and valued at his true measure by such judges as Sidney and
+Ralegh. By the common voice of all the poets of his time he was now
+acknowledged as the first of living English poets. It is not easy for
+us, who live in these late times and are familiar with so many literary
+masterpieces, to realize the surprise of a first and novel achievement
+in literature; the effect on an age, long and eagerly seeking after
+poetical expression, of the appearance at last of a work of such power,
+richness, and finished art.
+
+It can scarcely be doubted, I think, from the bitter sarcasms
+interspersed in his later poems, that Spenser expected more from his
+triumph than it brought him. It opened no way of advancement for him in
+England. He continued for a while in that most ungrateful and
+unsatisfactory employment, the service of the State in Ireland; and that
+he relinquished in 1593.[166:1] At the end of 1591 he was again at
+Kilcolman. He had written and probably sent to Ralegh, though he did not
+publish it till 1595, the record already quoted of the last two year's
+events, _Colin Clout's come home again_,--his visit, under Ralegh's
+guidance, to the Court, his thoughts and recollections of its great
+ladies, his generous criticisms on poets, the people and courtiers whom
+he had seen and heard of; how he had been dazzled, how he had been
+disenchanted, and how he was come home to his Irish mountains and
+streams and lakes, to enjoy their beauty, though in a "salvage" and
+"foreign" land; to find in this peaceful and tranquil retirement
+something far better than the heat of ambition and the intrigues of
+envious rivalries; and to contrast with the profanations of the name of
+love which had disgusted him in a dissolute society, the higher and
+purer ideal of it which he could honour and pursue in the simplicity of
+his country life.
+
+And in Ireland, the rejected adorer of the Rosalind of the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ found another and still more perfect Rosalind, who, though she
+was at first inclined to repeat the cruelty of the earlier one, in time
+relented, and received such a dower of poetic glory as few poets have
+bestowed upon their brides. It has always appeared strange that
+Spenser's passion for the first Rosalind should have been so lasting,
+that in his last pastoral, _Colin Clout's come home again_, written so
+late as 1591, and published after he was married, he should end his poem
+by reverting to this long-past love passage, defending her on the ground
+of her incomparable excellence and his own unworthiness, against the
+blame of friendly "shepherds," witnesses of the "languors of his too
+long dying," and angry with her hard-heartedness. It may be that,
+according to Spenser's way of making his masks and figures suggest but
+not fully express their antitypes,[168:2] Rosalind here bears the image
+of the real mistress of this time, the "country lass," the Elizabeth of
+the sonnets, who was, in fact, for a while as unkind as the earlier
+Rosalind. The history of this later wooing, its hopes and anguish, its
+varying currents, its final unexpected success, is the subject of a
+collection of Sonnets, which have the disadvantage of provoking
+comparison with the Sonnets of Shakespere. There is no want in them of
+grace and sweetness, and they ring true with genuine feeling and warm
+affection, though they have of course their share of the conceits then
+held proper for love poems. But they want the power and fire, as well as
+the perplexing mystery, of those of the greater master. His bride was
+also immortalized as a fourth among the three Graces, in a
+richly-painted passage in the last book of the _Faery Queen_. But the
+most magnificent tribute to her is the great Wedding Ode, the
+_Epithalamion_, the finest composition of its kind, probably, in any
+language: so impetuous and unflagging, so orderly and yet so rapid in
+the onward march of its stately and varied stanzas; so passionate, so
+flashing with imaginative wealth, yet so refined and self-restrained. It
+was always easy for Spenser to open the floodgates of his inexhaustible
+fancy. With him,--
+
+     The numbers flow as fast as spring doth rise.
+
+But here he has thrown into his composition all his power of
+concentration, of arrangement, of strong and harmonious government over
+thought and image, over language and measure and rhythm; and the result
+is unquestionably one of the grandest lyrics in English poetry. We have
+learned to think the subject unfit for such free poetical treatment;
+Spenser's age did not.
+
+Of the lady of whom all this was said, and for whom all this was
+written, the family name has not been thought worth preserving. We know
+that by her Christian name she was a namesake of the great queen, and of
+Spenser's mother. She is called a country lass, which may mean anything;
+and the marriage appears to have been solemnized in Cork, on what was
+then Midsummer Day, "Barnaby the Bright," the day when "the sun is in
+his cheerful height," June 11/22, 1594. Except that she survived
+Spenser, that she married again, and had some legal quarrels with one of
+her own sons about his lands, we know nothing more about her. Of two of
+the children whom she brought him, the names have been preserved, and
+they indicate that in spite of love and poetry, and the charms of
+Kilcolman, Spenser felt as Englishmen feel in Australia or in India. To
+call one of them _Sylvanus_, and the other _Peregrine_, reveals to us
+that Ireland was still to him a "salvage land," and he a pilgrim and
+stranger in it; as Moses called his firstborn Gershom, a stranger
+here--"for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land."
+
+In the year after his marriage, he sent over these memorials of it to be
+published in London, and they were entered at Stationers' Hall in
+November, 1595. The same year he came over himself, bringing with him
+the second instalment of the _Faery Queen_, which was entered for
+publication the following January, 1595/6. Thus the half of the
+projected work was finished; and finished, as we know from one of the
+Sonnets (80), before his marriage. After his long "race through Fairy
+land," he asks leave to rest, and solace himself with his "love's sweet
+praise;" and then "as a steed refreshed after toil," he will "stoutly
+that second worke assoyle." The first six books were published together
+in 1596. He remained most of the year in London, during which _The Four
+Hymns on Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly_, were published; and
+also a Dirge (_Daphnaida_) on Douglas Howard, the wife of Arthur Gorges,
+the spirited narrator of the Island Voyage of Essex and Ralegh, written
+in 1591; and a "spousal verse" (_Prothalamion_), on the marriage of the
+two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, late in 1596. But he was only a
+visitor in London. The _Prothalamion_ contains a final record of his
+disappointments in England.
+
+                   I, (whom sullein care,
+     Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay
+     In Princes Court, and expectation vayne
+     Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away,
+     Like empty shaddowes, did afflict my brayne,)
+     Walkt forth to ease my payne
+     Along the shoare of silver streaming Themmes--
+
+His marriage ought to have made him happy. He professed to find the
+highest enjoyment in the quiet and retirement of country life. He was in
+the prime of life, successful beyond all his fellows in his special
+work, and apparently with unabated interest in what remained to be done
+of it. And though he could not but feel himself at a distance from the
+"sweet civility" of England, and socially at disadvantage compared to
+those whose lines had fallen to them in its pleasant places, yet
+nature, which he loved so well, was still friendly to him, if men were
+wild and dangerous. He is never weary of praising the natural advantages
+of Ireland. Speaking of the North, he says,--
+
+     And sure it is yet a most beautifull and sweet countrey as any
+     is under heaven, seamed throughout with many goodly rivers,
+     replenished with all sortes of fish, most aboundantly
+     sprinckled with many sweet Ilandes, and goodly lakes, like
+     litle Inland Seas, that will carry even ships upon theyr
+     waters, adorned with goodly woodes fitt for building of howses
+     and shippes, soe comodiously, as that yf some princes in the
+     world had them, they would soone hope to be lordes of all the
+     seas, and ere long of all the world; also full of good portes
+     and havens opening upon England and Scotland, as inviting us
+     to come to them, to see what excellent comodityes that
+     countrey can affoord, besides the soyle it self most fertile,
+     fitt to yeeld all kind of fruite that shal be comitted
+     therunto. And lastly, the heavens most milde and temperat,
+     though somewhat more moyst then the part toward the West.
+
+His own home at Kilcolman charmed and delighted him. It was not his
+fault that its trout streams, its Mulla and Fanchin, are not as famous
+as Walter Scott's Teviot and Tweed, or Wordsworth's Yarrow and Duddon,
+or that its hills, Old Mole, and Arlo Hill, have not kept a poetic name
+like Helvellyn and "Eildon's triple height." They have failed to become
+familiar names to us. But the beauties of his home inspired more than
+one sweet pastoral picture in the _Faery Queen_; and in the last
+fragment remaining to us of it, he celebrates his mountains and woods
+and valleys as once the fabled resort of the Divine Huntress and her
+Nymphs, and the meeting-place of the Gods.
+
+There was one drawback to the enjoyment of his Irish country life, and
+of the natural attractiveness of Kilcolman. "Who knows not Arlo Hill?"
+he exclaims, in the scene just referred to from the fragment on
+_Mutability_. "Arlo, the best and fairest hill in all the holy island's
+heights." It was well known to all Englishmen who had to do with the
+South of Ireland. How well it was known in the Irish history of the
+time, may be seen in the numerous references to it, under various forms,
+such as Aharlo, Harlow, in the Index to the Irish Calendar of Papers of
+this troublesome date, and to continual encounters and ambushes in its
+notoriously dangerous woods. He means by it the highest part of the
+Galtee range, below which to the north, through a glen or defile, runs
+the "river Aherlow." Galtymore, the summit, rises, with precipice and
+gully, more than 3000 feet, above the plains of Tipperary, and is seen
+far and wide. It was connected with the "great wood," the wild region of
+forest, mountain, and bog which stretched half across Munster from the
+Suir to the Shannon. It was the haunt and fastness of Irish outlawry and
+rebellion in the South, which so long sheltered Desmond and his
+followers. Arlo and its "fair forests," harbouring "thieves and wolves,"
+was an uncomfortable neighbour to Kilcolman. The poet describes it as
+ruined by a curse pronounced on the lovely land by the offended goddess
+of the Chase,--
+
+     Which too too true that land's in-dwellers since have found.
+
+He was not only living in an insecure part, on the very border of
+disaffection and disturbance, but like every Englishman living in
+Ireland, he was living amid ruins. An English home in Ireland, however
+fair, was a home on the sides of Ætna or Vesuvius: it stood where the
+lava flood had once passed, and upon not distant fires. Spenser has left
+us his thoughts on the condition of Ireland, in a paper written between
+the two rebellions, some time between 1595 and 1598, after the twelve
+or thirteen years of so-called peace which followed the overthrow of
+Desmond, and when Tyrone's rebellion was becoming serious. It seems to
+have been much copied in manuscript, but though entered for publication
+in 1598, it was not printed till long after his death in 1633. A copy of
+it among the Irish papers of 1598 shows that it had come under the eyes
+of the English Government. It is full of curious observations, of shrewd
+political remarks, of odd and confused ethnography; but more than all
+this, it is a very vivid and impressive picture of what Sir Walter
+Ralegh called "the common woe of Ireland." It is a picture of a noble
+realm, which its inhabitants and its masters did not know what to do
+with; a picture of hopeless mistakes, misunderstandings, misrule; a
+picture of piteous misery and suffering on the part of a helpless and
+yet untameable and mischievous population--of unrelenting and scornful
+rigour on the part of their stronger rulers, which yet was absolutely
+ineffectual to reclaim or subdue them. "Men of great wisdom," Spenser
+writes, "have often wished that all that land were a sea-pool."
+Everything, people thought, had been tried, and tried in vain.
+
+     Marry, soe there have beene divers good plottes and wise
+     counsells cast alleready about reformation of that realme; but
+     they say, it is the fatall desteny of that land, that noe
+     purposes, whatsoever are meant for her good, will prosper or
+     take good effect, which, whether it proceede from the very
+     GENIUS of the soyle, or influence of the starres, or that
+     Allmighty God hath not yet appoynted the time of her
+     reformation, or that He reserveth her in this unquiett state
+     still for some secrett scourdge, which shall by her come unto
+     England, it is hard to be knowen, but yet much to be feared.
+
+The unchanging fatalities of Ireland appear in Spenser's account in all
+their well-known forms; some of them, as if they were what we were
+reading of yesterday. Throughout the work there is an honest zeal for
+order, an honest hatred of falsehood, sloth, treachery, and disorder.
+But there does not appear a trace of consideration for what the Irish
+might feel or desire or resent. He is sensible indeed of English
+mismanagement and vacillation, of the way in which money and force were
+wasted by not being boldly and intelligently employed; he enlarges on
+that power of malignity and detraction which he has figured in the
+Blatant Beast of the _Faery Queen_: but of English cruelty, of English
+injustice, of English rapacity, of English prejudice, he is profoundly
+unconscious. He only sees that things are getting worse and more
+dangerous; and though he, like others, has his "plot" for the
+subjugation and pacification of the island, and shrinks from nothing in
+the way of severity, not even, if necessary, from extermination, his
+outlook is one of deep despair. He calculates the amount of force, of
+money, of time, necessary to break down all resistance: he is minute and
+perhaps skilful in building his forts and disposing his garrisons; he is
+very earnest about the necessity of cutting broad roads through the
+woods, and building bridges in place of fords; he contemplates restored
+churches, parish schools, a better order of clergy. But where the spirit
+was to come from of justice, of conciliation, of steady and firm
+resistance to corruption and selfishness, he gives us no light. What it
+comes to is, that with patience, temper, and public spirit, Ireland
+might be easily reformed and brought into order: but unless he hoped for
+patience, temper, and public spirit from Lord Essex, to whom he seems to
+allude as the person "on whom the eye of England is fixed, and our last
+hopes now rest," he too easily took for granted what was the real
+difficulty. His picture is exact and forcible, of one side of the
+truth; it seems beyond the thought of an honest, well-informed, and
+noble-minded Englishman that there was another side.
+
+But he was right in his estimate of the danger, and of the immediate
+evils which produced it. He was right in thinking that want of method,
+want of control, want of confidence, and an untimely parsimony,
+prevented severity from having a fair chance of preparing a platform for
+reform and conciliation. He was right in his conviction of the
+inveterate treachery of the Irish Chiefs, partly the result of ages of
+mismanagement, but now incurable. While he was writing, Tyrone, a
+craftier and bolder man than Desmond, was taking up what Desmond had
+failed in. He was playing a game with the English authorities which as
+things then were is almost beyond belief. He was outwitting or cajoling
+the veterans of Irish government, who knew perfectly well what he was,
+and yet let him amuse them with false expectations--men like Sir John
+Norreys, who broke his heart when he found out how Tyrone had baffled
+and made a fool of him. Wishing to gain time for help from Spain, and to
+extend the rebellion, he revolted, submitted, sued for pardon but did
+not care to take it when granted, fearlessly presented himself before
+the English officers while he was still beleaguering their posts, led
+the English forces a chase through mountains and bogs, inflicted heavy
+losses on them, and yet managed to keep negotiations open as long as it
+suited him. From 1594 to 1598, the rebellion had been gaining ground; it
+had crept round from Ulster to Connaught, from Connaught to Leinster,
+and now from Connaught to the borders of Munster. But Munster, with its
+English landlords and settlers, was still on the whole quiet. At the end
+of 1597, the Council at Dublin reported home that "Munster was the best
+tempered of all the rest at this present time; for that though not long
+since sundry loose persons" (among them the base sons of Lord Roche,
+Spenser's adversary in land suits) "became Robin Hoods and slew some of
+the undertakers, dwelling scattered in thatched houses and remote places
+near to woods and fastnesses, yet now they are cut off, and no known
+disturbers left who are like to make any dangerous alteration on the
+sudden." But they go on to add that they "have intelligence that many
+are practised withal from the North, to be of combination with the rest,
+and stir coals in Munster, whereby the whole realm might be in a general
+uproar." And they repeat their opinion that they must be prepared for a
+"universal Irish war, intended to shake off all English government."
+
+In April, 1598, Tyrone received a new pardon; in the following August,
+he surprised an English army near Armagh, and shattered it with a
+defeat, the bloodiest and most complete ever received by the English in
+Ireland. Then the storm burst. Tyrone sent a force into Munster: and
+once more Munster rose. It was a rising of the dispossessed proprietors
+and the whole native population against the English undertakers; a
+"ragged number of rogues and boys," as the English Council describes
+them; rebel kernes, pouring out of the "great wood," and from Arlo, the
+"chief fastness of the rebels." Even the chiefs, usually on good terms
+with the English, could not resist the stream. Even Thomas Norreys, the
+President, was surprised, and retired to Cork, bringing down on himself
+a severe reprimand from the English Government. "You might better have
+resisted than you did, considering the many defensible houses and
+castles possessed by the undertakers, who, for aught we can hear, were
+by no means comforted nor supported by you, but either from lack of
+comfort from you, or out of mere cowardice, fled away from the rebels on
+the first alarm." "Whereupon," says Cox, the Irish historian, "the
+Munsterians, generally, rebel in October, and kill, murder, ravish and
+spoil without mercy; and Tyrone made James Fitz-Thomas, Earl of Desmond,
+on condition to be tributary to him; he was the handsomest man of his
+time, and is commonly called the _Sugan_ Earl."
+
+On the last day of the previous September (Sept. 30, 1598), the English
+Council had written to the Irish Government to appoint Edmund Spenser,
+Sheriff of the County of Cork, "a gentleman dwelling in the County of
+Cork, who is so well known unto you all for his good and commendable
+parts, being a man endowed with good knowledge in learning, and not
+unskilful or without experience in the wars." In October, Munster was in
+the hands of the insurgents, who were driving Norreys before them, and
+sweeping out of house and castle the panic-stricken English settlers. On
+December 9th, Norreys wrote home a despatch about the state of the
+province. This despatch was sent to England by Spenser, as we learn from
+a subsequent despatch of Norreys of December 21.[177:3] It was received
+at Whitehall, as appears from Robert Cecil's endorsement, on the 24th of
+December. The passage from Ireland seems to have been a long one. And
+this is the last original document which remains about Spenser.
+
+What happened to him in the rebellion we learn generally from two
+sources, from Camden's _History_, and from Drummond of Hawthornden's
+Recollections of Ben Jonson's conversations with him in 1619. In the
+Munster insurrection of October, the new Earl of Desmond's followers did
+not forget that Kilcolman was an old possession of the Desmonds. It was
+sacked and burnt. Jonson related that a little new-born child of
+Spenser's perished in the flames. Spenser and his wife escaped, and he
+came over to England, a ruined and heart-broken man. He died Jan. 16,
+1598/9; "he died," said Jonson, "for lack of bread in King Street
+[Westminster], and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of
+Essex, saying that he had no time to spend them." He was buried in the
+Abbey, near the grave of Chaucer, and his funeral was at the charge of
+the Earl of Essex. Beyond this we know nothing; nothing about the
+details of his escape, nothing of the fate of his manuscripts, or the
+condition in which he left his work, nothing about the suffering he went
+through in England. All conjecture is idle waste of time. We only know
+that the first of English poets perished miserably and prematurely, one
+of the many heavy sacrifices which the evil fortune of Ireland has cost
+to England; one of many illustrious victims to the madness, the evil
+customs, the vengeance of an ill-treated and ill-governed people.
+
+One Irish rebellion brought him to Ireland, another drove him out of it.
+Desmond's brought him to pass his life there, and to fill his mind with
+the images of what was then Irish life, with its scenery, its
+antipathies, its tempers, its chances, and necessities. Tyrone's swept
+him from Ireland, beggared and hopeless. Ten years after his death, a
+bookseller, reprinting the six books of the _Faery Queen_, added two
+cantos and a fragment, _On Mutability_, supposed to be part of the
+_Legend of Constancy_. Where and how he got them he has not told us. It
+is a strange and solemn meditation, on the universal subjection of all
+things to the inexorable conditions of change. It is strange, with its
+odd episode and fable which Spenser cannot resist about his neighbouring
+streams, its borrowings from Chaucer, and its quaint mixture of
+mythology with sacred and with Irish scenery, Olympus and Tabor, and his
+own rivers and mountains. But it is full of his power over thought and
+imagery; and it is quite in a different key from anything in the first
+six books. It has an undertone of awe-struck and pathetic sadness.
+
+     What man that sees the ever whirling wheel
+     Of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway,
+     But that thereby doth find and plainly feel
+     How Mutability in them doth play
+     Her cruel sports to many men's decay.
+
+He imagines a mighty Titaness, sister of Hecate and Bellona, most
+beautiful and most terrible, who challenges universal dominion over all
+things in earth and heaven, sun and moon, planets and stars, times and
+seasons, life and death; and finally over the wills and thoughts and
+natures of the gods, even of Jove himself; and who pleads her cause
+before the awful Mother of all things, figured as Chaucer had already
+imagined her:--
+
+     Great Nature, ever young, yet full of eld;
+     Still moving, yet unmoved from her stead;
+     Unseen of any, yet of all beheld,
+     Thus sitting on her throne.
+
+He imagines all the powers of the upper and nether worlds assembled
+before her on his own familiar hills, instead of Olympus, where she
+shone like the Vision which "dazed" those "three sacred saints" on
+"Mount Thabor." Before her pass all things known of men, in rich and
+picturesque procession; the Seasons pass, and the Months, and the
+Hours, and Day and Night, Life, as "a fair young lusty boy," Death, grim
+and grisly;--
+
+     Yet is he nought but parting of the breath,
+     Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene,
+     Unbodied, unsoul'd, unheard, unseene--
+
+and on all of them the claims of the Titaness, Mutability, are
+acknowledged. Nothing escapes her sway in this present state, except
+Nature which, while seeming to change, never really changes her ultimate
+constituent elements, or her universal laws. But when she seemed to have
+extorted the admission of her powers, Nature silences her. Change is
+apparent, and not real; and the time is coming when all change shall end
+in the final changeless change.
+
+       "I well consider all that ye have said,
+     And find that all things stedfastnesse do hate
+     And changed be; yet, being rightly wayd,
+     They are not changed from their first estate;
+     But by their change their being do dilate,
+     And turning to themselves at length againe,
+     Do worke their owne perfection so by fate:
+     Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne,
+     But they raigne over Change, and do their states maintaine.
+
+       "Cease therefore, daughter, further to aspire,
+     And thee content thus to be rul'd by mee,
+     For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire;
+     But time shall come that all shall changed bee,
+     And from thenceforth none no more change shal see."
+     So was the Titanesse put downe and whist,
+     And Jove confirm'd in his imperiall see.
+     Then was that whole assembly quite dismist,
+     And Natur's selfe did vanish, whither no man wist.
+
+What he meant--how far he was thinking of those daring arguments of
+religious and philosophical change of which the world was beginning to
+be full, we cannot now tell. The allegory was not finished: at least it
+is lost to us. We have but a fragment more, the last fragment of his
+poetry. It expresses the great commonplace which so impressed itself on
+the men of that time, and of which his works are full. No words could be
+more appropriate to be the last words of one who was so soon to be in
+his own person such an instance of their truth. They are fit closing
+words to mark his tragic and pathetic disappearance from the high and
+animated scene in which his imagination worked. And they record, too,
+the yearning hope of rest not extinguished by terrible and fatal
+disaster:--
+
+       When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare
+     Of Mutabilitie, and well it way,
+     Me seemes, that though she all unworthy were
+     Of the Heav'ns Rule; yet, very sooth to say,
+     In all things else she beares the greatest sway:
+     Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle,
+     And love of things so vaine to cast away;
+     Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle,
+     Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.
+
+       Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
+     Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
+     But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd
+     Upon the pillours of Eternity,
+     That is contrayr to Mutabilitie;
+     For all that moveth doth in Change delight:
+     But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
+     With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight:
+     O! that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabaoths sight.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[166:1] Who is _Edmondus Spenser, Prebendary of Effin_ (Elphin)? in a
+list of arrears of first fruits; Calendar of State Papers, _Ireland_,
+Dec. 8, 1586, p. 222. Church preferments were under special
+circumstances allowed to be held by laymen. See the Queen's
+"Instructions," 1579; in Preface to Calendar of Carew MSS. 1589-1600, p.
+ci.
+
+[168:2] "In these kind of historical allusions Spenser usually perplexes
+the subject: he leads you on, and then designedly misleads you."--Upton,
+quoted by Craik, iii. 92.
+
+[177:3] I am indebted for this reference to Mr. Hans Claude Hamilton.
+See also his Preface to Calendar of Irish Papers, 1574-85, p. lxxvi.
+
+
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+SAMUEL LEE, M.A. pp. 228.
+
+     "_A more complete Edition of Virgil in English it is scarcely
+     possible to conceive than the scholarly work before
+     us._"--GLOBE.
+
+
++The Works of Horace.+ Rendered into English Prose, with Introductions,
+Running Analysis, Notes, and Index. By JAMES LONSDALE, M.A., and SAMUEL
+LEE, M.A.
+
+     _The STANDARD says, "To classical and non-classical readers
+     it will be invaluable._"
+
+
++Milton's Poetical Works.+--Edited, with Introductions, by Professor
+MASSON.
+
+     "_In every way an admirable book._"--PALL MALL GAZETTE.
+
+
+MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+The following words use an oe ligature in the original:
+
+     Belphoebe
+     Belphoebe's
+     Phoebus
+
+The following corrections have been made to the text:
+
+     Page 6: dust was raised.[6:5][anchor missing in original
+
+     Page 41: scenery on which the poet's sweetness[original has
+     sweetnesss]
+
+     Page 42: "[quotation mark missing in original]Shepherd that
+     did fetch
+
+     Page 48: Discourse[original has Discouse] of English Poetrie
+
+     Page 76: as deputy for the said Briskett)[ending parenthesis
+     missing in original]
+
+     Page 83: [original has extraneous quotation mark]In the meane
+     while I must struggle
+
+     Page 105: looselie scattered abroad,[original has comma]
+
+     Page 122: as most fitte[original has fittte] for the
+     excellency
+
+     Page 151: standard of moral character[original has charater]
+
+     Page 173: "Men of great wisdom," Spenser writes[original has
+     writers]
+
+     Page 174: Throughout the work there is an[original has a]
+     honest zeal
+
+     Page 178: through in England.[original has comma] All
+     conjecture
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Spenser, by R. W. Church
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPENSER ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Spenser, by R. W. Church
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Spenser
+       (English Men of Letters Series)
+
+Author: R. W. Church
+
+Release Date: January 27, 2010 [EBook #31101]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPENSER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lisa Reigel, and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been
+left as in the original. Some typographical and punctuation errors have
+been corrected. A complete list follows the text. Words in Greek in the
+original are transliterated and placed between =equal signs=. Words
+italicized in the original are surrounded by _underscores_. Words in
+bold in the original are surrounded by +plus signs+. Characters inside
+{braces} are superscripted in the original. In quoted material, a row of
+asterisks represents an ellipsis. Ellipses match the original.
+
+
+
+
+                               SPENSER
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                            R. W. CHURCH,
+
+                         DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S,
+                  HONORARY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE.
+
+
+                               London:
+                          MACMILLAN AND CO.
+                                 1879
+
+
+       _The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved._
+
+
+
+
+NOTICE.
+
+
+As the plan of these volumes does not encourage footnotes, I wish to say
+that, besides the biographies prefixed to the various editions of
+Spenser, there are two series of publications, which have been very
+useful to me. One is the series of Calendars of State Papers, especially
+the State Papers on Ireland and the Carew MSS. at Lambeth, with the
+prefaces of Mr. Hans Claude Hamilton and the late Professor Brewer. The
+other is Mr. E. Arber's series of reprints of old English books, and his
+Transcript of the Stationers' Registers, a work, I suppose, without
+parallel in its information about the early literature of a country, and
+edited by him with admirable care and public spirit. I wish also to say
+that I am much indebted to Mr. Craik's excellent little book on _Spenser
+and his Poetry_.
+
+                                                         R. W. C.
+
+_March, 1879._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+     CHAPTER I.
+                                                             PAGE
+     SPENSER'S EARLY LIFE (1552-1579)                           1
+
+
+     CHAPTER II.
+
+     THE NEW POET--THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR (1579)              29
+
+
+     CHAPTER III.
+
+     SPENSER IN IRELAND (1580)                                 51
+
+
+     CHAPTER IV.
+
+     THE FAERY QUEEN--THE FIRST PART (1580-1590)               81
+
+
+     CHAPTER V.
+
+     THE FAERY QUEEN                                          118
+
+
+     CHAPTER VI.
+
+     SECOND PART OF THE FAERY QUEEN--SPENSER'S LAST
+         YEARS (1590-1599)                                    166
+
+
+
+
+SPENSER.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+SPENSER'S EARLY LIFE.
+
+[1552-1579.]
+
+
+Spenser marks a beginning in English literature. He is the first
+Englishman who, in that great division of our history which dates from
+the Reformation, attempted and achieved a poetical work of the highest
+order. Born about the same time as Hooker (1552-1554), in the middle of
+that eventful century which began with Henry VIII., and ended with
+Elizabeth, he was the earliest of our great modern writers in poetry, as
+Hooker was the earliest of our great modern writers in prose. In that
+reviving English literature, which, after Chaucer's wonderful promise,
+had been arrested in its progress, first by the Wars of the Roses, and
+then by the religious troubles of the Reformation, these two were the
+writers who first realized to Englishmen the ideas of a high literary
+perfection. These ideas vaguely filled many minds; but no one had yet
+shown the genius and the strength to grasp and exhibit them in a way to
+challenge comparison with what had been accomplished by the poetry and
+prose of Greece, Rome, and Italy. There had been poets in England since
+Chaucer, and prose writers since Wycliffe had translated the Bible.
+Surrey and Wyatt have deserved to live, while a crowd of poets, as
+ambitious as they, and not incapable of occasional force and sweetness,
+have been forgotten. Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, Tyndale, the
+translator of the New Testament, Bishop Latimer, the writers of many
+state documents, and the framers, either by translation or composition,
+of the offices of the English Prayer Book, showed that they understood
+the power of the English language over many of the subtleties and
+difficulties of thought, and were alive to the music of its cadences.
+Some of these works, consecrated by the highest of all possible
+associations, have remained, permanent monuments and standards of the
+most majestic and most affecting English speech. But the verse of
+Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville, and the prose of More and Ascham were but
+noble and promising efforts. Perhaps the language was not ripe for their
+success; perhaps the craftsmen's strength and experience were not equal
+to the novelty of their attempt. But no one can compare the English
+styles of the first half of the sixteenth century with the contemporary
+styles of Italy, with Ariosto, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, without
+feeling the immense gap in point of culture, practice, and skill--the
+immense distance at which the Italians were ahead, in the finish and
+reach of their instruments, in their power to handle them, in command
+over their resources, and facility and ease in using them. The Italians
+were more than a century older; the English could not yet, like the
+Italians, say what they would; the strength of English was, doubtless,
+there in germ, but it had still to reach its full growth and
+development. Even the French prose of Rabelais and Montaigne was more
+mature. But in Spenser, as in Hooker, all these tentative essays of
+vigorous but unpractised minds have led up to great and lasting works.
+We have forgotten all these preliminary attempts, crude and imperfect,
+to speak with force and truth, or to sing with measure and grace. There
+is no reason why they should be remembered, except by professed
+inquirers into the antiquities of our literature; they were usually
+clumsy and awkward, sometimes grotesque, often affected, always
+hopelessly wanting in the finish, breadth, moderation, and order which
+alone can give permanence to writing. They were the necessary exercises
+by which Englishmen were recovering the suspended art of Chaucer, and
+learning to write; and exercises, though indispensably necessary, are
+not ordinarily in themselves interesting and admirable. But when the
+exercises had been duly gone through, then arose the original and
+powerful minds, to take full advantage of what had been gained by all
+the practising, and to concentrate and bring to a focus all the hints
+and lessons of art which had been gradually accumulating. Then the
+sustained strength and richness of the _Faery Queen_ became possible;
+contemporary with it, the grandeur and force of English prose began in
+Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_; and then, in the splendid Elizabethan
+Drama, that form of art which has nowhere a rival, the highest powers of
+poetic imagination became wedded, as they had never been before in
+England or in the world, to the real facts of human life, and to its
+deepest thoughts and passions.
+
+More is known about the circumstances of Spenser's life than about the
+lives of many men of letters of that time; yet our knowledge is often
+imperfect and inaccurate. The year 1552 is now generally accepted as the
+year of his birth. The date is inferred from a passage in one of his
+Sonnets,[4:1] and this probably is near the truth. That is to say that
+Spenser was born in one of the last two years of Edward VI.; that his
+infancy was passed during the dark days of Mary; and that he was about
+six years old when Elizabeth came to the throne. About the same time
+were born Ralegh, and, a year or two later (1554), Hooker and Philip
+Sidney. Bacon (1561), and Shakespere (1564), belong to the next decade
+of the century.
+
+He was certainly a Londoner by birth, and early training. This also we
+learn from himself, in the latest poem published in his life-time. It is
+a bridal ode (_Prothalamion_), to celebrate the marriage of two
+daughters of the Earl of Worcester, written late in 1596. It was a time
+in his life of disappointment and trouble, when he was only a rare
+visitor to London. In the poem he imagines himself on the banks of
+London's great river, and the bridal procession arriving at Lord Essex's
+house; and he takes occasion to record the affection with which he still
+regarded "the most kindly nurse" of his boyhood.
+
+       Calm was the day, and through the trembling air
+       Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play,
+       A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
+       Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair:
+       When I, (whom sullen care,
+       Through discontent of my long fruitless stay
+       In Princes Court, and expectation vain
+       Of idle hopes, which still do fly away,
+       Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain,)
+       Walkt forth to ease my pain
+       Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames;
+       Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems,
+       Was painted all with variable flowers,
+       And all the meads adorned with dainty gems
+       Fit to deck maidens' bowers,
+       And crown their paramours
+     Against the bridal day, which is not long:
+     Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+       At length they all _to merry London came,
+       To merry London, my most kindly nurse,
+       That to me gave this life's first native source,
+       Though from another place I take my name,
+       A house of ancient fame_.
+       There, when they came, whereas those bricky towers
+       The which on Thames broad aged back do ride,
+       Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
+       There whilome wont the Templar Knights to bide,
+       Till they decayed through pride:
+       Next whereunto there stands a stately place,
+       _Where oft I gained gifts and goodly grace[5:2]
+       Of that great Lord, which therein wont to dwell;
+       Whose want too well now feels my friendless case;
+       But ah! here fits not well
+       Old woes, but joys, to tell_
+     Against the bridal day, which is not long:
+     Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song:
+       Yet therein now doth lodge a noble peer,[5:3]
+       Great England's glory and the wide world's wonder,
+       Whose dreadful name late through all Spain did thunder,
+       And Hercules two pillars, standing near,
+       Did make to quake and fear.
+       Fair branch of honour, flower of chivalry!
+       That fillest England with thy triumph's fame,
+       Joy have thou of thy noble victory,[5:4]
+       And endless happiness of thine own name
+       That promiseth the same.
+       That through thy prowess, and victorious arms,
+       Thy country may be freed from foreign harms;
+       And great Elisa's glorious name may ring
+       Through all the world, filled with thy wide alarms.
+
+Who his father was, and what was his employment we know not. From one of
+the poems of his later years we learn that his mother bore the famous
+name of Elizabeth, which was also the cherished one of Spenser's wife.
+
+           My love, my life's best ornament,
+     By whom my spirit out of dust was raised.[6:5]
+
+But his family, whatever was his father's condition, certainly claimed
+kindred, though there was a difference in the spelling of the name, with
+a house then rising into fame and importance, the Spencers of Althorpe,
+the ancestors of the Spencers and Churchills of modern days. Sir John
+Spencer had several daughters, three of whom made great marriages.
+Elizabeth was the wife of Sir George Carey, afterwards the second Lord
+Hunsdon, the son of Elizabeth's cousin and Counsellor. Anne, first, Lady
+Compton, afterwards married Thomas Sackville, the son of the poet, Lord
+Buckhurst, and then Earl of Dorset. Alice, the youngest, whose first
+husband, Lord Strange, became Earl of Derby, after his death married
+Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper, Baron Ellesmere, and then Viscount
+Brackley. These three sisters are celebrated by him in a gallery of the
+noble ladies of the Court,[6:6] under poetical names--"Phyllis, the
+flower of rare perfection," "Charillis, the pride and primrose of the
+rest," and "Sweet Amaryllis, the youngest but the highest in degree."
+Alice, Lady Strange, Lady Derby, Lady Ellesmere and Brackley, and then
+again Dowager Lady Derby, the "Sweet Amaryllis" of the poet, had the
+rare fortune to be a personal link between Spenser and Milton. She was
+among the last whom Spenser honoured with his homage: and she was the
+first whom Milton honoured; for he composed his Arcades to be acted
+before her by her grandchildren, and the _Masque of Comus_ for her
+son-in-law, Lord Bridgewater, and his daughter, another Lady Alice. With
+these illustrious sisters Spenser claimed kindred. To each of these he
+dedicated one of his minor poems; to Lady Strange, the _Tears of the
+Muses_; to Lady Compton, the Apologue of the Fox and the Ape, _Mother
+Hubberd's Tale_; to Lady Carey, the Fable of the Butterfly and the
+Spider, _Muiopotmos_. And in each dedication he assumed on their part
+the recognition of his claim.
+
+                    The sisters three,
+     The honour of the noble family,
+     Of which I meanest boast myself to be.
+
+Whatever his degree of relationship to them, he could hardly even in the
+days of his fame have ventured thus publicly to challenge it, unless
+there had been some acknowledged ground for it. There are obscure
+indications, which antiquarian diligence may perhaps make clear, which
+point to East Lancashire as the home of the particular family of
+Spensers to which Edmund Spenser's father belonged. Probably he was,
+however, in humble circumstances.
+
+Edmund Spenser was a Londoner by education as well as birth. A recent
+discovery by Mr. R. B. Knowles, further illustrated by Dr. Grosart,[7:7]
+has made us acquainted with Spenser's school. He was a pupil, probably
+one of the earliest ones, of the grammar school, then recently (1560)
+established by the Merchant Taylors' Company, under a famous teacher,
+Dr. Mulcaster. Among the manuscripts at Townley Hall are preserved the
+account books of the executors of a bountiful London citizen, Robert
+Nowell, the brother of Dr. Alexander Nowell, who was Dean of St. Paul's
+during Elizabeth's reign, and was a leading person in the ecclesiastical
+affairs of the time. In these books, in a crowd of unknown names of
+needy relations and dependents, distressed foreigners, and parish
+paupers, who shared from time to time the liberality of Mr. Robert
+Nowell's representatives, there appear among the numerous "poor
+scholars" whom his wealth assisted, the names of Richard Hooker, and
+Lancelot Andrewes. And there, also, in the roll of the expenditure at
+Mr. Nowell's pompous funeral at St. Paul's in February, 1568/9, among
+long lists of unknown men and women, high and low, who had mourning
+given them, among bills for fees to officials, for undertakers' charges,
+for heraldic pageantry and ornamentation, for abundant supplies for the
+sumptuous funeral banquet, are put down lists of boys, from the chief
+London schools, St. Paul's, Westminster, and others, to whom two yards
+of cloth were to be given to make their gowns: and at the head of the
+six scholars named from Merchant Taylors' is the name of Edmund Spenser.
+
+He was then, probably, the senior boy of the school, and in the
+following May he went to Cambridge. The Nowells still helped him: we
+read in their account books under April 28, 1569, "to Edmond Spensore,
+scholler of the m'chante tayler scholl, at his gowinge to penbrocke
+hall in chambridge, x{s}." On the 20th of May, he was admitted sizar,
+or serving clerk at Pembroke Hall; and on more than one occasion
+afterwards, like Hooker and like Lancelot Andrewes, also a Merchant
+Taylors' boy, two or three years Spenser's junior, and a member of the
+same college, Spenser had a share in the benefactions, small in
+themselves, but very numerous, with which the Nowells after the fine
+fashion of the time, were accustomed to assist poor scholars at the
+Universities. In the visitations of Merchant Taylors' School, at which
+Grindal, Bishop of London, was frequently present,[9:8] it is not
+unlikely that his interest was attracted, in the appositions or
+examinations, to the promising senior boy of the school. At any rate
+Spenser, who afterwards celebrated Grindal's qualities as a bishop, was
+admitted to a place, one which befitted a scholar in humble
+circumstances, in Grindal's old college. It is perhaps worth noticing
+that all Spenser's early friends, Grindal, the Nowells, Dr. Mulcaster,
+his master, were north country men.
+
+Spenser was sixteen or seventeen when he left school for the university,
+and he entered Cambridge at the time when the struggle which was to
+occupy the reign of Elizabeth was just opening. At the end of the year
+1569, the first distinct blow was struck against the queen and the new
+settlement of religion, by the Rising of the North. In the first ten
+years of Elizabeth's reign, Spenser's school time at Merchant Taylors',
+the great quarrel had slumbered. Events abroad occupied men's minds; the
+religious wars in France, the death of the Duke of Guise (1563), the
+loss of Havre, and expulsion of the English garrisons, the close of the
+Council of Trent (1563), the French peace, the accession of Pius V.
+(1565/6). Nearer home, there was the marriage of Mary of Scotland with
+Henry Darnley (1565), and all the tragedy which followed, Kirk of Field
+(1567), Lochleven, Langside, Carlisle, the imprisonment of the pretender
+to the English Crown (1568). In England, the authority of Elizabeth had
+established itself, and the internal organization of the Reformed Church
+was going on, in an uncertain and tentative way, but steadily. There was
+a struggle between Genevan exiles, who were for going too fast, and
+bishops and politicians who were for going too slow; between authority
+and individual judgment, between home-born state traditions and foreign
+revolutionary zeal. But outwardly, at least, England had been peaceful.
+Now however a great change was at hand. In 1566, the Dominican
+Inquisitor, Michael Ghislieri, was elected Pope, under the title of Pius
+V.
+
+In Pius (1566-72), were embodied the new spirit and policy of the Roman
+Church, as they had been created and moulded by the great Jesuit order,
+and by reforming bishops like Ghiberti of Verona, and Carlo Borromeo of
+Milan. Devout and self-denying as a saint, fierce and inflexible against
+abuses as a puritan, resolute and uncompromising as a Jacobin idealist
+or an Asiatic despot, ruthless and inexorable as an executioner, his
+soul was bent on re-establishing, not only by preaching and martyrdom,
+but by the sword and by the stake, the unity of Christendom and of its
+belief. Eastwards and westwards, he beheld two formidable foes and two
+serious dangers; and he saw before him the task of his life in the
+heroic work of crushing English heresy and beating back Turkish
+misbelief. He broke through the temporizing caution of his predecessors
+by the Bull of Deposition against Elizabeth in 1570. He was the soul of
+the confederacy which won the day of Lepanto against the Ottomans in
+1571. And though dead, his spirit was paramount in the slaughter of St.
+Bartholomew in 1572.
+
+In the year 1569, while Spenser was passing from school to college, his
+emissaries were already in England, spreading abroad that Elizabeth was
+a bastard and an apostate, incapable of filling a Christian throne,
+which belonged by right to the captive Mary. The seed they sowed bore
+fruit. In the end of the year, southern England was alarmed by the news
+of the rebellion of the two great Earls in the north, Percy of
+Northumberland and Neville of Westmoreland. Durham was sacked and the
+mass restored by an insurgent host, before which an "aged gentleman,"
+Richard Norton with his sons, bore the banner of the Five Wounds of
+Christ. The rebellion was easily put down, and the revenge was stern. To
+the men who had risen at the instigation of the Pope and in the cause of
+Mary, Elizabeth gave, as she had sworn "such a breakfast as never was in
+the North before." The hangman finished the work on those who had
+escaped the sword. Poetry, early and late, has recorded the dreary fate
+of those brave victims of a mistaken cause, in the ballad of the _Rising
+of the North_, and in the _White Doe of Rylstone_. It was the signal
+given for the internecine war which was to follow between Rome and
+Elizabeth. And it was the first great public event which Spenser would
+hear of in all men's mouths, as he entered on manhood, the prelude and
+augury of fierce and dangerous years to come. The nation awoke to the
+certainty--one which so profoundly affects sentiment and character both
+in a nation and in an individual--that among the habitual and fixed
+conditions of life is that of having a serious and implacable enemy ever
+to reckon with.
+
+And in this year, apparently in the transition time between school and
+college, Spenser's literary ventures began. The evidence is curious, but
+it seems to be clear. In 1569, a refugee Flemish physician from Antwerp,
+who had fled to England from the "abominations of the Roman Antichrist"
+and the persecutions of the Duke of Alva, John Vander Noodt, published
+one of those odd miscellanies, fashionable at the time, half moral and
+poetical, half fiercely polemical, which he called a "_Theatre_, wherein
+be represented as well the Miseries and Calamities which follow the
+voluptuous Worldlings, as also the great Joys and Pleasures which the
+Faithful do enjoy--an argument both profitable and delectable to all
+that sincerely love the word of God." This "little treatise," was a
+mixture of verse and prose, setting forth in general, the vanity of the
+world, and, in particular, predictions of the ruin of Rome and
+Antichrist: and it enforced its lessons by illustrative woodcuts. In
+this strange jumble are preserved, we can scarcely doubt, the first
+compositions which we know of Spenser's. Among the pieces are some
+Sonnets of Petrarch, and some Visions of the French poet Joachim du
+Bellay, whose poems were published in 1568. In the collection itself,
+these pieces are said by the compiler to have been translated by him
+"out of the Brabants speech," and "out of Dutch into English." But in a
+volume of "poems of the world's vanity," and published years afterwards
+in 1591, ascribed to Spenser, and put together, apparently with his
+consent, by his publisher, are found these very pieces from Petrarch and
+Du Bellay. The translations from Petrarch are almost literally the same,
+and are said to have been "formerly translated." In the Visions of Du
+Bellay there is this difference, that the earlier translations are in
+blank verse, and the later ones are rimed as sonnets; but the change
+does not destroy the manifest identity of the two translations. So that
+unless Spenser's publisher, to whom the poet had certainly given some of
+his genuine pieces for the volume, is not to be trusted,--which, of
+course, is possible, but not probable--or unless,--what is in the last
+degree inconceivable,--Spenser had afterwards been willing to take the
+trouble of turning the blank verse of Du Bellay's unknown translator
+into rime, the Dutchman who dates his _Theatre of Worldlings_ on the
+25th May, 1569, must have employed the promising and fluent school boy,
+to furnish him with an English versified form, of which he himself took
+the credit, for compositions which he professes to have known only in
+the Brabants or Dutch translations. The sonnets from Petrarch are
+translated with much command of language; there occurs in them, what was
+afterwards a favourite thought of Spenser's:--
+
+                             --The Nymphs,
+     That sweetly in accord did _tune their voice
+     To the soft sounding of the waters' fall_.[13:9]
+
+It is scarcely credible that the translator of the sonnets could have
+caught so much as he has done of the spirit of Petrarch without having
+been able to read the Italian original; and if Spenser was the
+translator, it is a curious illustration of the fashionableness of
+Italian literature in the days of Elizabeth, that a school-boy just
+leaving Merchant Taylors' should have been so much interested in it. Dr.
+Mulcaster, his master, is said by Warton to have given special attention
+to the teaching of the English language.
+
+If these translations were Spenser's, he must have gone to Cambridge
+with a faculty of verse, which for his time may be compared to that with
+which winners of prize poems go to the universities now. But there was
+this difference, that the school-boy versifiers of our days are rich
+with the accumulated experience and practice of the most varied and
+magnificent poetical literature in the world; while Spenser had but one
+really great English model behind him; and Chaucer, honoured as he was,
+had become in Elizabeth's time, if not obsolete, yet in his diction,
+very far removed from the living language of the day. Even Milton, in
+his boyish compositions, wrote after Spenser and Shakespeare, with their
+contemporaries, had created modern English poetry. Whatever there was in
+Spenser's early verses of grace and music was of his own finding: no one
+of his own time, except in occasional and fitful snatches, like stanzas
+of Sackville's, had shown him the way. Thus equipped, he entered the
+student world, then full of pedantic and ill-applied learning, of the
+disputations of Calvinistic theology, and of the beginnings of those
+highly speculative puritanical controversies, which were the echo at the
+University of the great political struggles of the day, and were soon to
+become so seriously practical. The University was represented to the
+authorities in London as being in a state of dangerous excitement,
+troublesome and mutinous. Whitgift, afterwards Elizabeth's favourite
+archbishop, Master, first of Pembroke, and then of Trinity, was
+Vice-Chancellor of the University; but as the guardian of established
+order, he found it difficult to keep in check the violent and
+revolutionary spirit of the theological schools. Calvin was beginning to
+be set up there as the infallible doctor of Protestant theology.
+Cartwright from the Margaret Professor's chair was teaching the
+exclusive and divine claims of the Geneva platform of discipline, and in
+defiance of the bishops and the government was denouncing the received
+Church polity and ritual as Popish and anti-Christian. Cartwright, an
+extreme and uncompromising man, was deprived in 1570; but the course
+which things were taking under the influence of Rome and Spain gave
+force to his lessons and warnings, and strengthened his party. In this
+turmoil of opinions, amid these hard and technical debates, these fierce
+conflicts between the highest authorities, and this unsparing violence
+and bitterness of party recriminations, Spenser, with the tastes and
+faculties of a poet, and the love not only of what was beautiful, but of
+what was meditative and dreamy, began his university life.
+
+It was not a favourable atmosphere for the nurture of a great poet. But
+it suited one side of Spenser's mind, as it suited that of all but the
+most independent Englishmen of the time, Shakespere, Bacon, Ralegh.
+Little is known of Spenser's Cambridge career. It is probable, from the
+persons with whom he was connected, that he would not be indifferent to
+the debates around him, and that his religious prepossessions were then,
+as afterwards, in favour of the conforming puritanism in the Church, as
+opposed to the extreme and thorough-going puritanism of Cartwright. Of
+the conforming puritans, who would have been glad of a greater
+approximation to the Swiss model, but who, whatever their private wishes
+or dislikes, thought it best, for good reasons or bad, to submit to the
+strong determination of the government against it, and to accept what
+the government approved and imposed, Grindal, who held successively the
+great sees of London, York, and Canterbury, and Nowell, Dean of St.
+Paul's, Spenser's benefactor, were representative types. Grindal, a
+waverer like many others in opinion, had also a noble and manly side to
+his character, in his hatred of practical abuses, and in the courageous
+and obstinate resistance which he could offer to power, when his sense
+of right was outraged. Grindal, as has been said, was perhaps
+instrumental in getting Spenser into his own old college, Pembroke Hall,
+with the intention, it may be, as was the fashion of bishops of that
+time, of becoming his patron. But certainly after his disgrace in 1577,
+and when it was not quite safe to praise a great man under the
+displeasure of the Court, Grindal is the person whom Spenser first
+singled out for his warmest and heartiest praise. He is introduced under
+a thin disguise, "Algrind," in Spenser's earliest work after he left
+Cambridge, the _Shepherd's Calendar_, as the pattern of the true and
+faithful Christian pastor. And if Pembroke Hall retained at all the tone
+and tendencies of such masters as Ridley, Grindal, and Whitgift, the
+school in which Spenser grew up was one of their mitigated puritanism.
+But his puritanism was political and national, rather than religious. He
+went heartily with the puritan party in their intense hatred of Rome and
+Roman partisans; he went with them also in their denunciations of the
+scandals and abuses of the ecclesiastical government at home. But in
+temper of mind and intellectual bias he had little in common with the
+puritans. For the stern austerities of Calvinism, its fierce and eager
+scholasticism, its isolation from human history, human enjoyment, and
+all the manifold play and variety of human character, there could not be
+much sympathy in a man like Spenser, with his easy and flexible nature,
+keenly alive to all beauty, an admirer even when he was not a lover of
+the alluring pleasures of which the world is full, with a perpetual
+struggle going on in him, between his strong instincts of purity and
+right, and his passionate appreciation of every charm and grace. He
+shows no signs of agreement with the internal characteristics of the
+puritans, their distinguishing theology, their peculiarities of thought
+and habits, their protests, right or wrong, against the fashions and
+amusements of the world. If not a man of pleasure, he yet threw himself
+without scruple into the tastes, the language, the pursuits, of the gay
+and gallant society in which they saw so much evil: and from their
+narrow view of life, and the contempt, dislike, and fear, with which
+they regarded the whole field of human interest, he certainly was parted
+by the widest gulf. Indeed, he had not the sternness and concentration
+of purpose, which made Milton the great puritan poet.
+
+Spenser took his Master's degree in 1576, and then left Cambridge. He
+gained no Fellowship, and there is nothing to show how he employed
+himself. His classical learning, whether acquired there or elsewhere,
+was copious, but curiously inaccurate; and the only specimen remaining
+of his Latin composition in verse is contemptible in its medi�val
+clumsiness. We know nothing of his Cambridge life except the friendships
+which he formed there. An intimacy began at Cambridge of the closest and
+most affectionate kind, which lasted long into after-life, between him
+and two men of his college, one older in standing than himself, the
+other younger; Gabriel Harvey, first a fellow of Pembroke, and then a
+student or teacher of civil law at Trinity Hall, and Edward Kirke, like
+Spenser, a sizar at Pembroke, recently identified with the E. K., who
+was the editor and commentator of Spenser's earliest work, the anonymous
+_Shepherd's Calendar_. Of the younger friend this is the most that is
+known. That he was deeply in Spenser's confidence as a literary
+coadjutor, and possibly in other ways, is shown in the work which he
+did. But Gabriel Harvey was a man who had influence on Spenser's ideas
+and purposes, and on the direction of his efforts. He was a classical
+scholar of much distinction in his day, well read in the Italian authors
+then so fashionable, and regarded as a high authority on questions of
+criticism and taste. Except to students of Elizabethan literary history,
+he has become an utterly obscure personage; and he has not usually been
+spoken of with much respect. He had the misfortune, later in life, to
+plunge violently into the scurrilous quarrels of the day, and as he was
+matched with wittier and more popular antagonists, he has come down to
+us as a foolish pretender, or at least as a dull and stupid scholar who
+knew little of the real value of the books he was always ready to quote,
+like the pedant of the comedies, or Shakespere's schoolmaster
+Holofernes. Further, he was one who, with his classical learning, had
+little belief in the resources of his mother tongue, and he was one of
+the earliest and most confident supporters of a plan then fashionable,
+for reforming English verse, by casting away its natural habits and
+rhythms, and imposing on it the laws of the classical metres. In this he
+was not singular. The professed treatises of this time on poetry, of
+which there were several, assume the same theory, as the mode of
+"reforming" and duly elevating English verse. It was eagerly accepted by
+Philip Sidney and his Areopagus of wits at court, who busied themselves
+in devising rules of their own--improvements as they thought on those of
+the university men--for English hexameters and sapphics, or as they
+called it, artificial versifying. They regarded the comparative value of
+the native English rhythms and the classical metres, much as our
+ancestors of Addison's day regarded the comparison between Gothic and
+Palladian architecture. One, even if it sometimes had a certain romantic
+interest, was rude and coarse; the other was the perfection of polite
+art and good taste. Certainly in what remains of Gabriel Harvey's
+writing, there is much that seems to us vain and ridiculous enough; and
+it has been naturally surmised that he must have been a dangerous friend
+and counsellor to Spenser. But probably we are hard upon him. His
+writings, after all, are not much more affected and absurd in their
+outward fashion than most of the literary composition of the time; his
+verses are no worse than those of most of his neighbours; he was not
+above, but he was not below, the false taste and clumsiness of his age;
+and the rage for "artificial versifying" was for the moment in the air.
+And it must be said, that though his enthusiasm for English hexameters
+is of a piece with the puritan use of scripture texts in divinity and
+morals, yet there is no want of hard-headed shrewdness in his remarks;
+indeed, in his rules for the adaptation of English words and accents to
+classical metres, he shows clearness and good sense in apprehending the
+conditions of the problem, while Sidney and Spenser still appear
+confused and uncertain. But in spite of his pedantry, and though he had
+not, as we shall see, the eye to discern at first the genius of the
+_Faery Queen_, he has to us the interest of having been Spenser's first,
+and as far as we can see, to the last, dearest friend. By both of his
+younger fellow-students at Cambridge, he was looked up to with the
+deepest reverence, and the most confiding affection. Their language is
+extravagant, but there is no reason to think that it was not genuine. E.
+Kirke, the editor of Spenser's first venture, the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+commends the "new poet" to his patronage, and to the protection of his
+"mighty rhetoric," and exhorts Harvey himself to seize the poetical
+"garland which to him alone is due." Spenser speaks in the same terms;
+"_veruntamen te sequor solum; nunquam vero assequar_." Portions of the
+early correspondence between Harvey and Spenser have been preserved to
+us, possibly by Gabriel Harvey's self-satisfaction in regard to his own
+compositions. But with the pedagogue's jocoseness, and a playfulness
+which is like that of an elephant, it shows on both sides easy
+frankness, sincerity, and warmth, and not a little of the early
+character of the younger man. In Spenser's earliest poetry, his
+pastorals, Harvey appears among the imaginary rustics, as the poet's
+"special and most familiar friend," under the name of Hobbinol,--
+
+     "Good Hobbinol, that was so true."
+
+To him Spenser addresses his confidences, under the name of Colin Clout,
+a name borrowed from Skelton, a satirical poet of Henry VIII.'s time,
+which Spenser kept throughout his poetical career. Harvey reappears in
+one of Spenser's latest writings, a return to the early pastoral, _Colin
+Clout's come home again_, a picture drawn in distant Ireland, of the
+brilliant but disappointing court of Elizabeth. And from Ireland in
+1586, was addressed to Harvey by "his devoted friend during life," the
+following fine sonnet, which, whatever may have been the merit of
+Harvey's criticisms and his literary quarrels with Greene and Nash,
+shows at least Spenser's unabated honour for him.
+
+     TO THE RIGHT WORSHIPFUL, MY SINGULAR GOOD FRIEND, M.
+     GABRIEL HARVEY, DOCTOR OF THE LAWS.
+
+     HARVEY, the happy above happiest men
+     I read; that, sitting like a looker on
+     Of this world's stage, dost note with critic pen
+     The sharp dislikes of each condition;
+     And, as one careless of suspicion,
+     Ne fawnest for the favour of the great;
+     Ne fearest foolish reprehension
+     Of faulty men, which danger to thee threat;
+     But freely dost, of what thee list, entreat,
+     Like a great lord of peerless liberty;
+     Lifting the good up to high honour's seat,
+     And the evil damning over more to die;
+     For life and death is in thy doomful writing;
+     So thy renown lives ever by enditing.
+
+     Dublin, this xviii. of July, 1586. Your devoted friend, during life,
+                                                  EDMUND SPENSER.
+
+Between Cambridge and Spenser's appearance in London, there is a short
+but obscure interval. What is certain is, that he spent part of it in
+the North of England; that he was busy with various poetical works, one
+of which was soon to make him known as a new star in the poetical
+heaven; and lastly, that in the effect on him of a deep but unrequited
+passion, he then received what seems to have been a strong and
+determining influence on his character and life. It seems likely that
+his sojourn in the north, which perhaps first introduced the London-bred
+scholar, the "Southern Shepherd's Boy," to the novel and rougher country
+life of distant Lancashire, also gave form and local character to his
+first considerable work. But we do not know for certain where his abode
+was in the north; of his literary activity, which must have been
+considerable, we only partially know the fruit; and of the lady whom he
+made so famous, that her name became a consecrated word in the poetry of
+the time, of Rosalind, the "Widow's Daughter of the Glen," whose refusal
+of his suit, and preference for another, he lamented so bitterly, yet
+would allow no one else to blame, we know absolutely nothing. She would
+not be his wife; but apparently, he never ceased to love her through all
+the chances and temptations, and possibly errors of his life, even
+apparently in the midst of his passionate admiration of the lady whom,
+long afterwards, he did marry. To her kindred and condition, various
+clues have been suggested, only to provoke and disappoint us. Whatever
+her condition, she was able to measure Spenser's powers: Gabriel Harvey
+has preserved one of her compliments--"Gentle Mistress Rosalind once
+reported him to have all the intelligences at commandment; and at
+another, christened him her _Signior Pegaso_." But the unknown Rosalind
+had given an impulse to the young poet's powers, and a colour to his
+thoughts, and had enrolled Spenser in that band and order of
+poets,--with one exception, not the greatest order,--to whom the
+wonderful passion of love, in its heights and its depths, is the element
+on which their imagination works, and out of which it moulds its most
+beautiful and characteristic creations.
+
+But in October, 1579, he emerges from obscurity. If we may trust the
+correspondence between Gabriel Harvey and Spenser, which was published
+at the time, Spenser was then in London.[22:1] It was the time of the
+crisis of the Alen�on courtship, while the Queen was playing fast and
+loose with her Valois lover, whom she playfully called her frog; when
+all about her, Burghley, Leicester, Sidney, and Walsingham, were
+dismayed, both at the plan itself, and at her vacillations; and just
+when the Puritan pamphleteer, who had given expression to the popular
+disgust at a French marriage, especially at a connexion with the family
+which had on its hands the blood of St. Bartholomew, was sentenced to
+lose his right hand as a seditious libeller. Spenser had become
+acquainted with Philip Sidney, and Sidney's literary and courtly
+friends. He had been received into the household of Sidney's uncle, Lord
+Leicester, and dates one of his letters from Leicester House. Among his
+employments he had written, "_Stemmata Dudleiana_." He is doubting
+whether or not to publish, "to utter," some of his poetical
+compositions: he is doubting, and asks Harvey's advice, whether or not
+to dedicate them to His Excellent Lordship, "lest by our much cloying
+their noble ears he should gather contempt of myself, or else seem
+rather for gain and commodity to do it, and some sweetness that I have
+already tasted." Yet, he thinks, that when occasion is so fairly offered
+of estimation and preferment, it may be well to use it: "while the iron
+is hot, it is good striking; and minds of nobles vary, as their
+estates." And he was on the eve of starting across the sea to be
+employed in Leicester's service, on some permanent mission in France,
+perhaps in connexion with the Alen�on intrigues. He was thus launched
+into what was looked upon as the road of preferment; in his case, as it
+turned out, a very subordinate form of public employment, which was to
+continue almost for his lifetime. Sidney had recognized his unusual
+power, if not yet his genius. He brought him forward; perhaps he
+accepted him as a friend. Tradition makes him Sidney's companion at
+Penshurst; in his early poems, Kent is the county with which he seems
+most familiar. But Sidney certainly made him known to the queen; he
+probably recommended him as a promising servant to Leicester: and he
+impressed his own noble and beautiful character deeply on Spenser's
+mind. Spenser saw and learned in him what was then the highest type of
+the finished gentleman. He led Spenser astray. Sidney was not without
+his full share of that affectation, which was then thought refinement.
+Like Gabriel Harvey, he induced Spenser to waste his time on the
+artificial versifying which was in vogue. But such faults and mistakes
+of fashion, and in one shape or another they are inevitable in all ages,
+were as nothing, compared to the influence on a highly receptive nature,
+of a character so elevated and pure, so genial, so brave and true. It
+was not in vain that Spenser was thus brought so near to his
+"Astrophel."
+
+These letters tell us all that we know of Spenser's life at this time.
+During these anxious eighteen months, and connected with persons like
+Sidney and Leicester, Spenser only writes to Harvey on literary
+subjects. He is discreet, and will not indulge Harvey's "desire to hear
+of my late being with her Majesty." According to a literary fashion of
+the time, he writes and is addressed as _M. Immerito_, and the great
+business which occupies him and fills the letters is the scheme devised
+in Sidney's _Areopagus_ for the "general surceasing and silence of bald
+Rymers, and also of the very best of them too; and for prescribing
+certain laws and rules of quantities of English syllables for English
+verse." Spenser "is more in love with his English versifying than with
+ryming,"--"which," he says to Harvey, "I should have done long since, if
+I would then have followed your counsel." Harvey, of course, is
+delighted; he thanks the good angel which puts it into the heads of
+Sidney and Edward Dyer, "the two very diamonds of her Majesty's court,"
+"our very Castor and Pollux," to "help forward our new famous enterprise
+for the exchanging of barbarous rymes for artificial verses;" and the
+whole subject is discussed at great length between the two friends; "Mr.
+Drant's" rules are compared with those of "Mr. Sidney," revised by "Mr.
+Immerito;" and examples, highly illustrative of the character of the
+"famous enterprise" are copiously given. In one of Harvey's letters we
+have a curious account of changes of fashion in studies and ideas at
+Cambridge. They seem to have changed since Spenser's time.
+
+     I beseech you all this while, what news at _Cambridge_?
+     _Tully_ and _Demosthenes_ nothing so much studied as they were
+     wont: _Livy_ and _Sallust_ perhaps more, rather than less:
+     _Lucian_ never so much: _Aristotle_ much named but little
+     read: _Xenophon_ and _Plato_ reckoned amongst discoursers, and
+     conceited superficial fellows; much verbal and sophistical
+     jangling; little subtle and effectual disputing. _Machiavel_ a
+     great man: _Castilio_, of no small repute: _Petrarch_ and
+     _Boccace_ in every man's mouth: _Galateo_ and _Guazzo_ never
+     so happy: but some acquainted with _Unico Aretino_: the
+     _French_ and _Italian_ highly regarded: the _Latin_ and
+     _Greek_ but lightly. The _Queen Mother_ at the beginning or
+     end of every conference: all inquisitive after news: new
+     _books_, new fashions, new laws, new officers, and some after
+     new elements, some after new heavens and hells too. _Turkish_
+     affairs familiarly known: castles built in the air: much ado,
+     and little help: in no age so little so much made of; every
+     one highly in his own favour. Something made of nothing, in
+     spight of Nature: numbers made of cyphers, in spight of Art.
+     Oxen and asses, notwithstanding the absurdity it seemed to
+     _Plautus_, drawing in the same yoke: the Gospel taught, not
+     learnt; Charity cold; nothing good, but by imputation; the
+     Ceremonial Law in word abrogated, the Judicial in effect
+     disannull'd, the Moral abandon'd; _the Light, the Light_ in
+     every man's lips, but mark their eyes, and you will say they
+     are rather like owls than eagles. As of old books, so of
+     ancient virtue, honesty, fidelity, equity, new abridgments;
+     every day spawns new opinions: heresy in divinity, in
+     philosophy, in humanity, in manners, grounded upon hearsay;
+     doctors contemn'd; the _devil_ not so hated as the _pope_;
+     many invectives, but no amendment. No more ado about caps and
+     surplices; Mr. _Cartwright_ quite forgotten.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     _David_, _Ulysses_, and _Solon_, feign'd themselves fools and
+     madmen; our fools and madmen feign themselves _Davids_,
+     _Ulysses's_, and _Solons_. It is pity fair weather should do
+     any hurt; but I know what peace and quietness hath done with
+     some melancholy pickstraws.
+
+The letters preserve a good many touches of character which are
+interesting. This, for instance, which shows Spenser's feeling about
+Sidney. "New books," writes Spenser, "I hear of none, but only of one,
+that writing a certain book called _The School of Abuse_, [Stephen
+Gosson's _Invective against poets, pipers, players, &c._] and dedicating
+to M. Sidney, was for his labour scorned: _if at least it be in the
+goodness of that nature to scorn_." As regards Spenser himself, it is
+clear from the letters that Harvey was not without uneasiness lest his
+friend, from his gay and pleasure-loving nature, and the temptations
+round him, should be carried away into the vices of an age, which,
+though very brilliant and high-tempered, was also a very dissolute one.
+He couches his counsels mainly in Latin; but they point to real danger;
+and he adds in English,--"Credit me, I will never lin [= cease] baiting
+at you, till I have rid you quite of this yonkerly and womanly humour."
+But in the second pair of letters of April, 1580, a lady appears.
+Whether Spenser was her husband or her lover, we know not; but she is
+his "sweetheart." The two friends write of her in Latin. Spenser sends
+in Latin the saucy messages of his sweetheart, "meum corculum," to
+Harvey; Harvey, with academic gallantry, sends her in Latin as many
+thanks for her charming letter as she has hairs, "half golden, half
+silver, half jewelled, in her little head;"--she is a second little
+Rosalind--"altera Rosalindula," whom he salutes as "Domina Immerito, mea
+bellissima Colina Clouta." But whether wife or mistress, we hear of her
+no more. Further, the letters contain notices of various early works of
+Spenser. The "new" _Shepherd's Calendar_, of which more will be said,
+had just been published. And in this correspondence of April, 1580, we
+have the first mention of the _Faery Queen_. The compositions here
+mentioned have been either lost, or worked into his later poetry; his
+_Dreams_, _Epithalamion Thamesis_, apparently in the "reformed verse,"
+his _Dying Pelican_, his _Slumber_, his _Stemmata Dudleiana_, his
+_Comedies_. They show at least the activity and eagerness of the writer
+in his absorbing pursuit. But he was still in bondage to the belief that
+English poetry ought to try to put on a classical dress. It is strange
+that the man who had written some of the poetry in the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ should have found either satisfaction or promise in the
+following attempt at Trimeter Iambics.
+
+     And nowe requite I you with the like, not with the verye
+     beste, but with the verye shortest, namely, with a few
+     Iambickes: I dare warrant they be precisely perfect for the
+     feete (as you can easily judge), and varie not one inch from
+     the Rule. I will imparte yours to Maister _Sidney_ and Maister
+     _Dyer_ at my nexte going to the Courte. I praye you, keepe
+     mine close to your selfe, or your verie entire friends,
+     Maister _Preston_, Maister _Still_, and the reste.
+
+                        _Iambicum Trimetrum._
+
+          Unhappie Verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,
+            Make thy selfe fluttring wings of thy fast flying
+            Thought, and fly forth unto my Love wheresoever she be:
+
+          Whether lying reastlesse in heavy bedde, or else
+            Sitting so cheerlesse at the cheerfull boorde, or else
+            Playing alone carelesse on hir heavenlie Virginals.
+
+          If in Bed, tell hir, that my eyes can take no reste:
+            If at Boorde, tell hir that my mouth can eate no meate:
+            If at hir Virginals, tell hir, I can heare no mirth.
+
+          Asked why? say: Waking Love suffereth no sleepe:
+            Say, that raging Love dothe appall the weake stomacke:
+            Say, that lamenting Love marreth the Musicall.
+
+          Tell hir, that hir pleasures were wonte to lull me asleepe:
+            Tell hir, that hir beautie was wonte to feede mine eyes:
+            Tell hir, that hir sweete Tongue was wonte to make me mirth.
+
+          Nowe doe I nightly waste, wanting my kindely reste:
+            Nowe doe I dayly starve, wanting my lively foode:
+            Nowe doe I alwayes dye, wanting thy timely mirth.
+
+          And if I waste, who will bewaile my heavy chaunce?
+            And if I starve, who will record my cursed end?
+            And if I dye, who will saye: _this was Immerito_?
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4:1]
+
+       ----Since the winged god his planet clear
+     Began in me to move, one year is spent:
+     The which doth longer unto me appear
+     Than _all those forty_ which my life outwent.
+
+                  _Sonnet_ LX., probably written in 1593 or 1594.
+
+[5:2] Leicester House, then Essex House, in the Strand.
+
+[5:3] Earl of Essex.
+
+[5:4] At Cadiz, June 21, 1596.
+
+[6:5] _Sonnet_ LXXIV.
+
+[6:6] _Colin Clout's come Home again_, l. 536. Craik, _Spenser_, i. 9.
+10.
+
+[7:7] See _The Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell_, 1568-1580: from
+the MSS. at Towneley Hall. Edited by Rev. A. B. Grosart, 1877.
+
+[9:8] H. B. Wilson, _Hist. of Merchant Taylors' School_, p. 23.
+
+[13:9] Comp. _Sheph. Cal._ April l. 36. June l. 8. F. Q. 6. 10. 7.
+
+[22:1] Published in June, 1580. Reprinted incompletely in Haslewood,
+_Ancient Critical Essays_ (1815), ii. 255. Extracts given in editions of
+Spenser by Hughes, Todd, and Morris. The letters are of April, 1579, and
+October, 1580.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE NEW POET--THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR.
+
+[1579.]
+
+
+It is clear that when Spenser appeared in London, he had found out his
+powers and vocation as a poet. He came from Cambridge, fully conscious
+of the powerful attraction of the imaginative faculties, conscious of an
+extraordinary command over the resources of language, and with a
+singular gift of sensitiveness to the grace and majesty and
+suggestiveness of sound and rhythm, such as makes a musician. And
+whether he knew it or not, his mind was in reality made up, as to what
+his English poetry was to be. In spite of opinions and fashions round
+him, in spite of university pedantry and the affectations of the court,
+in spite of Harvey's classical enthusiasm, and Sidney's Areopagus, and
+in spite of half-fancying himself converted to their views, his own
+powers and impulses showed him the truth, and made him understand better
+than his theories what a poet could and ought to do with English speech
+in its free play and genuine melodies. When we first come upon him, we
+find that at the age of twenty-seven, he had not only realized an idea
+of English poetry far in advance of anything which his age had yet
+conceived or seen; but that, besides what he had executed or planned, he
+had already in his mind the outlines of the _Faery Queen_, and, in some
+form or other, though perhaps not yet as we have it, had written some
+portion of it.
+
+In attempting to revive for his own age Chaucer's suspended art, Spenser
+had the tendencies of the time with him. The age was looking out for
+some one to do for England what had been grandly done for Italy. The
+time in truth was full of poetry. The nation was just in that condition
+which is most favourable to an outburst of poetical life or art. It was
+highly excited; but it was also in a state of comparative peace and
+freedom from external disturbance. "An over-faint quietness," writes
+Sidney in 1581, lamenting that there were so few good poets, "should
+seem to strew the house for poets." After the first ten years of
+Elizabeth's reign, and the establishment of her authority, the country
+had begun to breathe freely, and fall into natural and regular ways.
+During the first half of the century, it had had before it the most
+astonishing changes which the world had seen for centuries. These
+changes seemed definitely to have run their course; with the convulsions
+which accompanied them, their uprootings and terrors, they were gone;
+and the world had become accustomed to their results. The nation still
+had before it great events, great issues, great perils, great and
+indefinite prospects of adventure and achievement. The old quarrels and
+animosities of Europe had altered in character: from being wars between
+princes, and disputes of personal ambition, they had attracted into them
+all that interests and divides mankind, from high to low. Their
+animating principle was a high and a sacred cause: they had become wars
+of liberty, and wars of religion. The world had settled down to the
+fixed antipathies and steady rivalries of centuries to come. But the
+mere shock of transition was over. Yet the remembrance of the great
+break-up was still fresh. For fifty years the English people had had
+before its eyes the great vicissitudes which make tragedy. They had seen
+the most unforeseen and most unexpected revolutions in what had for ages
+been held certain and immovable; the overthrow of the strongest
+institutions, and most venerable authorities; the violent shifting of
+feelings from faith to passionate rejection, from reverence to scorn and
+a hate which could not be satisfied. They had seen the strangest turns
+of fortune, the most wonderful elevations to power, the most terrible
+visitations of disgrace. They had seen the mightiest ruined, the
+brightest and most admired brought down to shame and death, men struck
+down with all the forms of law, whom the age honoured as its noblest
+ornaments. They had seen the flames of martyr or heretic, heads which
+had worn a crown laid one after another on the block, controversies, not
+merely between rivals for power, but between the deepest principles and
+the most rooted creeds, settled on the scaffold. Such a time of
+surprise,--of hope and anxiety, of horror and anguish to-day, of relief
+and exultation to-morrow,--had hardly been to England as the first half
+of the sixteenth century. All that could stir men's souls, all that
+could inflame their hearts, or that could wring them, had happened.
+
+And yet, compared with previous centuries, and with what was going on
+abroad, the time now was a time of peace, and men lived securely. Wealth
+was increasing. The Wars of the Roses had left the crown powerful to
+enforce order, and protect industry and trade. The nation was beginning
+to grow rich. When the day's work was done, men's leisure was not
+disturbed by the events of neighbouring war. They had time to open
+their imaginations to the great spectacle which had been unrolled before
+them, to reflect upon it, to put into shape their thoughts about it. The
+intellectual movement of the time had reached England, and its strong
+impulse to mental efforts in new and untried directions was acting
+powerfully upon Englishmen. But though there was order and present peace
+at home, there was much to keep men's minds on the stretch. There was
+quite enough danger and uncertainty to wind up their feelings to a high
+pitch. But danger was not so pressing as to prevent them from giving
+full place to the impressions of the strange and eventful scene round
+them, with its grandeur, its sadness, its promises. In such a state of
+things there is everything to tempt poetry. There are its materials and
+its stimulus, and there is the leisure to use its materials.
+
+But the poet had not yet been found; and everything connected with
+poetry was in the disorder of ignorance and uncertainty. Between the
+counsels of a pedantic scholarship, and the rude and hesitating, but
+true instincts of the natural English ear, every one was at sea. Yet it
+seemed as if every one was trying his hand at verse. Popular writing
+took that shape. The curious and unique record of literature preserved
+in the registers of the Stationers' Company, shows that the greater
+proportion of what was published, or at least entered for publication,
+was in the shape of ballads. The ballad vied with the sermon in doing
+what the modern newspaper does, in satisfying the public craving for
+information, amusement, or guidance. It related the last great novelty,
+the last great battle or crime, a storm or monstrous birth. It told some
+pathetic or burlesque story, or it moralized on the humours or follies
+of classes and professions, of young and old, of men and of women. It
+sang the lover's hopes or sorrows, or the adventures of some hero of
+history or romance. It might be a fable, a satire, a libel, a squib, a
+sacred song or paraphrase, a homily. But about all that it treated it
+sought to throw more or less the colour of imagination. It appealed to
+the reader's feelings, or sympathy, or passion. It attempted to raise
+its subject above the level of mere matter of fact. It sought for choice
+and expressive words; it called in the help of measure and rhythm. It
+aimed at a rude form of art. Presently the critical faculty came into
+play. Scholars, acquainted with classical models and classical rules,
+began to exercise their judgment on their own poetry, to construct
+theories, to review the performances before them, to suggest plans for
+the improvement of the poetic art. Their essays are curious, as the
+beginnings of that great critical literature, which in England, in spite
+of much infelicity, has only been second to the poetry which it judged.
+But in themselves they are crude, meagre, and helpless; interesting
+mainly, as showing how much craving there was for poetry, and how little
+good poetry to satisfy it, and what inconceivable doggrel could be
+recommended by reasonable men, as fit to be admired and imitated. There
+is fire and eloquence in Philip Sidney's _Apologie for Poetrie_ (1581);
+but his ideas about poetry were floating, loose, and ill defined, and he
+had not much to point to as of first-rate excellence in recent writers.
+Webbe's _Discourse of English Poetrie_ (1586), and the more elaborate
+work ascribed to George Puttenham (1589), works of tame and artificial
+learning without Sidney's fire, reveal equally the poverty, as a whole,
+of what had been as yet produced in England as poetry, in spite of the
+widespread passion for poetry. The specimens which they quote and praise
+are mostly grotesque to the last degree. Webbe improves some gracefully
+flowing lines of Spenser's into the most portentous Sapphics; and
+Puttenham squeezes compositions into the shapes of triangles, eggs, and
+pilasters. Gabriel Harvey is accused by his tormentor, Nash, of doing
+the same, "of having writ verse in all kinds, as in form of a pair of
+gloves, a dozen of points, a pair of spectacles, a two-hand sword, a
+poynado, a colossus, a pyramid, a painter's easel, a market cross, a
+trumpet, an anchor, a pair of pot-hooks." Puttenham's Art of Poetry,
+with its books, one on Proportion, the other on Ornament, might be
+compared to an Art of War, of which one book treated of barrack drill,
+and the other of busbies, sabretasches, and different forms of
+epaulettes and feathers. These writers do not want good sense or the
+power to make a good remark. But the stuff and material for good
+criticism, the strong and deep poetry, which makes such criticisms as
+theirs seem so absurd, had not yet appeared.
+
+A change was at hand; and the suddenness of it is one of the most
+astonishing things in literary history. The ten years from 1580 to 1590
+present a set of critical essays, giving a picture of English poetry of
+which, though there are gleams of a better hope, and praise is specially
+bestowed on a "new poet," the general character is feebleness, fantastic
+absurdity, affectation and bad taste. Force, and passion, and simple
+truth, and powerful thoughts of the world and man, are rare; and
+poetical reformers appear maundering about miserable attempts at English
+hexameters and sapphics. What was to be looked for from all that? Who
+could suppose what was preparing under it all? But the dawn was come.
+The next ten years, from 1590 to 1600, not only saw the _Faery Queen_,
+but they were the years of the birth of the English Drama. Compare the
+idea which we get of English poetry from Philip Sidney's Defense in
+1581, and Puttenham's treatise in 1589, I do not say with Shakespere,
+but with Lamb's selections from the Dramatic Poets, many of them unknown
+names to the majority of modern readers; and we see at once what a bound
+English poetry has made; we see that a new spring time of power and
+purpose in poetical thought has opened; new and original forms have
+sprung to life of poetical grandeur, seriousness, and magnificence. From
+the poor and rude play-houses, with their troops of actors most of them
+profligate and disreputable, their coarse excitements, their buffoonery,
+license, and taste for the monstrous and horrible,--denounced not
+without reason as corruptors of public morals, preached against at
+Paul's Cross, expelled the city by the Corporation, classed by the law
+with rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and patronized by the great
+and unscrupulous nobles in defiance of it--there burst forth suddenly a
+new poetry, which with its reality, depth, sweetness and nobleness took
+the world captive. The poetical ideas and aspirations of the Englishmen
+of the time had found at last adequate interpreters, and their own
+national and unrivalled expression.
+
+And in this great movement Spenser was the harbinger and announcing
+sign. But he was only the harbinger. What he did was to reveal to
+English ears as it never had been revealed before, at least, since the
+days of Chaucer, the sweet music, the refined grace, the inexhaustible
+versatility of the English tongue. But his own efforts were in a
+different direction from that profound and insatiable seeking after the
+real, in thought and character, in representation and expression, which
+made Shakespere so great, and his brethren great in proportion as they
+approached him. Spenser's genius continued to the end under the
+influences which were so powerful when it first unfolded itself. To the
+last it allied itself, in form, at least, with the artificial. To the
+last it moved in a world which was not real, which never had existed,
+which, any how, was only a world of memory and sentiment. He never threw
+himself frankly on human life as it is; he always viewed it through a
+veil of mist which greatly altered its true colours, and often distorted
+its proportions. And thus while more than any one he prepared the
+instruments and the path for the great triumph, he himself missed the
+true field for the highest exercise of poetic power; he missed the
+highest honours of that in which he led the way.
+
+Yet, curiously enough, it seems as if, early in his career, he was
+affected by the strong stream which drew Shakespere. Among the
+compositions of his first period, besides _The Shepherd's Calendar_, are
+_Nine Comedies_,--clearly real plays, which his friend Gabriel Harvey
+praised with enthusiasm. As early as 1579 Spenser had laid before
+Gabriel Harvey for his judgement and advice, a portion of the _Fairy
+Queen_ in some shape or another, and these nine comedies. He was
+standing at the parting of the ways. The allegory, with all its tempting
+associations and machinery, with its ingenuities and pictures, and
+boundless license to vagueness and to fancy, was on one side; and on the
+other, the drama, with its _prima facie_ and superficially prosaic
+aspects, and its kinship to what was customary and commonplace and
+unromantic in human life. Of the nine comedies, composed on the model of
+those of Ariosto and Machiavelli and other Italians, every trace has
+perished. But this was Gabriel Harvey's opinion of the respective value
+of the two specimens of work submitted to him, and this was his counsel
+to their author. In April, 1580, he thus writes to Spenser.
+
+     In good faith I had once again nigh forgotten your _Faerie
+     Queene_; howbeit, by good chance, I have now sent her home at
+     the last neither in better or worse case than I found her. And
+     must you of necessity have my judgement of her indeed? To be
+     plain, I am void of all judgement, if your _Nine Comedies_,
+     whereunto in imitation of Herodotus, you give the names of the
+     Nine Muses (and in one man's fancy not unworthily), come not
+     nearer Ariosto's comedies, either for the fineness of
+     plausible elocution, or the rareness of poetical invention,
+     than that _Elvish Queen_ doth to his _Orlando Furioso_, which
+     notwithstanding you will needs seem to emulate, and hope to
+     overgo, as you flatly professed yourself in one of your last
+     letters.
+
+     Besides that you know, it hath been the usual practice of the
+     most exquisite and odd wits in all nations, and specially in
+     Italy rather to show, and advance themselves that way than any
+     other: as, namely, those three notorious discoursing heads,
+     Bibiena, Machiavel, and Aretino did (to let Bembo and Ariosto
+     pass) with the great admiration and wonderment of the whole
+     country: being indeed reputed matchable in all points, both
+     for conceit of wit and eloquent deciphering of matters, either
+     with Aristophanes and Menander in Greek, or with Plautus and
+     Terence in Latin, or with any other in any other tongue. But I
+     will not stand greatly with you in your own matters. If so be
+     the _Faery Queene_ be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses,
+     and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo: mark what
+     I say, and yet I will not say that I thought, but there is an
+     end for this once, and fare you well, till God or some good
+     angel put you in a better mind.
+
+It is plain on which side Spenser's own judgement inclined. He had
+probably written the comedies, as he had written English hexameters, out
+of deference to others, or to try his hand. But the current of his own
+secret thoughts, those thoughts, with their ideals and aims, which tell
+a man what he is made for, and where his power lies, set another way.
+The _Fairy Queen was_ 'fairer in his eye than the Nine Muses, and
+Hobgoblin did run away with the garland from Apollo.' What Gabriel
+Harvey prayed for as the 'better mind' did not come. And we cannot
+repine at a decision which gave us, in the shape which it took at last,
+the allegory of the _Fairy Queen_.
+
+But the _Fairy Queen_, though already planned and perhaps begun, belongs
+to the last ten years of the century, to the season of fulfilment not of
+promise, to the blossoming, not to the opening bud. The new hopes for
+poetry which Spenser brought were given in a work, which the _Fairy
+Queen_ has eclipsed and almost obscured, as the sun puts out the morning
+star. Yet that which marked a turning-point in the history of our
+poetry, was the book which came out, timidly and anonymously, in the end
+of 1579, or the beginning of 1580, under the borrowed title of the
+_Shepherd's Calendar_, a name familiar in those days as that of an early
+medley of astrology and homely receipts from time to time reprinted,
+which was the Moore's or Zadkiel's almanac of the time. It was not
+published ostensibly by Spenser himself, though it is inscribed to
+Philip Sidney in a copy of verses signed with Spenser's masking name of
+_Immerito_. The avowed responsibility for it might have been
+inconvenient for a young man pushing his fortune among the cross
+currents of Elizabeth's court. But it was given to the world by a friend
+of the author's, signing himself E. K., now identified with Spenser's
+fellow-student at Pembroke, Edward Kirke, who dedicates it in a long,
+critical epistle of some interest to the author's friend, Gabriel
+Harvey, and after the fashion of some of the Italian books of poetry,
+accompanies it with a gloss, explaining words, and to a certain extent,
+allusions. Two things are remarkable in Kirke's epistle. One is the
+confidence with which he announces the yet unrecognized excellence of
+"this one new poet," whom he is not afraid to put side by side with
+"that good old poet," Chaucer, the "loadstar of our language." The other
+point is the absolute reliance which he places on the powers of the
+English language, handled by one who has discerned its genius, and is
+not afraid to use its wealth. "In my opinion, it is one praise of many,
+that are due to this poet, that he hath laboured to restore, as to their
+rightful heritage, such good and natural English words, as have been
+long time out of use, or almost clean disherited, which is the only
+cause, that our mother tongue, which truly of itself is both full enough
+for prose, and stately enough for verse, hath long time been counted
+most bare and barren of both." The friends, Kirke and Harvey, were not
+wrong in their estimate of the importance of Spenser's work. The "new
+poet," as he came to be customarily called, had really made one of those
+distinct steps in his art, which answer to discoveries and inventions in
+other spheres of human interest--steps which make all behind them seem
+obsolete and mistaken. There was much in the new poetry which was
+immature and imperfect, not a little that was fantastic and affected.
+But it was the first adequate effort of reviving English poetry.
+
+The _Shepherd's Calendar_ consists of twelve compositions, with no other
+internal connexion than that they are assigned respectively to the
+twelve months of the year. They are all different in subject, metre,
+character, and excellence. They are called _�glogues_, according to the
+whimsical derivation adopted from the Italians of the word which the
+classical writers called Eclogues: "_�glogai_, as it were =aig�n= or
+=aigonom�n logoi=, that is, Goatherd's Tales." The book is in its form
+an imitation of that highly artificial kind of poetry which the later
+Italians of the Renaissance had copied from Virgil, as Virgil had copied
+it from the Sicilian and Alexandrian Greeks, and to which had been given
+the name of Bucolic or Pastoral. Petrarch, in imitation of Virgil, had
+written Latin Bucolics, as he had written a Latin Epic, his _Africa_. He
+was followed in the next century by Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516), the
+"old Mantuan," of Holofernes in _Love's Labour's Lost_, whose Latin
+"Eglogues" became a favourite school-book in England, and who was
+imitated by a writer who passed for a poet in the time of Henry VIII.,
+Alexander Barclay. In the hands of the Sicilians, pastoral poetry may
+have been an attempt at idealizing country life almost as genuine as
+some of Wordsworth's poems; but it soon ceased to be that, and in
+Alexandrian hands it took its place among the recognized departments of
+classic and literary copying, in which Virgil found and used it. But a
+further step had been made since Virgil had adopted it as an instrument
+of his genius. In the hands of Mantuan and Barclay it was a vehicle for
+general moralizing, and in particular for severe satire on women and the
+clergy. And Virgil, though he may himself speak under the the names of
+Tityrus and Menalcas, and lament Julius C�sar as Daphnis, did not
+conceive of the Roman world as peopled by flocks and sheep-cotes, or its
+emperors and chiefs, its poets, senators, and ladies, as shepherds and
+shepherdesses, of higher or lower degree. But in Spenser's time, partly
+through undue deference to what was supposed to be Italian taste, partly
+owing to the tardiness of national culture, and because the poetic
+impulses had not yet gained power to force their way through the
+embarrassment and awkwardness which accompany reviving art,--the world
+was turned for the purposes of the poetry of civil life, into a pastoral
+scene. Poetical invention was held to consist in imagining an
+environment, a set of outward circumstances, as unlike as possible to
+the familiar realities of actual life and employment, in which the
+primary affections and passions had their play. A fantastic basis,
+varying according to the conventions of the fashion, was held essential
+for the representation of the ideal. Masquerade and hyperbole were the
+stage and scenery on which the poet's sweetness, or tenderness, or
+strength was to be put forth. The masquerade, when his subject belonged
+to peace, was one of shepherds: when it was one of war and adventure, it
+was a masquerade of knight errantry. But a masquerade was necessary, if
+he was to raise his composition above the vulgarities and trivialities
+of the street, the fire-side, the camp, or even the court; if he was to
+give it the dignity, the ornament, the unexpected results, the
+brightness, and colour, which belong to poetry. The fashion had the
+sanction of the brilliant author of the _Arcadia_, the "Courtier,
+Soldier, Scholar," who was the "mould of form," and whose judgment was
+law to all men of letters in the middle years of Elizabeth, the
+all-accomplished Philip Sidney. Spenser submitted to this fashion from
+first to last. When first he ventured on a considerable poetical
+enterprise, he spoke his thoughts, not in his own name, nor as his
+contemporaries ten years later did, through the mouth of characters in a
+tragic or comic drama, but through imaginary rustics, to whom every one
+else in the world was a rustic, and lived among the sheep-folds, with a
+background of downs or vales or fields, and the open sky above. His
+shepherds and goatherds bear the homely names of native English clowns,
+Diggon Davie, Willye, and Piers; Colin Clout, adopted from Skelton,
+stands for Spenser himself; Hobbinol, for Gabriel Harvey; Cuddie,
+perhaps for Edward Kirke; names revived by Ambrose Phillips, and laughed
+at by Pope, when pastorals again came into vogue with the wits of Queen
+Anne.[42:1] With them are mingled classical ones like Menalcas, French
+ones from Marot, anagrams like Algrind for Grindal, significant ones
+like Palinode, plain ones like Lettice, and romantic ones like Rosalind;
+and no incongruity seems to be found in matching a beautiful shepherdess
+named Dido with a Great Shepherd called Lobbin, or when the verse
+requires it, Lobb. And not merely the speakers in the dialogue are
+shepherds; every one is in their view a shepherd. Chaucer is the "god of
+shepherds," and Orpheus is a--
+
+              "Shepherd that did fetch his dame
+     From Plutoe's baleful bower withouten leave."
+
+The "fair Elisa," is the Queen of shepherds all; her great father is
+Pan, the shepherds' god, and Anne Boleyn is Syrinx. It is not unnatural
+that when the clergy are spoken of, as they are in three of the poems,
+the figure should be kept up. But it is curious to find that the
+shepherd's god, the great Pan, who stands in one connexion for Henry
+VIII., should in another represent in sober earnest the Redeemer and
+Judge of the world.[42:2]
+
+The poems framed in this grotesque setting, are on many themes, and of
+various merit, and probably of different dates. Some are simply amatory
+effusions of an ordinary character, full of a lover's despair and
+complaint. Three or four are translations or imitations; translations
+from Marot, imitations from Theocritus, Bion, or Virgil. Two of them
+contain fables told with great force and humour. The story of the Oak
+and the Briar, related as his friendly commentator, Kirke, says, "so
+lively and so feelingly, as if the thing were set forth in some picture
+before our eyes," for the warning of "disdainful younkers," is a first
+fruit, and promise of Spenser's skill in vivid narrative. The fable of
+the Fox and the Kid, a curious illustration of the popular discontent at
+the negligence of the clergy, and the popular suspicions about the arts
+of Roman intriguers, is told with great spirit, and with mingled humour
+and pathos. There is of course a poem in honour of the great queen, who
+was the goddess of their idolatry to all the wits and all the learned of
+England, the "faire Eliza," and a compliment is paid to Leicester,
+
+                 The worthy whom she loveth best,--
+     That first the White Bear to the stake did bring.
+
+Two of them are avowedly burlesque imitations of rustic dialect and
+banter, carried on with much spirit. One composition is a funeral
+tribute to some unknown lady; another is a complaint of the neglect of
+poets by the great. In three of the �glogues he comes on a more serious
+theme; they are vigorous satires on the loose living and greediness of
+clergy forgetful of their charge, with strong invectives against foreign
+corruption and against the wiles of the wolves and foxes of Rome, with
+frequent allusions to passing incidents in the guerilla war with the
+seminary priests, and with a warm eulogy on the faithfulness and wisdom
+of Archbishop Grindal; whose name is disguised as old Algrind, and with
+whom in his disgrace the poet is not afraid to confess deep sympathy.
+They are, in a poetical form, part of that manifold and varied system of
+Puritan aggression on the established ecclesiastical order of England,
+which went through the whole scale from the "Admonition to Parliament,"
+and the lectures of Cartwright and Travers, to the libels of Martin
+Mar-prelate: a system of attack which with all its injustice and
+violence, and with all its mischievous purposes, found but too much
+justification in the inefficiency and corruption of many both of the
+bishops and clergy, and in the rapacious and selfish policy of the
+government, forced to starve and cripple the public service, while great
+men and favourites built up their fortunes out of the prodigal
+indulgence of the Queen.
+
+The collection of poems is thus a very miscellaneous one, and cannot be
+said to be in its subjects inviting. The poet's system of composition,
+also, has the disadvantage of being to a great degree unreal, forced and
+unnatural. Departing from the precedent of Virgil and the Italians, but
+perhaps copying the artificial Doric of the Alexandrians, he professes
+to make his language and style suitable to the "ragged and rustical"
+rudeness of the shepherds whom he brings on the scene, by making it both
+archaic and provincial. He found in Chaucer a store of forms and words
+sufficiently well known to be with a little help intelligible, and
+sufficiently out of common use to give the character of antiquity to a
+poetry which employed them. And from his sojourn in the North he is said
+to have imported a certain number of local peculiarities which would
+seem unfamiliar and harsh in the South. His editor's apology for this
+use of "ancient solemn words," as both proper and as ornamental, is
+worth quoting; it is an early instance of what is supposed to be not yet
+common, a sense of pleasure in that wildness which we call picturesque.
+
+     And first for the words to speak: I grant they be something
+     hard, and of most men unused: yet English, and also used of
+     most excellent Authors and most famous Poets. In whom, when as
+     this our Poet hath been much travelled and throughly read, how
+     could it be, (as that worthy Orator said,) but that 'walking
+     in the sun, although for other cause he walked, yet needs he
+     mought be sun-burnt'; and having the sound of those ancient
+     poets still ringing in his ears, he mought needs, in singing,
+     hit out some of their tunes. But whether he useth them by such
+     casualty and custom, or of set purpose and choice, as thinking
+     them fittest for such rustical rudeness of shepherds, either
+     for that their rough sound would make his rymes more ragged
+     and rustical, or else because such old and obsolete words are
+     most used of country folks, sure I think, and I think not
+     amiss, that they bring great grace, and, as one would say,
+     authority, to the verse. . . . . Yet neither everywhere must
+     old words be stuffed in, nor the common Dialect and manner of
+     speaking so corrupted thereby, that, as in old buildings, it
+     seem disorderly and ruinous. But as in most exquisite pictures
+     they use to blaze and portrait not only the dainty lineaments
+     of beauty, but also round about it to shadow the rude thickets
+     and craggy cliffs, that by the baseness of such parts, more
+     excellency may accrue to the principal--for ofttimes, we find
+     ourselves I know not how, singularly delighted with the show
+     of such natural rudeness, and take great pleasure in that
+     disorderly order:--even so do these rough and harsh terms
+     enlumine, and make more clearly to appear, the brightness of
+     brave and glorious words. So oftentimes a discord in music
+     maketh a comely concordance.
+
+But when allowance is made for an eclectic and sometimes pedantic
+phraseology, and for mannerisms to which the fashion of the age tempted
+him, such as the extravagant use of alliteration, or, as they called it,
+"hunting the letter," the _Shepherd's Calendar_ is, for its time, of
+great interest.
+
+Spenser's force, and sustained poetical power, and singularly musical
+ear are conspicuous in this first essay of his genius. In the poets
+before him of this century, fragments and stanzas, and perhaps single
+pieces might be found, which might be compared with his work. Fugitive
+pieces, chiefly amatory, meet us of real sprightliness, or grace, or
+tenderness. The stanzas which Sackville, afterwards, Lord Buckhurst,
+contributed to the collection called the _Mirror of Magistrates_,[46:3]
+are marked with a pathetic majesty, a genuine sympathy for the
+precariousness of greatness, which seem a prelude to the Elizabethan
+drama. But these fragments were mostly felicitous efforts, which soon
+passed on into the ungainly, the uncouth, the obscure or the grotesque.
+But in the _Shepherd's Calendar_ we have for the first time in the
+century, the swing, the command, the varied resources of the real poet,
+who is not driven by failing language or thought into frigid or tumid
+absurdities. Spenser is master over himself and his instrument even when
+he uses it in a way which offends our taste. There are passages in the
+_Shepherd's Calendar_ of poetical eloquence, of refined vigour, and of
+musical and imaginative sweetness, such as the English language had
+never attained to, since the days of him, who was to the age of Spenser,
+what Shakespere and Milton are to ours, the pattern and fount of poetry,
+Chaucer. Dryden is not afraid to class Spenser with Theocritus and
+Virgil, and to write that the _Shepherd's Calendar_ is not to be matched
+in any language.[46:4] And this was at once recognized. The authorship
+of it, as has been said, was not formally acknowledged. Indeed, Mr.
+Collier remarks that seven years after its publication, and after it had
+gone through three or four separate editions, it was praised by a
+contemporary poet, George Whetstone, himself a friend of Spenser's, as
+the "reputed work of Sir Philip Sidney." But if it was officially a
+secret, it was an open secret, known to every one who cared to be well
+informed. It is possible that the free language used in it about
+ecclesiastical abuses was too much in sympathy with the growing
+fierceness and insolence of Puritan invective to be safely used by a
+poet who gave his name: and one of the reasons assigned for Burghley's
+dislike to Spenser is the praise bestowed in the _Shepherd's Calendar_
+on Archbishop Grindal, then in deep disgrace for resisting the
+suppression of the puritan prophesyings. But anonymous as it was, it had
+been placed under Sidney's protection; and it was at once warmly
+welcomed. It is not often that in those remote days we get evidence of
+the immediate effect of a book; but we have this evidence in Spenser's
+case. In this year, probably, after it was published, we find it spoken
+of by Philip Sidney, not without discriminating criticism, but as one of
+the few recent examples of poetry worthy to be named after Chaucer.
+
+     I account the _Mirror of Magistrates_ meetly furnished of
+     beautiful parts; and in the Earl of Surrey's _Lyrics_ many
+     things tasting of birth, and worthy of a noble mind. The
+     _Shepherd's Calendar_ hath much poetry in his Eglogues: indeed
+     worthy the reading if I be not deceived. That same framing of
+     his style in an old rustic language I dare not allow, sith
+     neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sanazar in
+     Italian, did affect it. Besides these do I not remember to
+     have seen but few (to speak boldly) printed that have poetical
+     sinews in them.
+
+Sidney's patronage of the writer and general approval of the work
+doubtless had something to do with making Spenser's name known: but he
+at once takes a place in contemporary judgment which no one else takes,
+till the next decade of the century. In 1586, Webbe published his
+_Discourse of English Poetrie_. In this, the author of the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ is spoken of by the name given him by its Editor, E. K----, as
+the "new poet," just as earlier in the century, the _Orlando Furioso_
+was styled the "nuova poesia;" and his work is copiously used to supply
+examples and illustrations of the critic's rules and observations.
+Webbe's review of existing poetry was the most comprehensive yet
+attempted: but the place which he gives to the new poet, whose name was
+in men's mouths, though like the author of _In Memoriam_, he had not
+placed it on his title-page, was one quite apart.
+
+     This place [to wear the Laurel] have I purposely reserved for
+     one, who, if not only, yet in my judgement principally,
+     deserveth the title of the rightest English poet that ever I
+     read: that is, the author of the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+     intituled to the worthy Gentleman Master Philip Sidney,
+     whether it was Master Sp. or what rare scholar in Pembroke
+     Hall soever, because himself and his friends, for what respect
+     I know not, would not reveal it, I force not greatly to set
+     down. Sorry I am that I cannot find none other with whom I
+     might couple him in this catalogue in his rare gift of poetry:
+     although one there is, though now long since seriously
+     occupied in graver studies, Master Gabriel Harvey, yet as he
+     was once his most special friend and fellow poet, so because
+     he hath taken such pains not only in his Latin poetry . . .
+     but also to reform our English verse . . . therefore will I
+     adventure to set them together as two of the rarest wits and
+     learnedest masters of poetry in England.
+
+He even ventured to compare him favourably with Virgil.
+
+     But now yet at the last hath England hatched up one poet of
+     this sort, in my conscience comparable with the best in any
+     respect: even Master Sp., author of the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+     whose travail in that piece of English poetry I think verily
+     is so commendable, as none of equal judgement can yield him
+     less praise for his excellent skill and skilful excellency
+     showed forth in the same than they would to either Theocritus
+     or Virgil, whom in mine opinion, if the coarseness of our
+     speech, (I mean the course of custom which he would not
+     infringe,) had been no more let unto him than their pure
+     native tongues were unto them, he would have, if it might be,
+     surpassed them.
+
+The courtly author of the _Arte of English Poesie_, 1589, commonly cited
+as G. Puttenham, classes him with Sidney. And from this time his name
+occurs in every enumeration of English poetical writers, till he
+appears, more than justifying this early appreciation of his genius, as
+Chaucer's not unworthy successor, in the _Faery Queen_. Afterwards, as
+other successful poetry was written, and the standards of taste were
+multiplied, this first enthusiastic reception cooled down. In James the
+First's time, Spenser's use of "old outworn words" is criticized as
+being no more "practical English" than Chaucer or Skelton: it is not
+"courtly" enough.[49:5] The success of the _Shepherd's Calendar_ had
+also, apparently, substantial results, which some of his friends thought
+of with envy. They believed that it secured him high patronage, and
+opened to him a way to fortune. Poor Gabriel Harvey, writing in the year
+in which the _Shepherd's Calendar_ came out, contrasts his own less
+favoured lot, and his ill-repaid poetical efforts, with Colin Clout's
+good luck.
+
+     But ever and ever, methinks, your great Catoes, _Ecquid erit
+     pretii_, and our little Catoes, _Res age qu� prosunt_, make
+     such a buzzing and ringing in my head, that I have little joy
+     to animate and encourage either you or him to go forward,
+     unless ye might make account of some certain ordinary wages,
+     or at the least wise have your meat and drink for your day's
+     works. As for myself, howsoever I have toyed and trifled
+     heretofore, I am now taught, and I trust I shall shortly
+     learn, (no remedy, I must of mere necessity give you over in
+     the plain field) to employ my travail and time wholly or
+     chiefly on those studies and practices that carry, as they
+     say, meat in their mouth, having evermore their eye upon the
+     Title, _De pane lucrando_, and their hand upon their
+     halfpenny. For I pray now what saith Mr. Cuddie, alias you
+     know who, in the tenth �glogue of the aforesaid famous new
+     Calendar.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+          The dapper ditties, that I wont devise
+            To feed youths' fancy and the flocking fry,
+          Delighten much: what I the best for thy?
+            They han the pleasure, I a sclender prize.
+          I beat the bush, the birds to them do fly.
+            What good thereof to Cuddie can arise?
+
+     But Master Colin Clout is not everybody, and albeit his old
+     companions, Master Cuddie and Master Hobinoll, be as little
+     beholding to their mistress poetry as ever you wist: yet he,
+     peradventure, by the means of her special favour, and some
+     personal privilege, may haply live by _Dying Pelicans_, and
+     purchase great lands and lordships with the money which his
+     _Calendar_ and _Dreams_ have, and will afford him.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[42:1] In the _Guardian_, No. 40. Compare Johnson's _Life of Ambrose
+Phillips_.
+
+[42:2] _Shepherd's Calendar_, May, July, and September.
+
+[46:3] First published in 1559. It was popular book, and was often
+re-edited.
+
+[46:4] Dedication to Virgil.
+
+[49:5] Bolton in Haslewood, ii. 249.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SPENSER IN IRELAND.
+
+[1580.]
+
+
+In the first week of October, 1579, Spenser was at Leicester House,
+expecting "next week" to be despatched on Leicester's service to France.
+Whether he was sent or not, we do not know. Gabriel Harvey, writing at
+the end of the month, wagers that "for all his saying, he will not be
+gone over sea, neither this week nor the next." In one of the �glogues
+(September) there are some lines which suggest, but do not necessarily
+imply, the experience of an eye-witness of the state of religion in a
+Roman Catholic country. But we can have nothing but conjecture whether
+at this time or any other Spenser was on the Continent. The _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ was entered at Stationers' Hall, December 5, 1579. In April,
+1580, as we know from one of his letters to Harvey, he was at
+Westminster. He speaks of the _Shepherd's Calendar_ as published; he is
+contemplating the publication of other pieces, and then "he will in hand
+forthwith with his _Fairie Queene_," of which he had sent Harvey a
+specimen. He speaks especially of his _Dreams_ as a considerable work.
+
+     I take best my _Dreams_ should come forth alone, being grown
+     by means of the Gloss (running continually in manner of a
+     Paraphrase) full as great as my _Calendar_. Therein be some
+     things excellently, and many things wittily discoursed of E.
+     K., and the pictures so singularly set forth and portrayed, as
+     if Michael Angelo were there, he could (I think) nor amend the
+     best, nor reprehend the worst. I know you would like them
+     passing well.
+
+It is remarkable that of a book so spoken of, as of the _Nine Comedies_,
+not a trace, as far as appears, is to be found. He goes on to speak with
+much satisfaction of another composition, which was probably
+incorporated, like the _Epithalamion Thamesis_, in his later work.
+
+     Of my _Stemmata Dudleiana_, and specially of the sundry
+     Apostrophes therein, addressed you know to whom, much more
+     advisement he had, than so lightly to send them abroad: now
+     list, trust me (though I do never very well) yet, in mine own
+     fancy, I never did better. _Veruntamen te sequor solum:
+     nunquam vero assequar._
+
+He is plainly not dissatisfied with his success, and is looking forward
+to more. But no one in those days could live by poetry. Even scholars,
+in spite of university endowments, did not hope to live by their
+scholarship; and the poet or man of letters only trusted that his work,
+by attracting the favour of the great, might open to him the door of
+advancement. Spenser was probably expecting to push his fortunes in some
+public employment under the patronage of two such powerful favourites as
+Sidney and his uncle Leicester. Spenser's heart was set on poetry: but
+what leisure he might have for it would depend on the course his life
+might take. To have hung on Sidney's protection, or gone with him as his
+secretary to the wars, to have been employed at home or abroad in
+Leicester's intrigues, to have stayed in London filling by Leicester's
+favour some government office, to have had his habits moulded and his
+thoughts affected by the brilliant and unscrupulous society of the
+court, or by the powerful and daring minds which were fast thronging the
+political and literary scene--any of these contingencies might have
+given his poetical faculty a different direction; nay, might have even
+abridged its exercise or suppressed it. But his life was otherwise
+ordered. A new opening presented itself. He had, and he accepted, the
+chance of making his fortune another way. And to his new manner of life,
+with its peculiar conditions, may be ascribed, not indeed the original
+idea of that which was to be his great work, but the circumstances under
+which the work was carried out, and which not merely coloured it, but
+gave it some of its special and characteristic features.
+
+That which turned the course of his career, and exercised a decisive
+influence, certainly on its events and fate, probably also on the turn
+of his thoughts and the shape and moulding of his work, was his
+migration to Ireland, and his settlement there for the greater part of
+the remaining eighteen years of his life. We know little more than the
+main facts of this change from the court and the growing intellectual
+activity of England, to the fierce and narrow interests of a cruel and
+unsuccessful struggle for colonization, in a country which was to
+England much what Algeria was to France some thirty years ago. Ireland,
+always unquiet, had became a serious danger to Elizabeth's Government.
+It was its "bleeding ulcer." Lord Essex's great colonizing scheme, with
+his unscrupulous severity, had failed. Sir Henry Sidney, wise, firm, and
+wishing to be just, had tried his hand as Deputy for the third time in
+the thankless charge of keeping order; he, too, after a short gleam of
+peace, had failed also. For two years Ireland had been left to the local
+administration, totally unable to heal its wounds, or cope with its
+disorders. And now, the kingdom threatened to become a vantage-ground to
+the foreign enemy. In November, 1579, the Government turned their eyes
+on Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, a man of high character, and a soldier
+of distinction. He, or they, seem to have hesitated; or rather, the
+hesitation was on both sides. He was not satisfied with many things in
+the policy of the Queen in England: his discontent had led him, strong
+Protestant as he was, to coquet with Norfolk and the partisans of Mary
+Queen of Scots, when England was threatened with a French marriage ten
+years before. His name stands among the forty nobles on whom Mary's
+friends counted.[54:1] And on the other hand, Elizabeth did not like him
+or trust him. For some time she refused to employ him. At length, in the
+summer of 1580, he was appointed to fill that great place which had
+wrecked the reputation and broken the hearts of a succession of able and
+high-spirited servants of the English Crown, the place of Lord-Deputy in
+Ireland. He was a man who was interested in the literary enterprise of
+the time. In the midst of his public employment in Holland, he had been
+the friend and patron of George Gascoigne, who left a high reputation,
+for those days, as poet, wit, satirist, and critic. Lord Grey now took
+Spenser, the "new poet," the friend of Philip Sidney, to Ireland as his
+Secretary.
+
+Spenser was not the only scholar and poet who about this time found
+public employment in Ireland. Names which appear in literary records,
+such as Warton's _History of English Poetry_, poets like Barnaby Googe
+and Ludovic Bryskett, reappear as despatch-writers or agents in the
+Irish State Papers. But one man came over to Ireland about the same time
+as Spenser, whose fortunes were a contrast to his. Geoffrey Fenton was
+one of the numerous translators of the time. He had dedicated Tragical
+Tales from the French and Italian to Lady Mary Sidney, Guevara's
+Epistles from the Spanish to Lady Oxford, and a translation of
+Guicciardini to the Queen. About this time, he was recommended by his
+brother to Walsingham for foreign service; he was soon after in Ireland:
+and in the summer of 1580, he was made Secretary to the Government. He
+shortly became one of the most important persons in the Irish
+administration. He corresponded confidentially and continually with
+Burghley and Walsingham. He had his eye on the proceedings of Deputies
+and Presidents, and reported freely their misdoings or their
+unpopularity. His letters form a considerable part of the Irish Papers.
+He became a powerful and successful public servant. He became Sir
+Geoffrey Fenton; he kept his high place for his life; he obtained grants
+and lands; and he was commemorated as a great personage, in a pompous
+monument in St. Patrick's Cathedral. This kind of success was not to be
+Spenser's.
+
+Lord Grey of Wilton was a man in whom his friends saw a high and heroic
+spirit. He was a statesman in whose motives and actions his religion had
+a dominant influence: and his religion--he is called by the vague name
+of Puritan--was one which combined a strong and doubtless genuine zeal
+for the truth of Christian doctrine and for purity of morals, with the
+deepest and deadliest hatred of what he held to be their natural enemy,
+the Anti-Christ of Rome. The "good Lord Grey," he was, if we believe
+his secretary, writing many years after this time, and when he was dead,
+"most gentle, affable, loving, and temperate; always known to be a most
+just, sincere, godly, and right noble man, far from sternness, far from
+unrighteousness." But the infelicity of his times bore hardly upon him,
+and Spenser admits, what is known otherwise, that he left a terrible
+name behind him. He was certainly a man of severe and unshrinking sense
+of duty, and like many great Englishmen of the time, so resolute in
+carrying it out to the end, that it reached, when he thought it
+necessary, to the point of ferocity. Naturally, he had enemies, who did
+not spare his fame; and Spenser, who came to admire and reverence him,
+had to lament deeply that "that good lord was blotted with the name of a
+bloody man," one who "regarded not the life of the queen's subjects no
+more than dogs, and had wasted and consumed all, so as now she had
+nothing almost left, but to reign in their ashes."
+
+Lord Grey was sent over at a moment of the utmost confusion and danger.
+In July, 1579, Drury wrote to Burghley to stand firmly to the helm, for
+"that a great storm was at hand." The South of Ireland was in fierce
+rebellion, under the Earl of Desmond and Dr. Nicolas Sanders, who was
+acting under the commission of the Pope, and promising the assistance of
+the King of Spain; and a band of Spanish and Italian adventurers,
+unauthorized, but not uncountenanced by their Government, like Drake in
+the Indies, had landed with arms and stores, and had fortified a port at
+Smerwick, on the south-western coast of Kerry. The North was deep in
+treason, restless, and threatening to strike. Round Dublin itself, the
+great Irish Lords of the Pale, under Lord Baltinglass, in the summer of
+1580, had broken into open insurrection, and were holding out a hand to
+the rebels of the South. The English garrisons, indeed, small as they
+were, could not only hold their own against the ill-armed and
+undisciplined Irish bands, but could inflict terrible chastisement on
+the insurgents. The native feuds were turned to account; Butlers were
+set to destroy their natural enemies the Geraldines, and the Earl of
+Ormond their head, was appointed General in Munster, to execute English
+vengeance and his own on the lands and people of his rival Desmond. But
+the English chiefs were not strong enough to put down the revolt. "The
+conspiracy throughout Ireland," wrote Lord Grey, "is so general, that
+without a main force it will not be appeased. There are cold service and
+unsound dealing generally." On the 12th of August, 1580, Lord Grey
+landed, amid a universal wreck of order, of law, of mercy, of industry;
+and among his counsellors and subordinates, the only remedy thought of
+was that of remorseless and increasing severity.
+
+It can hardly be doubted that Spenser must have come over with him. It
+is likely that where he went, his Secretary would accompany him. And if
+so, Spenser must soon have become acquainted with some of the scenes and
+necessities of Irish life. Within three weeks after Lord Grey's landing,
+he and those with him were present at the disaster of Glenmalure, a
+rocky defile near Wicklow, where the rebels enticed the English captains
+into a position in which an ambuscade had been prepared, after the
+manner of Red Indians in the last century, and of South African savages
+now, and where, in spite of Lord Grey's courage, "which could not have
+been bettered by Hercules," a bloody defeat was inflicted on his troops,
+and a number of distinguished officers were cut off. But Spenser was
+soon to see a still more terrible example of this ruthless warfare. It
+was necessary, above all things to destroy the Spanish fort at Smerwick,
+in order to prevent the rebellion being fed from abroad: and in
+November, 1580, Lord Grey in person undertook the work. The incidents of
+this tragedy have been fully recorded, and they formed at the time a
+heavy charge against Lord Grey's humanity, and even his honour. In this
+instance Spenser must almost certainly have been on the spot. Years
+afterwards, in his _View of the State of Ireland_, he describes and
+vindicates Lord Grey's proceedings; and he does so, "being," as he
+writes, "as near them as any." And we have Lord Grey's own despatch to
+Queen Elizabeth, containing a full report of the tragical business. We
+have no means of knowing how Lord Grey employed Spenser, or whether he
+composed his own despatches. But from Spenser's position, the Secretary,
+if he had not some hand in the following vivid and forcible account of
+the taking of Smerwick,[58:2] must probably have been cognizant of it;
+though there are some slight differences in the despatch, and in the
+account which Spenser himself wrote afterwards in his pamphlet on Irish
+Affairs.
+
+After describing the proposal of the garrison for a parley, Lord Grey
+proceeds,--
+
+     There was presently sent unto me one Alexandro, their camp
+     master; he told me that certain Spaniards and Italians were
+     there arrived upon fair speeches and great promises, which
+     altogether vain and false they found; and that it was no part
+     of their intent to molest or take any government from your
+     Majesty; for proof, that they were ready to depart as they
+     came and deliver into my hands the fort. Mine answer was, that
+     for that I perceived their people to stand of two nations,
+     Italian and Spanish, I would give no answer unless a Spaniard
+     was likewise by. He presently went and returned with a Spanish
+     captain. I then told the Spaniard that I knew their nation to
+     have an absolute prince, one that was in good league and amity
+     with your Majesty, which made me to marvell that any of his
+     people should be found associate with them that went about to
+     maintain rebels against you. . . And taking it that it could
+     not be his king's will, I was to know by whom and for what
+     cause they were sent. His reply was that the king had not sent
+     them, but that one John Martinez de Ricaldi, Governor for the
+     king at Bilboa, had willed him to levy a band and repair with
+     it to St. Andrews (Santander), and there to be directed by
+     this their colonel here, whom he followed as a blind man, not
+     knowing whither. The other avouched that they were all sent by
+     the Pope for the defence of the _Catholica fede_. My answer
+     was, that I would not greatly have marvelled if men being
+     commanded by natural and absolute princes did sometimes take
+     in hand wrong actions; but that men, and that of account as
+     some of them made show of, should be carried into unjust,
+     desperate, and wicked actions, by one that neither from God or
+     man could claim any princely power or empire, but (was) indeed
+     a detestable shaveling, the right Antichrist and general
+     ambitious tyrant over all right principalities, and patron of
+     the _Diabolica fede_--this I could not but greatly rest in
+     wonder. Their fault therefore far to be aggravated by the
+     vileness of their commander; and that at my hands no condition
+     or composition they were to expect, other than they should
+     render me the fort, and yield their selves to my will for life
+     or death. With this answer he departed; after which there was
+     one or two courses to and fro more, to have gotten a certainty
+     for some of their lives: but finding that it would not be, the
+     colonel himself about sunsetting came forth and requested
+     respite with surcease of arms till the next morning, and then
+     he would give a resolute answer.
+
+     Finding that to be but a gain of time to them, and a loss of
+     the same for myself, I definitely answered I would not grant
+     it, and therefore presently either that he took my offer or
+     else return and I would fall to my business. He then embraced
+     my knees simply putting himself to my mercy, only he prayed
+     that for that night he might abide in the fort, and that in
+     the morning all should be put into my hands. I asked hostages
+     for the performance; they were given. Morning came; I
+     presented my companies in battle before the fort, the colonel
+     comes forth with ten or twelve of his chief gentlemen,
+     trailing their ensigns rolled up, and presented them unto me
+     with their lives and the fort. I sent straight certain
+     gentlemen in, to see their weapons and armour laid down, and
+     to guard the munition and victual there left for spoil. Then
+     put I in certain bands, who straight fell to execution. There
+     were six hundred slain. Munition and victual great store:
+     though much wasted through the disorder of the soldier, which
+     in that fury could not be helped. Those that I gave life unto,
+     I have bestowed upon the captains and gentlemen whose service
+     hath well deserved. . . Of the six hundred slain, four hundred
+     were as gallant and goodly personages as of any (soldiers) I
+     ever beheld. So hath it pleased the Lord of Hosts to deliver
+     your enemies into your Highnesses' hand, and so too as one
+     only excepted, not one of yours is either lost or hurt.
+
+Another account adds to this that "the Irish men and women were hanged,
+with an Englishman who had served Dr. Sanders, and two others whose arms
+and legs were broken for torture."
+
+Such scenes as those of Glenmalure and Smerwick, terrible as they were,
+it might have been any one's lot to witness who found himself in
+presence of the atrocious warfare of those cruel days, in which the
+ordinary exasperation of combatants was made more savage and unforgiving
+by religious hatred, and by the license which religious hatred gave to
+irregular adventure and the sanguinary repression of it. They were not
+confined to Ireland. Two years later the Marquis de Santa Cruz treated
+in exactly the same fashion a band of French adventurers, some eighty
+noblemen and gentlemen and two hundred soldiers, who were taken in an
+attempt on the Azores during a time of nominal peace between the crowns
+of France and Spain. In the Low Countries, and in the religious wars of
+France, it need not be said that even the 'execution' at Smerwick was
+continually outdone; and it is what the Spaniards would of course have
+done to Drake if they had caught him. Nor did the Spanish Government
+complain of this treatment of its subjects, who had no legal commission.
+
+But the change of scene and life to Spenser was much more than merely
+the sight of a disastrous skirmish and a capitulation without quarter.
+He had passed to an entirely altered condition of social life; he had
+passed from pleasant and merry England, with its comparative order and
+peace, its thriving homesteads and wealthy cities, its industry and
+magnificence,--
+
+                             Eliza's blessed field,
+     That still with people, peace, and plenty flows--
+
+to a land, beautiful indeed, and alluring, but of which the only law was
+disorder, and the only rule failure. The Cambridge student, the follower
+of country life in Lancashire or Kent, the scholar discussing with
+Philip Sidney and corresponding with Gabriel Harvey about classical
+metres and English rimes; the shepherd poet, Colin Clout, delicately
+fashioning his innocent pastorals, his love complaints, or his dexterous
+panegyrics or satires; the courtier, aspiring to shine in the train of
+Leicester before the eyes of the great queen,--found himself
+transplanted into a wild and turbulent savagery, where the elements of
+civil society hardly existed, and which had the fatal power of drawing
+into its own evil and lawless ways the English who came into contact
+with it. Ireland had the name and the framework of a Christian realm. It
+had its hierarchy of officers in Church and State, its Parliament, its
+representative of the Crown. It had its great earls and lords, with
+noble and romantic titles, its courts and councils and administration;
+the Queen's laws were there, and where they were acknowledged, which was
+not, however, everywhere, the English speech was current. But underneath
+this name and outside, all was coarse, and obstinately set against
+civilized order. There was nothing but the wreck and clashing of
+disintegrated customs, the lawlessness of fierce and ignorant
+barbarians, whose own laws had been destroyed, and who would recognize
+no other; the blood-feuds of rival septs; the ambitious and deadly
+treacheries of rival nobles, oppressing all weaker than themselves, and
+maintaining in waste and idleness their crowds of brutal retainers. In
+one thing only was there agreement, though not even in this was there
+union; and that was in deep, implacable hatred of their English masters.
+And with these English masters, too, amid their own jealousies and
+backbitings and mischief-making, their own bitter antipathies and
+chronic despair, there was only one point of agreement, and that was
+their deep scorn and loathing of the Irish.
+
+This is Irish dealing with Irish, in Munster at this time:--
+
+     The Lord Roche kept a freeholder, who had eight plowlands,
+     prisoner, and hand-locked him till he had surrendered seven
+     plowlands and a half, on agreement to keep the remaining
+     plowland free; but when this was done, the Lord Roche extorted
+     as many exactions from that half-plowland, as from any other
+     half-plowland in his country. . . . And even the great men
+     were under the same oppression from the greater: for the Earl
+     of Desmond forcibly took away the Seneschal of Imokilly's corn
+     from his own land, though he was one of the most considerable
+     gentlemen in Munster.[62:3]
+
+And this is English dealing with Irish:--
+
+     Mr. Henry Sheffield asks Lord Burghley's interest with Sir
+     George Carew, to be made his deputy at Leighlin, in place of
+     Mr. Bagenall, who met his death under the following
+     circumstances:--
+
+     Mr. Bagenall, after he had bought the barony of Odrone of Sir
+     George Carew, could not be contented to let the Kavanaghs
+     enjoy such lands as old Sir Peter Carew, young Sir Peter, and
+     last, Sir George were content that they should have, but
+     threatened to kill them wherever he could meet them. As it is
+     now fallen out, about the last of November, one Henry Heron,
+     Mr. Bagenall's brother-in-law, having lost four kine, making
+     that his quarrel, he being accompanied with divers others to
+     the number of twenty or thereabouts, by the procurement of his
+     brother-in-law, went to the house of Mortagh Oge, a man
+     seventy years old, the chief of the Kavanaghs, with their
+     swords drawn: which the old man seeing, for fear of his life,
+     sought to go into the woods, but was taken and brought before
+     Mr. Heron, who charged him that his son had taken the cows.
+     The old man answered that he could pay for them. Mr. Heron
+     would not be contented, but bade his men kill him, he desiring
+     to be brought for trial at the sessions. Further, the morrow
+     after they went again into the woods, and there they found
+     another old man, a servant of Mortagh Oge, and likewise killed
+     him, Mr. Heron saying that it was because he would not confess
+     the cows.
+
+     On these murders, the sons of the old man laid an ambush for
+     Mr. Bagenall; who, following them more upon will than with
+     discretion, fell into their hands, and were slain with
+     thirteen more. He had sixteen wounds above his girdle, and one
+     of his legs cut off, and his tongue drawn out of his mouth and
+     slit. There is not one man dwelling in all this country that
+     was Sir George Carew's, but every man fled, and left the whole
+     country waste; and so I fear me it will continue, now the
+     deadly feud is so great between them.[63:4]
+
+Something like this has been occasionally seen in our colonies towards
+the native races; but there it never reached the same height of
+unrestrained and frankly justified indulgence. The English officials and
+settlers knew well enough that the only thought of the native Irish was
+to restore their abolished customs, to recover their confiscated lands,
+to re-establish the crippled power of their chiefs; they knew that for
+this insurrection was ever ready, and that treachery would shrink from
+nothing. And to meet it, the English on the spot--all but a few who were
+denounced as unpractical sentimentalists for favouring an irreconcilable
+foe--could think of no way of enforcing order, except by a wholesale use
+of the sword and the gallows. They could find no means of restoring
+peace except turning the rich land into a wilderness, and rooting out by
+famine those whom the soldier or the hangman had not overtaken. "No
+governor shall do any good here," wrote an English observer in 1581,
+"except he show himself a Tamerlane."
+
+In a general account, even contemporary, such statements might suggest a
+violent suspicion of exaggeration. We possess the means of testing it.
+The Irish State Papers of the time contain the ample reports and
+letters, from day to day, of the energetic and resolute Englishmen
+employed in council or in the field--men of business like Sir William
+Pelham, Sir Henry Wallop, Edward Waterhouse, and Geoffrey
+Fenton;--daring and brilliant officers, like Sir William Drury, Sir
+Nicolas Malby, Sir Warham St. Leger, Sir John Norreys, and John Zouch.
+These papers are the basis of Mr. Froude's terrible chapters on the
+Desmond rebellion, and their substance in abstract or abridgment is
+easily accessible in the printed calendars of the Record Office. They
+show that from first to last, in principle and practice, in council and
+in act, the Tamerlane system was believed in, and carried out without a
+trace of remorse or question as to its morality. "If hell were open, and
+all the evil spirits were abroad," writes Walsingham's correspondent
+Andrew Trollope, who talked about Tamerlane, "they could never be worse
+than these Irish rogues--rather dogs, and worse than dogs, for dogs do
+but after their kind, and they degenerate from all humanity." There is
+but one way of dealing with wild dogs or wolves; and accordingly the
+English chiefs insisted that this was the way to deal with the Irish.
+The state of Ireland, writes one, "is like an old cloak often before
+patched, wherein is now made so great a gash that all the world doth
+know that there is no remedy but to make a new." This means, in the
+language of another, "that there is no way to daunt these people but by
+the edge of the sword, and to plant better in their place, or rather,
+let them cut one another's throats." These were no idle words. Every
+page of these papers contains some memorandum of execution and
+destruction. The progress of a Deputy, or the President of a province,
+through the country is always accompanied with its tale of hangings.
+There is sometimes a touch of the grotesque. "At Kilkenny," writes Sir
+W. Drury, "the jail being full, we caused sessions immediately to begin.
+Thirty-six persons were executed, among which some good ones; two for
+treason, a blackamoor, and two witches by natural law, for that we found
+no law to try them by in this realm." It is like the account of some
+unusual kind of game in a successful bag. "If taking of cows, and
+killing of kerne and churles had been worth advertizing," writes Lord
+Grey to the Queen, "I would have had every day to have troubled your
+Highness." Yet Lord Grey protests in the same letter that he has never
+taken the life of any, however evil, who submitted. At the end of the
+Desmond outbreak, the chiefs in the different provinces send in their
+tale of death. Ormond complains of the false reports of his "slackness
+in but killing three men," whereas the number was more than 3000; and he
+sends in his "brief note" of his contribution to the slaughter, "598
+persons of quality, besides 3000 or 4000 others, and 158 slain since his
+discharge." The end was that, as one of the chief actors writes, Sir
+Warham St. Leger, "Munster is nearly unpeopled by the murders done by
+the rebels, and the killings by the soldiers; 30,000 dead of famine in
+half a year, besides numbers that are hanged and killed. The realm," he
+adds, "was never in greater danger, or in like misery." But in the
+murderous work itself there was not much danger. "Our wars," writes Sir
+Henry Wallop, in the height of the struggle, "are but like fox-hunting."
+And when the English Government remonstrates against this system of
+massacre, the Lord-Deputy writes back that "he sorrows that pity for the
+wicked and evil should be enchanted into her Majesty."
+
+And of this dreadful policy, involving, as the price of the extinction
+of Desmond's rebellion, the absolute desolation of the South and West of
+Ireland, Lord Grey came to be the deliberate and unfaltering champion.
+His administration lasted only two years, and in spite of his natural
+kindness of temper, which we need not doubt, it was, from the supposed
+necessities of his position, and the unwavering consent of all English
+opinions round him, a rule of extermination. No scruple ever crossed his
+mind, except that he had not been sufficiently uncompromising in putting
+first the religious aspect of the quarrel. "If Elizabeth had allowed
+him," writes Mr. Froude, "he would have now made a Mahommedan conquest
+of the whole island, and offered the Irish the alternative of the
+Gospel or the sword." With the terrible sincerity of a Puritan, he
+reproached himself that he had allowed even the Queen's commands to come
+before the "one article of looking to God's dear service." "I confess my
+sin," he wrote to Walsingham, "I have followed man too much," and he saw
+why his efforts had been in vain. "Baal's prophets and councillors shall
+prevail. I see it is so. I see it is just. I see it past help. I rest
+despaired." His policy of blood and devastation, breaking the neck of
+Desmond's rebellion, but failing to put an end to it, became at length
+more than the home Government could bear; and with mutual
+dissatisfaction he was recalled before his work was done. Among the
+documents relating to his explanations with the English Government, is
+one of which this is the abstract: "Declaration (Dec. 1583), by Arthur,
+Lord Grey, of Wilton, to the Queen, showing the state of Ireland when he
+was appointed Deputy, with the services of his government, and the
+plight he left it in. 1485 chief men and gentlemen slain, not accounting
+those of meaner sort, nor yet executions by law, and killing of churles,
+which were innumerable."
+
+This was the world into which Spenser was abruptly thrown, and in which
+he was henceforward to have his home. He first became acquainted with it
+as Lord Grey's Secretary in the Munster war. He himself in later days
+with ample experience and knowledge reviewed the whole of this dreadful
+history, its policy, its necessities, its results: and no more
+instructive document has come down to us from those times. But his
+description of the way in which the plan of extermination was carried
+out in Munster before his eyes, may fittingly form a supplement to the
+language on the spot of those responsible for it.
+
+     _Eudox._ But what, then, shall be the conclusion of this
+     war? . . .
+
+     _Iren._--The end will I assure me be very short and much
+     sooner than can be, in so great a trouble, as it seemeth,
+     hoped for, although there should none of them fall by the
+     sword nor be slain by the soldier: yet thus being kept from
+     manurance and their cattle from running abroad, by this hard
+     restraint they would quickly consume themselves, and devour
+     one another. The proof whereof I saw sufficiently exampled in
+     these late wars of Munster; for notwithstanding that the same
+     was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle
+     that you would have thought they should have been able to
+     stand long, yet ere one year and a half they were brought to
+     such wretchedness as that any stony heart would have rued the
+     same. Out of every corner of the woods and glynnes they came
+     creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear
+     them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like
+     ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead
+     carrions, happy where they could find them, yea and one
+     another soon after, insomuch that the very carcases they
+     spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a
+     plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a
+     feast for a time, yet not able long to continue there withal;
+     that in a short space there were none almost left, and a most
+     populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and
+     beast; yet sure in all that war there perished not many by the
+     sword, but all by the extremity of famine which they
+     themselves had wrought.
+
+It is hardly surprising that Lord Grey's Secretary should share the
+opinions and the feelings of his master and patron. Certainly in his
+company and service, Spenser learned to look upon Ireland and the Irish
+with the impatience and loathing which filled most Englishmen; and it
+must be added with the same greedy eyes. In this new atmosphere, in
+which his life was henceforth spent, amid the daily talk of ravage and
+death, the daily scramble for the spoils of rebels and traitors, the
+daily alarms of treachery and insurrection, a man naturally learns
+hardness. Under Spenser's imaginative richness, and poetic delicacy of
+feeling, there appeared two features. There was a shrewd sense of the
+practical side of things: and there was a full share of that sternness
+of temper which belonged to the time. He came to Ireland for no romantic
+purpose: he came to make his fortune as well as he could: and he
+accepted the conditions of the place and scene, and entered at once into
+the game of adventure and gain which was the natural one for all English
+comers, and of which the prizes were lucrative offices and forfeited
+manors and abbeys. And in the native population and native interests, he
+saw nothing but what called forth not merely antipathy, but deep moral
+condemnation. It was not merely that the Irish were ignorant,
+thriftless, filthy, debased and loathsome in their pitiable misery and
+despair: it was that in his view, justice, truth, honesty had utterly
+perished among them, and therefore were not due to them. Of any other
+side to the picture, he like other good Englishmen, was entirely
+unconscious: he saw only on all sides of him the empire of barbarism and
+misrule which valiant and godly Englishmen were fighting to vanquish and
+destroy--fighting against apparent but not real odds. And all this was
+aggravated by the stiff adherence of the Irish to their old religion.
+Spenser came over with the common opinion of Protestant Englishmen, that
+they had at least in England the pure and undoubted religion of the
+Bible: and in Ireland, he found himself face to face with the very
+superstition in its lowest forms which he had so hated in England. He
+left it plotting in England; he found it in armed rebellion in Ireland.
+Like Lord Grey, he saw in Popery the root of all the mischiefs of
+Ireland; and his sense of true religion, as well as his convictions of
+right, conspired to recommend to him Lord Grey's pitiless government.
+The opinion was everywhere--it was undisputed and unexamined--that a
+policy of force, direct or indirect, was the natural and right way of
+reducing diverging religions to submission and uniformity: that
+religious disagreement ought as a matter of principle to be subdued by
+violence of one degree or another. All wise and good men thought so: all
+statesmen and rulers acted so. Spenser found in Ireland a state of
+things which seemed to make this doctrine the simplest dictate of common
+sense.
+
+In August, 1582, Lord Grey left Ireland. He had accepted his office with
+the utmost reluctance, from the known want of agreement between the
+Queen and himself as to policy. He had executed it in a way which
+greatly displeased the home Government. And he gave it up with his
+special work, the extinction of Desmond's rebellion, still
+unaccomplished. In spite of the thousands slain, and a province made a
+desert, Desmond was still at large and dangerous. Lord Grey had been
+ruthlessly severe, and yet not successful. For months there had been an
+interchange of angry letters between him and the Government. Burghley,
+he complains to Walsingham, was "so heavy against him." The Queen and
+Burghley wanted order restored, but did not like either the expense of
+war, or the responsibility before other governments for the severity
+which their agents on the spot judged necessary. Knowing that he did not
+please, he had begun to solicit his recall before he had been a year in
+Ireland; and at length he was recalled, not to receive thanks, but to
+meet a strict, if not hostile, inquiry into his administration. Besides
+what had been on the surface of his proceedings to dissatisfy the
+Queen, there had been, as in the case of every Deputy, a continued
+underground stream of backbiting and insinuation going home against him.
+Spenser did not forget this, when in the _Faery Queen_ he shadowed forth
+Lord Grey's career in the adventures of Arthegal, the great Knight of
+Justice, met on his return home from his triumphs by the hags, Envy and
+Detraction, and the braying of the hundred tongues of the Blatant Beast.
+Irish lords and partisans, calling themselves loyal, when they could not
+get what they wanted, or when he threatened them for their insincerity
+or insolence, at once wrote to England. His English colleagues, civil
+and military, were his natural rivals or enemies, ever on the watch to
+spy out and report, if necessary, to misrepresent, what was questionable
+or unfortunate in his proceedings. Permanent officials like Archbishop
+Adam Loftus the Chancellor, or Treasurer Wallop, or Secretary Fenton,
+knew more than he did; they corresponded directly with the ministers;
+they knew that they were expected to keep a strict watch on his
+expenditure; and they had no scruple to send home complaints against him
+behind his back, as they did against one another. A secretary in Dublin
+like Geoffrey Fenton is described as a moth in the garment of every
+Deputy. Grey himself complains of the underhand work; he cannot prevent
+"backbiters' report:" he has found of late "very suspicious dealing
+amongst all his best esteemed associates;" he "dislikes not to be
+informed of the charges against him." In fact, they were accusing him of
+one of the gravest sins of which a Deputy could be guilty; they were
+writing home that he was lavishing the forfeited estates among his
+favourites, under pretence of rewarding service, to the great loss and
+permanent damage of her Majesty's revenue; and they were forwarding
+plans for commissions to distribute these estates, of which the Deputy
+should not be a member.
+
+He had the common fate of those who accepted great responsibilities
+under the Queen. He was expected to do very hard tasks with insufficient
+means, and to receive more blame where he failed than thanks where he
+succeeded. He had every one, English and Irish, against him in Ireland,
+and no one for him in England. He was driven to violence because he
+wanted strength; he took liberties with forfeitures belonging to the
+Queen because he had no other means of rewarding public services. It is
+not easy to feel much sympathy for a man who, brave and public spirited
+as he was, could think of no remedy for the miseries of Ireland but
+wholesale bloodshed. Yet, compared with the resident officials who
+caballed against him, and who got rich on these miseries, the Wallops
+and Fentons of the Irish Council, this stern Puritan, so remorseless in
+what he believed to be his duty to his Queen and his faith, stands out
+as an honest and faithful public servant of a Government which seemed
+hardly to know its own mind, which vacillated between indulgence and
+severity, and which hampered its officers by contradictory policies,
+ignorant of their difficulties, and incapable of controlling the
+supplies for a costly and wasteful war. Lord Grey's strong hand, though
+incapable of reaching the real causes of Irish evils, undoubtedly saved
+the country at a moment of serious peril, and once more taught lawless
+Geraldines, and Eustaces, and Burkes the terrible lesson of English
+power. The work which he had half done in crushing Desmond was soon
+finished by Desmond's hereditary rival, Ormond; and under the milder,
+but not more popular, rule of his successor, the proud and irritable
+Sir John Perrot, Ireland had for a few years the peace which consisted
+in the absence of a definite rebellion, till Tyrone began to stir in
+1595, and Perrot went back a disgraced man, to die a prisoner in the
+Tower.
+
+Lord Grey left behind him unappeasable animosities, and returned to meet
+jealous rivals and an ill-satisfied mistress. But he had left behind one
+whose admiration and reverence he had won, and who was not afraid to
+take care of his reputation. Whether Spenser went back with his patron
+or not in 1582, he was from henceforth mainly resident in Ireland. Lord
+Grey's administration, and the principles on which it had been carried
+on, had made a deep impression on Spenser's mind. His first ideal had
+been Philip Sidney, the attractive and all-accomplished gentleman,--
+
+                  The President
+     Of noblesse and of chevalrie,--
+
+And to the end the pastoral Colin Clout, for he ever retained his first
+poetic name, was faithful to his ideal. But in the stern Proconsul,
+under whom he had become hardened into a keen and resolute colonist, he
+had come in contact with a new type of character; a governor under the
+sense of duty, doing the roughest of work in the roughest of ways. In
+Lord Grey, he had this character, not as he might read of it in books,
+but acting out its qualities in present life, amid the unexpected
+emergencies, the desperate alternatives, the calls for instant decision,
+the pressing necessities and the anxious hazards, of a course full of
+uncertainty and peril. He had before his eyes day by day, fearless,
+unshrinking determination, in a hateful and most unpromising task. He
+believed that he saw a living example of strength, manliness, and
+nobleness; of unsparing and unswerving zeal for order and religion, and
+good government; of single-hearted devotion to truth and right, and to
+the Queen. Lord Grey grew at last, in the poet's imagination, into the
+image and representative of perfect and masculine justice. When Spenser
+began to enshrine in a great allegory his ideas of human life and
+character, Lord Grey supplied the moral features, and almost the name,
+of one of its chief heroes. Spenser did more than embody his memory in
+poetical allegories. In Spenser's _View of the present State of
+Ireland_, written some years after Lord Grey's death, he gives his
+mature, and then at any rate, disinterested approbation of Lord Grey's
+administration, and his opinion of the causes of its failure. He kindles
+into indignation when "most untruely and maliciously, those evil tongues
+backbite and slander the sacred ashes of that most just and honourable
+personage, whose least virtue, of many most excellent, which abounded in
+his heroical spirit, they were never able to aspire unto."
+
+Lord Grey's patronage had brought Spenser into the public service;
+perhaps that patronage, the patronage of a man who had powerful enemies,
+was the cause that Spenser's preferments, after Lord Grey's recall, were
+on so moderate a scale. The notices which we glean from indirect sources
+about Spenser's employment in Ireland are meagre enough, but they are
+distinct. They show him as a subordinate public servant, of no great
+account, but yet, like other public servants in Ireland, profiting, in
+his degree, by the opportunities of the time. In the spring following
+Lord Grey's arrival (March 22, 1581), Spenser was appointed Clerk of
+Decrees and Recognizances in the Irish Court of Chancery, retaining his
+place as Secretary to the Lord-Deputy, in which character his signature
+sometimes appears in the Irish Records, certifying State documents sent
+to England. This office is said by Fuller to have been a "lucrative"
+one. In the same year he received a lease of the Abbey and Manor of
+Enniscorthy, in the County of Wexford. Enniscorthy was an important post
+in the network of English garrisons, on one of the roads from Dublin to
+the South. He held it but for a short time. It was transferred by him to
+a citizen of Wexford, Richard Synot, an agent, apparently, of the
+powerful Sir Henry Wallop, the Treasurer; and it was soon after
+transferred by Synot to his patron, an official who secured to himself a
+large share of the spoils of Desmond's rebellion. Further, Spenser's
+name appears, in a list of persons (January, 1582), among whom Lord Grey
+had distributed some of the forfeited property of the rebels--a list
+sent home by him in answer to charges of waste and damage to the Queen's
+revenue, busily urged against him in Ireland by men like Wallop and
+Fenton, and readily listened to by English ministers like Burghley, who
+complained that Ireland was a "gulf of consuming treasure." The grant
+was mostly to persons active in service, among others one to Wallop
+himself; and a certain number of smaller value to persons of Lord Grey's
+own household. There, among yeomen ushers, gentlemen ushers, gentlemen
+serving the Lord-Deputy, and Welshmen and Irishmen with uncouth names,
+to whom small gratifications had been allotted out of the spoil, we
+read--"the lease of a house in Dublin belonging to [Lord] Baltinglas for
+six years to come to Edmund Spenser, one of the Lord-Deputy's
+Secretaries, valued at 5_l._" . . . "of a 'custodiam' of John Eustace's
+[one of Baltinglas' family] land of the Newland to Edmund Spenser, one
+of the Lord-Deputy's Secretaries." In July, 1586, when every one was
+full of the project for "planting" Munster, he was still in Dublin, for
+he addresses from thence a sonnet to Gabriel Harvey. In March, 1588/9,
+we find the following, in a list of officers on the establishment of the
+province of Munster, which the government was endeavouring to colonize
+from the west of England: "Lodovick Briskett, clerk to the council (at
+20_l._ per annum), 13_l._ 6_s._ 8_d._ (this is exercised by one Spenser,
+as deputy for the said Briskett), to whom (i. e. Briskett) it was
+granted by patent 6 Nov. 25 Eliz. (1583)." (_Carew MSS._) Bryskett was a
+man much employed in Irish business. He had been Clerk to the Irish
+Council, had been a correspondent of Burghley and Walsingham, and had
+aspired to be Secretary of State when Fenton obtained the post: possibly
+in disappointment, he had retired, with an office which he exercised by
+deputy, to his lands in Wexford. He was a poet, and a friend of
+Spenser's: and it may have been by his interest with the dispensers of
+patronage, that "one Spenser," who had been his deputy, succeeded to his
+office.
+
+In this position Spenser was brought into communication with the
+powerful English chiefs on the Council of Munster, and also with the
+leading men among the Undertakers as they were called, among whom more
+than half a million of acres of the escheated and desolate lands of the
+fallen Desmond were to be divided, on condition of each Undertaker
+settling on his estate a proportionate number of English gentlemen,
+yeomen, artisans and labourers with their families, who were to bring
+the ruined province into order and cultivation. The President and
+Vice-President of the Council were the two Norreys, John and Thomas, two
+of the most gallant of a gallant family. The project for the planting of
+Munster had been originally started before the rebellion, in 1568. It
+had been one of the causes of the rebellion; but now that Desmond was
+fallen, it was revived. It had been received in England with favour and
+hope. Men of influence and enterprise, Sir Christopher Hatton,
+Walsingham, Walter Ralegh, had embarked in it: and the government had
+made an appeal to the English country gentlemen to take advantage of
+this new opening for their younger sons, and to send them over at the
+head of colonies from the families of their tenants and dependants, to
+occupy a rich and beautiful land on easy terms of rent. In the Western
+Counties, north and south, the appeal had awakened interest. In the list
+of Undertakers are found Cheshire and Lancashire names, Stanley,
+Fleetwood, Molyneux: and a still larger number for Somerset, Devon, and
+Dorset, Popham, Rogers, Coles, Ralegh, Chudleigh, Champernown. The plan
+of settlement was carefully and methodically traced out. The province
+was surveyed as well as it could be under great difficulties. Maps were
+made which Lord Burghley annotated. "Seignories" were created of varying
+size, 12,000, 8000, 6000, 4000 acres, with corresponding obligations as
+to the number and class of farms and inhabitants in each. Legal science
+in England was to protect titles by lengthy patents and leases;
+administrative watchfulness and firmness were to secure them in Ireland.
+Privileges of trade were granted to the Undertakers: they were even
+allowed to transport coin out of England to Ireland: and a long respite
+was granted them before the Crown was to claim its rents. Strict rules
+were laid down to keep the native Irish out of the English lands and
+from intermarrying with the English families. In this partition,
+Seignories were distributed by the Undertakers among themselves with the
+free carelessness of men dividing the spoil. The great people, like
+Hatton and Ralegh, were to have their two or three Seignories: the
+county of Cork with its nineteen Seignories is assigned to the gentleman
+undertakers from Somersetshire. The plan was an ambitious and tempting
+one. But difficulties soon arose. The gentleman undertakers were not in
+a hurry to leave England even on a visit to their desolate and dangerous
+seignories in Munster. The "planting" did not thrive. The Irish were
+inexhaustible in raising legal obstacles and in giving practical
+annoyance. Claims and titles were hard to discover or to extinguish.
+Even the very attainted and escheated lands were challenged by virtue of
+settlements made before the attainders. The result was that a certain
+number of Irish estates were added to the possessions of a certain
+number of English families. But Munster was not planted. Burghley's
+policy, and Walsingham's resolution, and Ralegh's daring inventiveness
+were alike baffled by the conditions of a problem harder than the
+peopling of America or the conquest of India. Munster could not be made
+English. After all its desolation, it reverted in the main to its Irish
+possessors.
+
+Of all the schemes and efforts which accompanied the attempt, and the
+records of which fill the Irish State papers of those years, Spenser was
+the near and close spectator. He was in Dublin and on the spot, as Clerk
+of the Council of Munster. And he had become acquainted, perhaps, by
+this time, had formed a friendship, with Walter Ralegh, one of the most
+active men in Irish business, whose influence was rising wherever he was
+becoming known. Most of the knowledge which Spenser thus gathered, and
+of the impressions which a practical handling of Irish affairs had left
+on him, was embodied in his interesting work, written several years
+later--_A View of the present State of Ireland_. But his connexion with
+Munster not unnaturally brought him also an accession of fortune. When
+Ralegh and the "Somersetshire men" were dividing among them the County
+of Cork, the Clerk of the Council was remembered by some of his friends.
+He was admitted among the Undertakers. His name appears in the list,
+among great statesmen and captains with their seignories of 12,000
+acres, as holding a grant of some 3000. It was the manor and castle of
+Kilcolman, a ruined house of the Desmonds, under the Galtee Hills. It
+appears to have been first assigned to another person.[79:5] But it came
+at last into Spenser's hands, probably in 1586; and henceforward, this
+was his abode and his home.
+
+Kilcolman Castle was near the high road between Mallow and Limerick,
+about three miles from Buttevant and Doneraile, in a plain at the foot
+of the last western falls of the Galtee range, watered by a stream now
+called the Awbeg, but which he celebrates under the name of the Mulla.
+In Spenser's time it was probably surrounded with woods. The earlier
+writers describe it as a pleasant abode with fine views, and so Spenser
+celebrated its natural beauties. The more recent accounts are not so
+favourable. "Kilcolman," says the writer in Murray's Handbook, "is a
+small peel tower, with cramped and dark rooms, a form which every
+gentleman's house assumed in turbulent times. It is situated on the
+margin of a small lake, and, it must be confessed, overlooking an
+extremely dreary tract of country." It was in the immediate
+neighbourhood of the wild country to the north, half forest, half bog,
+the wood and hill of Aharlo, or Arlo, as Spenser writes it, which was
+the refuge and the "great fastness" of the Desmond rebellion. It was
+amid such scenes, amid such occupations, in such society and
+companionship, that the poet of the _Faery Queen_ accomplished as much
+of his work as was given him to do. In one of his later poems, he thus
+contrasts the peace of England with his own home:--
+
+     No wayling there nor wretchednesse is heard,
+     No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,
+     No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard,
+     No nightly bordrags [= border ravage], nor no hue and cries;
+     The shepheards there abroad may safely lie,
+     On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger:
+     No ravenous wolves the good mans hope destroy,
+     Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[54:1] Froude, x. 158.
+
+[58:2] Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1574-1585. Mr. H. C. Hamilton's
+Pref. p. lxxi-lxxiii. Nov. 12, 1580.
+
+[62:3] Cox, Hist. of Ireland, 354.
+
+[63:4] Irish Papers, March 29, 1587.
+
+[79:5] Carew MSS. Calendar, 1587, p. 449. Cf. Irish Papers; Calendar,
+1587, p. 309, 450.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE FAERY QUEEN--THE FIRST PART.
+
+[1580-1590.]
+
+
+The _Faery Queen_ is heard of very early in Spenser's literary course.
+We know that in the beginning of 1580, the year in which Spenser went to
+Ireland, something under that title had been already begun and submitted
+to Gabriel Harvey's judgment; and that among other literary projects,
+Spenser was intending to proceed with it. But beyond the mere name, we
+know nothing, at this time, of Spenser's proposed _Faery Queen_.
+Harvey's criticisms on it tell us nothing of its general plan or its
+numbers. Whether the first sketch had been decided upon, whether the new
+stanza, Spenser's original creation, and its peculiar beauty and
+instrument, had yet been invented by him, while he had been trying
+experiments in metre in the _Shepherd's Calendar_, we have no means of
+determining. But he took the idea with him to Ireland; and in Ireland he
+pursued it and carried it out.
+
+The first authentic account which we have of the composition of the
+_Faery Queen_, is in a pamphlet written by Spenser's friend and
+predecessor in the service of the Council of Munster, Ludowick Bryskett,
+and inscribed to Lord Grey of Wilton: a _Discourse of Civil Life_,
+published in 1606. He describes a meeting of friends at his cottage
+near Dublin, and a conversation that took place on the "ethical" part of
+moral philosophy. The company consisted of some of the principal
+Englishmen employed in Irish affairs, men whose names occur continually
+in the copious correspondence in the Rolls and at Lambeth. There was
+Long, the Primate of Armagh; there were Sir Robert Dillon, the Chief
+Justice of the Common Pleas, and Dormer, the Queen's Solicitor; and
+there were soldiers, like Thomas Norreys, then Vice-President of
+Munster, under his brother John Norreys; Sir Warham Sentleger, on whom
+had fallen so much of the work in the South of Ireland, and who at last,
+like Thomas Norreys, fell in Tyrone's rebellion; Captain Christopher
+Carleil, Walsingham's son-in-law, a man who had gained great distinction
+on land and sea, not only in Ireland, but in the Low Countries, in
+France, and at Carthagena and San Domingo; and Captain Nicholas Dawtry,
+the Seneschal of Clandeboy, in the troublesome Ulster country,
+afterwards "Captain" of Hampshire at the time of the Armada. It was a
+remarkable party. The date of this meeting must have been after the
+summer of 1584, at which time Long was made Primate, and before the
+beginning of 1588, when Dawtry was in Hampshire. The extract is so
+curious, as a picture of the intellectual and literary wants and efforts
+of the times, especially amid the disorders of Ireland, and as a
+statement of Spenser's purpose in his poem, that an extract from it
+deserves to be inserted, as it is given in Mr. Todd's _Life of Spenser_,
+and repeated in that by Mr. Hales.
+
+     "Herein do I greatly envie," writes Bryskett, "the happiness
+     of the Italians, who have in their mother-tongue late writers
+     that have, with a singular easie method taught all that Plato
+     and Aristotle have confusedly or obscurely left written. Of
+     which, some I have begun to reade with no small delight; as
+     Alexander Piccolomini, Gio. Baptista Giraldi, and Guazzo; all
+     three having written upon the Ethick part of Morall
+     Philosophie both exactly and perspicuously. And would God that
+     some of our countrimen would shew themselves so wel affected
+     to the good of their countrie (whereof one principall and most
+     important part consisteth in the instructing men to vertue),
+     as to set downe in English the precepts of those parts of
+     Morall Philosophy, whereby our youth might, without spending
+     so much time as the learning of those other languages require,
+     speedily enter into the right course of vertuous life.
+
+     In the meane while I must struggle with those bookes which I
+     vnderstand and content myselfe to plod upon them, in hope that
+     God (who knoweth the sincerenesse of my desire) will be
+     pleased to open my vnderstanding, so as I may reape that
+     profit of my reading, which I trauell for. Yet is there _a
+     gentleman in this company_, whom I have had often a purpose to
+     intreate, that as his liesure might serue him, he would
+     vouchsafe to spend some time with me to instruct me in some
+     hard points which I cannot of myselfe understand; _knowing him
+     to be not onely perfect in the Greek tongue, but also very
+     well read in Philosophie, both morall and naturall_.
+     Neuertheless such is my bashfulness, as I neuer yet durst open
+     my mouth to disclose this my desire unto him, though I have
+     not wanted some hartning thereunto from himselfe. For of loue
+     and kindnes to me, _he encouraged me long sithens to follow
+     the reading of the Greeke tongue, and offered me his helpe to
+     make me vnderstand it_. But now that so good an opportunitie
+     is offered vnto me, to satisfie in some sort my desire; I
+     thinke I should commit a great fault, not to myselfe alone,
+     but to all this company, if I should not enter my request thus
+     farre, as to moue him to spend this time which we have now
+     destined to familiar discourse and conuersation, in declaring
+     unto us the great benefits which men obtaine by the knowledge
+     of Morall Philosophie, and in making us to know what the same
+     is, what be the parts thereof, whereby vertues are to be
+     distinguished from vices; and finally that he will be pleased
+     to run ouer in such order as he shall thinke good, such and
+     so many principles and rules thereof, as shall serue not only
+     for my better instruction, but also for the contentment and
+     satisfaction of you al. For I nothing doubt, but that euery
+     one of you will be glad to heare so profitable a discourse and
+     thinke the time very wel spent wherin so excellent a knowledge
+     shal be reuealed unto you, from which euery one may be assured
+     to gather some fruit as wel as myselfe.
+
+     Therefore (said I), turning myselfe to _M. Spenser_, It is you
+     sir, to whom it pertaineth to shew yourselfe courteous now
+     unto vs all and to make vs all beholding unto you for the
+     pleasure and profit which we shall gather from your speeches,
+     if you shall vouchsafe to open unto vs the goodly cabinet, in
+     which this excellent treasure of vertues lieth locked up from
+     the vulgar sort. And thereof in the behalfe of all as for
+     myselfe, I do most earnestly intreate you not to say vs nay.
+     Vnto which wordes of mine euery man applauding most with like
+     words of request and the rest with gesture and countenances
+     expressing as much, _M. Spenser_ answered in this maner:
+
+     Though it may seeme hard for me, to refuse the request made by
+     you all, whom euery one alone, I should for many respects be
+     willing to gratifie; yet as the case standeth, I doubt not but
+     with the consent of the most part of you, I shall be excused
+     at this time of this taske which would be laid vpon me; for
+     sure I am, that it is not vnknowne unto you, that I haue
+     alreedy vndertaken a work tending to the same effect, which is
+     in _heroical verse_ under the title of a _Faerie Queene_ to
+     represent all the moral vertues, assigning to euery vertue a
+     Knight to be the patron and defender of the same, in whose
+     actions and feates of arms and chiualry the operations of that
+     vertue, whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed, and
+     the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against
+     the same, to be beaten down and ouercome. Which work, _as I
+     haue already well entred into_, if God shall please to spare
+     me life that I may finish it according to my mind, your wish
+     (_M. Bryskett_) will be in some sort accomplished, though
+     perhaps not so effectually as you could desire. And the same
+     may very well serue for my excuse, if at this time I craue to
+     be forborne in this your request, since any discourse, that I
+     might make thus on the sudden in such a subject would be but
+     simple, and little to your satisfactions. For it would require
+     good aduisement and premeditation for any man to vndertake the
+     declaration of these points that you have proposed, containing
+     in effect the Ethicke part of Morall Philosophie. Whereof
+     since I haue taken in hand to discourse at large in my poeme
+     before spoken, I hope the expectation of that work may serue
+     to free me at this time from speaking in that matter,
+     notwithstanding your motion and all your intreaties. But I
+     will tell you how I thinke by himselfe he may very well excuse
+     my speech, and yet satisfie all you in this matter. I haue
+     seene (as he knoweth) a translation made by himselfe out of
+     the Italian tongue of a dialogue comprehending all the Ethick
+     part of Moral Philosophy written by one of those three he
+     formerly mentioned, and that is by _Giraldi_ vnder the title
+     of a Dialogue of Ciuil life. If it please him to bring us
+     forth that translation to be here read among vs, or otherwise
+     to deliuer to us, as his memory may serue him, the contents of
+     the same; he shal (I warrant you) satisfie you all at the ful,
+     and himselfe wil haue no cause but to thinke the time well
+     spent in reuiewing his labors, especially in the company of so
+     many his friends, who may thereby reape much profit, and the
+     translation happily fare the better by some mending it may
+     receiue in the perusing, as all writings else may do by the
+     often examination of the same. Neither let it trouble him that
+     I so turne ouer to him againe the taske he wold haue put me
+     to; for it falleth out fit for him to verifie the principall
+     of all this Apologie, euen now made for himselfe; because
+     thereby it will appeare that he hath not withdrawne himselfe
+     from seruice of the state to liue idle or wholly priuate to
+     himselfe, but hath spent some time in doing that which may
+     greatly benefit others, and hath serued not a little to the
+     bettering of his owne mind, and increasing of his knowledge;
+     though he for modesty pretend much ignorance, and pleade want
+     in wealth, much like some rich beggars, who either of custom,
+     or for couetousnes, go to begge of others those things whereof
+     they haue no want at home.
+
+     With this answer of _M. Spensers_ it seemed that all the
+     company were wel satisfied, for after some few speeches
+     whereby they had shewed an extreme longing after his worke of
+     the _Fairie Queene_, _whereof some parcels had been by some of
+     them seene_, they all began to presse me to produce my
+     translation mentioned by _M. Spenser_ that it might be perused
+     among them; or else that I should (as near as I could) deliuer
+     unto them the contents of the same, supposing that my memory
+     would not much faile me in a thing so studied and advisedly
+     set downe in writing as a translation must be."
+
+A poet at this time still had to justify his employment by presenting
+himself in the character of a professed teacher of morality, with a
+purpose as definite and formal, though with a different method, as the
+preacher in the pulpit. Even with this profession, he had to encounter
+many prejudices, and men of gravity and wisdom shook their heads at what
+they thought his idle trifling. But if he wished to be counted
+respectable, and to separate himself from the crowd of foolish or
+licentious rimers, he must intend distinctly, not merely to interest,
+but to instruct, by his new and deep conceits. It was under the
+influence of this persuasion that Spenser laid down the plan of the
+_Faery Queen_. It was, so he proposed to himself, to be a work on moral,
+and if time were given him, political philosophy, composed with as
+serious a didactic aim, as any treatise or sermon in prose. He deems it
+necessary to explain and excuse his work by claiming for it this design.
+He did not venture to send the _Faery Queen_ into the world without also
+telling the world its moral meaning and bearing. He cannot trust it to
+tell its own story or suggest its real drift. In the letter to Sir W.
+Ralegh, accompanying the first portion of it, he unfolds elaborately the
+sense of his allegory, as he expounded it to his friends in Dublin. "To
+some," he says, "I know this method will seem displeasant, which had
+rather have good discipline delivered plainly by way of precept, or
+sermoned at large, as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in
+allegorical devises." He thought that Homer and Virgil and Ariosto had
+thus written poetry, to teach the world moral virtue and political
+wisdom. He attempted to propitiate Lord Burghley, who hated him and his
+verses, by setting before him in a dedication sonnet, the true intent of
+his--
+
+                                Idle rimes;
+     The labour of lost time and wit unstaid;
+     Yet if their deeper sense he inly weighed,
+     And the dim veil, with which from common view
+     Their fairer parts are hid, aside be laid,
+     Perhaps not vain they may appear to you.
+
+In earlier and in later times, men do not apologize for being poets; and
+Spenser himself was deceived in giving himself credit for this direct
+purpose to instruct, when he was really following the course marked out
+by his genius. But he only conformed to the curious utilitarian spirit
+which pervaded the literature of the time. Readers were supposed to look
+everywhere for a moral to be drawn, or a lesson to be inculcated, or
+some practical rules to be avowedly and definitely deduced; and they
+could not yet take in the idea that the exercise of the speculative and
+imaginative faculties may be its own end, and may have indirect
+influences and utilities even greater than if it was guided by a
+conscious intention to be edifying and instructive.
+
+The first great English poem of modern times, the first creation of
+English imaginative power since Chaucer, and like Chaucer so thoroughly
+and characteristically English, was not written in England. Whatever
+Spenser may have done to it before he left England with Lord Grey, and
+whatever portions of earlier composition may have been used and worked
+up into the poem as it went on, the bulk of the _Faery Queen_, as we
+have it, was composed in what to Spenser and his friends was almost a
+foreign land--in the conquered and desolated wastes of wild and
+barbarous Ireland. It is a feature of his work on which Spenser himself
+dwells. In the verses which usher in his poem, addressed to the great
+men of Elizabeth's court, he presents his work to the Earl of Ormond, as
+
+     The wild fruit which salvage soil hath bred;
+     Which being through long wars left almost waste,
+     With brutish barbarism is overspread;--
+
+and in the same strain to Lord Grey, he speaks of his "rude rimes, the
+which a rustic muse did weave, in salvage soil." It is idle to speculate
+what difference of form the _Faery Queen_ might have received, if the
+design had been carried out in the peace of England and in the society
+of London. But it is certain that the scene of trouble and danger in
+which it grew up greatly affected it. This may possibly account, though
+it is questionable, for the looseness of texture, and the want of
+accuracy and finish which is sometimes to be seen in it. Spenser was a
+learned poet; and his poem has the character of the work of a man of
+wide reading, but without books to verify or correct. It cannot be
+doubted that his life in Ireland added to the force and vividness with
+which Spenser wrote. In Ireland, he had before his eyes continually, the
+dreary world which the poet of knight errantry imagines. There men might
+in good truth travel long through wildernesses and "great woods" given
+over to the outlaw and the ruffian. There the avenger of wrong need
+seldom want for perilous adventure and the occasion for quelling the
+oppressor. There the armed and unrelenting hand of right was but too
+truly the only substitute for law. There might be found in most certain
+and prosaic reality, the ambushes, the disguises, the treacheries, the
+deceits and temptations, even the supposed witchcrafts and enchantments,
+against which the fairy champions of the virtues have to be on their
+guard. In Ireland, Englishmen saw, or at any rate thought they saw, a
+universal conspiracy of fraud against righteousness, a universal battle
+going on between error and religion, between justice and the most
+insolent selfishness. They found there every type of what was cruel,
+brutal, loathsome. They saw everywhere men whose business it was to
+betray and destroy, women whose business it was to tempt and ensnare and
+corrupt. They thought that they saw too, in those who waged the Queen's
+wars, all forms of manly and devoted gallantry, of noble generosity, of
+gentle strength, of knightly sweetness and courtesy. There were those,
+too, who failed in the hour of trial; who were the victims of temptation
+or of the victorious strength of evil. Besides the open or concealed
+traitors, the Desmonds, and Kildares, and O'Neales, there were the men
+who were entrapped and overcome, and the men who disappointed hopes, and
+became recreants to their faith and loyalty; like Sir William Stanley,
+who, after a brilliant career in Ireland, turned traitor and apostate,
+and gave up Deventer and his Irish bands to the King of Spain.
+
+The realities of the Irish wars and of Irish social and political life
+gave a real subject, gave body and form to the allegory. There in actual
+flesh and blood were enemies to be fought with by the good and true.
+There in visible fact were the vices and falsehoods, which Arthur and
+his companions were to quell and punish. There in living truth were
+_Sansfoy_, and _Sansloy_, and _Sansjoy_; there were _Orgoglio_ and
+_Grantorto_, the witcheries of _Acrasia_ and _Ph�dria_, the insolence of
+_Briana_ and _Crudor_. And there, too, were real Knights of goodness and
+the Gospel--Grey, and Ormond, and Ralegh, the Norreyses, St. Leger, and
+Maltby--on a real mission from Gloriana's noble realm to destroy the
+enemies of truth and virtue.
+
+The allegory bodies forth the trials which beset the life of man in all
+conditions and at all times. But Spenser could never have seen in
+England such a strong and perfect image of the allegory itself--with the
+wild wanderings of its personages, its daily chances of battle and
+danger, its hairbreadth escapes, its strange encounters, its prevailing
+anarchy and violence, its normal absence of order and law--as he had
+continually and customarily before him in Ireland. "The curse of God was
+so great," writes John Hooker, a contemporary, "and the land so barren
+both of man and beast, that whosoever did travel from one end to the
+other of all Munster, even from Waterford to Smerwick, about six score
+miles, he should not meet man, woman, or child, saving in cities or
+towns, nor yet see any beast, save foxes, wolves or other ravening
+beasts." It is the desolation through which Spenser's knights pursue
+their solitary way, or join company as they can. Indeed to read the same
+writer's account, for instance, of Ralegh's adventures with the Irish
+chieftains, his challenges and single combats, his escapes at fords and
+woods, is like reading bits of the _Faery Queen_ in prose. As Spenser
+chose to write of knight errantry, his picture of it has doubtless
+gained in truth and strength by his very practical experience of what
+such life as he describes must be. The _Faery Queen_ might almost be
+called the Epic of the English wars in Ireland under Elizabeth, as much
+as the Epic of English virtue and valour at the same period.
+
+At the Dublin meeting described by Bryskett, some time later than 1584,
+Spenser had already "well entered into" his work. In 1589, he came to
+England, bringing with him the first three books; and early in 1590,
+they were published. Spenser himself has told us the story of this first
+appearance of the _Faery Queen_. The person who discovered the
+extraordinary work of genius which was growing up amid the turbulence
+and misery and despair of Ireland, and who once more brought its author
+into the centre of English life, was Walter Ralegh. Ralegh had served
+through much of the Munster war. He had shown in Ireland some of the
+characteristic points of his nature, which made him at once the glory
+and shame of English manhood. He had begun to take a prominent place in
+any business in which he engaged. He had shown his audacity, his
+self-reliance, his resource, and some signs of that boundless but
+prudent ambition which marked his career. He had shown that freedom of
+tongue, that restless and high-reaching inventiveness, and that tenacity
+of opinion, which made him a difficult person for others to work with.
+Like so many of the English captains, he hated Ormond, and saw in his
+feud with the Desmonds the real cause of the hopeless disorder of
+Munster. But also he incurred the displeasure and suspicion of Lord
+Grey, who equally disliked the great Irish Chief, but who saw in the
+"plot" which Ralegh sent to Burghley for the pacification of Munster, an
+adventurer's impracticable and self-seeking scheme. "I must be plain,"
+he writes, "I like neither his carriage nor his company." Ralegh had
+been at Smerwick: he had been in command of one of the bands put in by
+Lord Grey to do the execution. On Lord Grey's departure he had become
+one of the leading persons among the undertakers for the planting of
+Munster. He had secured for himself a large share of the Desmond lands.
+In 1587, an agreement among the undertakers assigned to Sir Walter
+Ralegh, his associates and tenants, three seignories of 12,000 acres
+a-piece, and one of 6000, in Cork and Waterford. But before Lord Grey's
+departure, Ralegh had left Ireland, and had found the true field for his
+ambition, in the English court. From 1582 to 1589, he had shared with
+Leicester and Hatton and afterwards with Essex, the special favour of
+the Queen. He had become Warden of the Stannaries and Captain of the
+Guard. He had undertaken the adventure of founding a new realm in
+America under the name of Virginia. He had obtained grants of
+monopolies, farms of wines, Babington's forfeited estates. His own great
+ship, which he had built, the Ark Ralegh, had carried the flag of the
+High Admiral of England in the glorious but terrible summer of 1588. He
+joined in that tremendous sea-chase from Plymouth to the North Sea,
+when, as Spenser wrote to Lord Howard of Effingham--
+
+         Those huge castles of Castilian King,
+     That vainly threatened kingdoms to displace,
+     Like flying doves, ye did before you chase.
+
+In the summer of 1589, Ralegh had been busy, as men of the sea were
+then, half Queen's servants, half buccaneers, in gathering the abundant
+spoils to be found on the high seas; and he had been with Sir John
+Norreys and Sir Francis Drake in a bootless but not unprofitable
+expedition to Lisbon. On his return from the Portugal voyage his court
+fortunes underwent a change. Essex, who had long scorned "that knave
+Ralegh," was in the ascendant. Ralegh found the Queen, for some reason
+or another, and reasons were not hard to find, offended and dangerous.
+He bent before the storm. In the end of the summer of 1589, he was in
+Ireland, looking after his large seignories, his law-suits with the old
+proprietors, his castle at Lismore, and his schemes for turning to
+account his woods for the manufacture of pipe staves for the French and
+Spanish wine trade.
+
+He visited Spenser, who was his neighbour, at Kilcolman, and the visit
+led to important consequences. The record of it and of the events which
+followed, is preserved in a curious poem of Spenser's written two or
+three years later, and of much interest in regard to Spenser's personal
+history. Taking up the old pastoral form of the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+with the familiar rustic names of the swains who figured in its
+dialogues,--Hobbinol, Cuddie, Rosalind, and his own Colin Clout,--he
+described under the usual poetical disguise, the circumstances which
+once more took him back from Ireland to the court. The court was the
+place to which all persons wishing to push their way in the world were
+attracted. It was not only the centre of all power, the source of
+favours and honours, the seat of all that swayed the destiny of the
+nation. It was the home of refinement, and wit, and cultivation, the
+place where eminence of all kinds was supposed to be collected, and to
+which all ambitions, literary as much as political, aspired. It was not
+only a royal court; it was also a great club. Spenser's poem shows us
+how he had sped there, and the impressions made on his mind by a closer
+view of the persons and the ways of that awful and dazzling scene,
+which exercised such a spell upon Englishmen, and which seemed to
+combine or concentrate in itself the glory and the goodness of heaven,
+and all the baseness and malignity of earth. The occasion deserved a
+full celebration; it was indeed a turning-point in his life, for it led
+to the publication of the _Faery Queen_, and to the immediate and
+enthusiastic recognition by the Englishmen of the time of his unrivalled
+pre-eminence as a poet. In this poetical record, _Colin Clout's come
+home again_, containing in it history, criticism, satire, personal
+recollections, love passages, we have the picture of his recollections
+of the flush and excitement of those months which saw the first
+appearance of the _Faery Queen_. He describes the interruption of his
+retired and, as he paints it, peaceful and pastoral life in his Irish
+home, by the appearance of Ralegh, the "Shepherd of the Ocean," from
+"the main sea deep." They may have been thrown together before. Both had
+been patronized by Leicester. Both had been together at Smerwick, and
+probably in other passages of the Munster war; both had served under
+Lord Grey, Spenser's master, though he had been no lover of Ralegh. In
+their different degrees, Ralegh with his two or three Seignories of half
+a county, and Spenser with his more modest estate, they were embarked in
+the same enterprise, the plantation of Munster. But Ralegh now appeared
+before Spenser in all the glory of a brilliant favourite, the soldier,
+the explorer, the daring sea-captain, the founder of plantations across
+the ocean, and withal, the poet, the ready and eloquent discourser, the
+true judge and measurer of what was great or beautiful.
+
+The time, too, was one at once of excitement and repose. Men felt as
+they feel after a great peril, a great effort, a great relief; as the
+Greeks did after Salamis and Plat�a, as our fathers did after Waterloo.
+In the struggle in the Channel with the might of Spain, England had
+recognized its force and its prospects. One of those solemn moments had
+just passed when men see before them the course of the world turned one
+way, when it might have been turned another. All the world had been
+looking out to see what would come to pass; and nowhere more eagerly
+than in Ireland. Every one, English and Irish alike, stood agaze to "see
+how the game would be played." The great fleet, as it drew near, "worked
+wonderfully uncertain yet calm humours in the people, not daring to
+disclose their real intention." When all was decided, and the distressed
+ships were cast away on the western coast, the Irish showed as much zeal
+as the English in fulfilling the orders of the Irish council, to
+"apprehend and execute all Spaniards found there of what quality
+soever." These were the impressions under which the two men met. Ralegh,
+at the moment, was under a cloud. In the poetical fancy picture set
+before us--
+
+     His song was all a lamentable lay
+     Of great unkindnesse, and of usage hard,
+     Of Cynthia the Ladie of the Sea,
+     Which from her presence faultlesse him debard.
+     And ever and anon, with singults rife,
+     He cryed out, to make his undersong;
+     Ah! my loves queene, and goddesse of my life,
+     Who shall me pittie, when thou doest me wrong?
+
+At Kilcolman, Ralegh became acquainted with what Spenser had done of the
+_Faery Queen_. His rapid and clear judgment showed him how immeasurably
+it rose above all that had yet been produced under the name of poetry in
+England. That alone is sufficient to account for his eager desire that
+it should be known in England. But Ralegh always had an eye to his own
+affairs, marred as they so often were by ill-fortune and his own
+mistakes; and he may have thought of making his peace with Cynthia, by
+reintroducing at Court the friend of Philip Sidney, now ripened into a
+poet not unworthy of Gloriana's greatness. This is Colin Clout's
+account:--
+
+     When thus our pipes we both had wearied well,
+     (Quoth he) and each an end of singing made,
+     He gan to cast great lyking to my lore,
+     And great dislyking to my lucklesse lot,
+     That banisht had my selfe, like wight forlore,
+     Into that waste, where I was quite forgot.
+     The which to leave, thenceforth he counseld mee,
+     Unmeet for man, in whom was ought regardfull,
+     And wend with him, his Cynthia to see:
+     Whose grace was great, and bounty most rewardfull;
+     Besides her peerlesse skill in making well,
+     And all the ornaments of wondrous wit,
+     Such as all womankynd did far excell,
+     Such as the world admyr'd, and praised it.
+     So what with hope of good, and hate of ill,
+     He me perswaded forth with him to fare.
+     Nought tooke I with me, but mine oaten quill:
+     Small needments else need shepheard to prepare.
+     So to the sea we came; the sea, that is
+     A world of waters heaped up on hie,
+     Rolling like mountaines in wide wildernesse,
+     Horrible, hideous, roaring with hoarse crie.
+
+This is followed by a spirited description of a sea-voyage, and of that
+empire of the seas in which, since the overthrow of the Armada, England
+and England's mistress were now claiming to be supreme, and of which
+Ralegh was one of the most active and distinguished officers:--
+
+     And yet as ghastly dreadfull, as it seemes,
+     Bold men, presuming life for gaine to sell,
+     Dare tempt that gulf, and in those wandring stremes
+     Seek waies unknowne, waies leading down to hell.
+     For, as we stood there waiting on the strond,
+     Behold! an huge great vessell to us came,
+     Dauncing upon the waters back to lond,
+     As if it scornd the daunger of the same;
+     Yet was it but a wooden frame and fraile,
+     Glewed togither with some subtile matter.
+     Yet had it armes and wings, and head and taile,
+     And life to move it selfe upon the water.
+     Strange thing! how bold and swift the monster was,
+     That neither car'd for wind, nor haile, nor raine,
+     Nor swelling waves, but thorough them did passe
+     So proudly, that she made them roare againe.
+     The same aboord us gently did receave,
+     And without harme us farre away did beare,
+     So farre that land, our mother, us did leave,
+     And nought but sea and heaven to us appeare.
+     Then hartlesse quite, and full of inward feare,
+     That shepheard I besought to me to tell,
+     Under what skie, or in what world we were,
+     In which I saw no living people dwell.
+     Who, me recomforting all that he might,
+     Told me that that same was the Regiment
+     Of a great Shepheardesse, that Cynthia hight,
+     His liege, his Ladie, and his lifes Regent.
+
+This is the poetical version of Ralegh's appreciation of the treasure
+which he had lighted on in Ireland, and of what he did to make it known
+to the admiration and delight of England. He returned to the Court, and
+Spenser with him. Again, for what reason we know not, he was received
+into favour. The poet, who accompanied him, was brought to the presence
+of the lady, who saw herself in "various mirrors,"--Cynthia, Gloriana,
+Belphoebe, as she heard him read portions of the great poem which was
+to add a new glory to her reign.
+
+       "The Shepheard of the Ocean (quoth he)
+     Unto that Goddesse grace me first enhanced,
+     And to mine oaten pipe enclin'd her eare,
+     That she thenceforth therein gan take delight;
+     And it desir'd at timely houres to heare,
+     All were my notes but rude and roughly dight;
+     For not by measure of her owne great mynde,
+     And wondrous worth, she mott my simple song,
+     But joyd that country shepheard ought could fynd
+     Worth harkening to, emongst the learned throng."
+
+He had already too well caught the trick of flattery--flattery in a
+degree almost inconceivable to us--which the fashions of the time, and
+the Queen's strange self-deceit, exacted from the loyalty and enthusiasm
+of Englishmen. In that art Ralegh was only too apt a teacher. Colin
+Clout, in his story of his recollections of the Court, lets us see how
+he was taught to think and to speak there:--
+
+     But if I her like ought on earth might read,
+     I would her lyken to a crowne of lillies,
+     Upon a virgin brydes adorned head,
+     With Roses dight and Goolds and Daffadillies;
+     Or like the circlet of a Turtle true,
+     In which all colours of the rainbow bee;
+     Or like faire Phebes garlond shining new,
+     In which all pure perfection one may see.
+     But vaine it is to thinke, by paragone
+     Of earthly things, to judge of things divine:
+     Her power, her mercy, her wisdome, none
+     Can deeme, but who the Godhead can define.
+     Why then do I, base shepheard, bold and blind,
+     Presume the things so sacred to prophane?
+     More fit it is t' adore, with humble mind,
+     The image of the heavens in shape humane.
+
+The Queen, who heard herself thus celebrated, celebrated not only as a
+semi-divine person, but as herself unrivalled in the art of "making" or
+poetry,--"her peerless skill in making well,"--granted Spenser a pension
+of 50_l._ a year, which, it is said, the prosaic and frugal Lord
+Treasurer, always hard-driven for money and not caring much for poets,
+made difficulties about paying. But the new poem was not for the
+Queen's ear only. In the registers of the Stationers' Company occurs the
+following entry:--
+
+                                      Primo die Decembris [1589].
+
+     Mr. Ponsonbye--Entered for his Copye, a book intytuled the
+     _fayrye Queene_ dysposed into xij bookes &c., authorysed under
+     thandes of the Archbishop of Canterbery and bothe the Wardens.
+
+                                                           vj{d.}
+
+Thus, between pamphlets of the hour,--an account of the Arms of the City
+Companies on one side, and the last news from France on the other,--the
+first of our great modern English poems was licensed to make its
+appearance. It appeared soon after, with the date of 1590. It was not
+the twelve books, but only the first three. It was accompanied and
+introduced, as usual, by a great host of commendatory and laudatory
+sonnets and poems. All the leading personages at Elizabeth's court were
+appealed to; according to their several tastes or their relations to the
+poet, they are humbly asked to befriend, or excuse, or welcome his
+poetical venture. The list itself is worth quoting:--Sir Christopher
+Hatton, then Lord Chancellor, the Earls of Essex, Oxford,
+Northumberland, Ormond, Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord Grey of Wilton,
+Sir Walter Ralegh, Lord Burleigh, the Earl of Cumberland, Lord Hunsdon,
+Lord Buckhurst, Walsingham, Sir John Norris, President of Munster. He
+addresses Lady Pembroke, in remembrance of her brother, that "heroic
+spirit," "the glory of our days,"
+
+     Who first my Muse did lift out of the floor,
+     To sing his sweet delights in lowly lays.
+
+And he finishes with a sonnet to Lady Carew, one of Sir John Spencer's
+daughters, and another to "all the gracious and beautiful ladies of the
+Court," in which "the world's pride seems to be gathered." There come
+also congratulations and praises for himself. Ralegh addressed to him a
+fine but extravagant sonnet, in which he imagined Petrarch weeping for
+envy at the approval of the _Faery Queen_, while "Oblivion laid him down
+on Laura's hearse," and even Homer trembled for his fame. Gabriel Harvey
+revoked his judgment on the _Elvish Queen_, and not without some regret
+for less ambitious days in the past, cheered on his friend in his noble
+enterprise. Gabriel Harvey has been so much, and not without reason,
+laughed at, and yet his verses welcoming the _Faery Queen_ are so full
+of true and warm friendship, and of unexpected refinement and grace,
+that it is but just to cite them. In the eyes of the world he was an
+absurd personage: but Spenser saw in him perhaps his worthiest and
+trustiest friend. A generous and simple affection has almost got the
+better in them of pedantry and false taste.
+
+     Collyn, I see, by thy new taken taske,
+       Some sacred fury hath enricht thy braynes,
+     That leades thy muse in haughty verse to maske,
+       And loath the layes that longs to lowly swaynes;
+     That lifts thy notes from Shepheardes unto kinges:
+     So like the lively Larke that mounting singes.
+
+     Thy lovely Rosolinde seemes now forlorne,
+       And all thy gentle flockes forgotten quight:
+     Thy chaunged hart now holdes thy pypes in scorne,
+       Those prety pypes that did thy mates delight;
+     Those trusty mates, that loved thee so well;
+     Whom thou gav'st mirth, as they gave thee the bell.
+
+     Yet, as thou earst with thy sweete roundelayes
+       Didst stirre to glee our laddes in homely bowers;
+     So moughtst thou now in these refyned layes
+       Delight the daintie eares of higher powers:
+     And so mought they, in their deepe skanning skill,
+     Alow and grace our Collyns flowing quyll.
+
+     And faire befall that _Faery Queene_ of thine,
+       In whose faire eyes love linckt with vertue sittes;
+     Enfusing, by those bewties fyers devyne,
+       Such high conceites into thy humble wittes,
+     As raised hath poore pastors oaten reedes
+     From rustick tunes, to chaunt heroique deedes.
+
+     So mought thy _Redcrosse Knight_ with happy hand
+       Victorious be in that faire Ilands right,
+     Which thou dost vayle in Type of Faery land,
+       Elizas blessed field, that _Albion_ hight:
+     That shieldes her friendes, and warres her mightie foes,
+     Yet still with people, peace, and plentie flowes.
+
+     But (jolly shepheard) though with pleasing style
+       Thou feast the humour of the Courtly trayne,
+     Let not conceipt thy setled sence beguile,
+       Ne daunted be through envy or disdaine.
+     Subject thy dome to her Empyring spright,
+     From whence thy Muse, and all the world, takes light.
+
+                                                        HOBYNOLL.
+
+And to the Queen herself Spenser presented his work, in one of the
+boldest dedications perhaps ever penned:--
+
+                                  To
+               The Most High, Mightie, and Magnificent
+                              Empresse,
+       Renowmed for piety, vertve, and all gratiovs government,
+                              ELIZABETH,
+                         By the Grace of God,
+      Qveene of England, Fravnce, and Ireland, and of Virginia,
+                     Defendovr of the Faith, &c.
+                       Her most hvmble Servavnt
+                           EDMVND SPENSER,
+                       Doth, in all hvmilitie,
+                  Dedicate, present, and consecrate
+                          These his labovrs,
+               To live with the eternitie of her fame.
+
+"To live with the eternity of her fame,"--the claim was a proud one, but
+it has proved a prophecy. The publication of the _Faery Queen_ placed
+him at once and for his lifetime at the head of all living English
+poets. The world of his day immediately acknowledged the charm and
+perfection of the new work of art which had taken it by surprise. As far
+as appears, it was welcomed heartily and generously. Spenser speaks in
+places of envy and detraction, and he, like others, had no doubt his
+rivals and enemies. But little trace of censure appears, except in the
+stories about Burghley's dislike of him, as an idle rimer, and perhaps
+as a friend of his opponents. But his brother poets, men like Lodge and
+Drayton, paid honour, though in quaint phrases, to the learned Colin,
+the reverend Colin, the excellent and cunning Colin. A greater than
+they, if we may trust his editors, takes him as the representative of
+poetry, which is so dear to him.
+
+     If music and sweet poetry agree,
+     As they must needs, the sister and the brother,
+     Then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me,
+     Because thou lov'st the one, and I the other.
+     _Dowland_ to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
+     Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
+     _Spenser_ to me, whose deep conceit is such
+     As passing all conceit, needs no defence.
+     Thou lov'st to hear the sweet melodious sound
+     That Phoebus' lute, the queen of music, makes;
+     And I in deep delight am chiefly drown'd
+     Whenas himself to singing he betakes.
+     One god is god of both, as poets feign;
+     One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.
+
+               (_Shakespere_, in the _Passionate Pilgrim_, 1599.)
+
+Even the fierce pamphleteer, Thomas Nash, the scourge and torment of
+poor Gabriel Harvey, addresses Harvey's friend as heavenly Spenser, and
+extols "the Faery Singers' stately tuned verse." Spenser's title to be
+the "Poet of poets," was at once acknowledged as by acclamation. And he
+himself has no difficulty in accepting his position. In some lines on
+the death of a friend's wife, whom he laments and praises, the idea
+presents itself that the great queen may not approve of her Shepherd
+wasting his lays on meaner persons; and he puts into his friend's mouth
+a deprecation of her possible jealousy. The lines are characteristic,
+both in their beauty and music, and in the strangeness, in our eyes, of
+the excuse made for the poet.
+
+     Ne let Eliza, royall Shepheardesse,
+     The praises of my parted love envy,
+     For she hath praises in all plenteousnesse
+     Powr'd upon her, like showers of Castaly,
+     By her own Shepheard, Colin, her owne Shepheard,
+     That her with heavenly hymnes doth deifie,
+     Of rustick muse full hardly to be betterd.
+
+     She is the Rose, the glorie of the day,
+     And mine the Primrose in the lowly shade:
+     Mine, ah! not mine; amisse I mine did say:
+     Not mine, but His, which mine awhile her made;
+     Mine to be His, with him to live for ay.
+     O that so faire a flower so soone should fade,
+     And through untimely tempest fall away!
+
+     She fell away in her first ages spring,
+     Whil'st yet her leafe was greene, and fresh her rinde,
+     And whilst her braunch faire blossomes foorth did bring,
+     She fell away against all course of kinde.
+     For age to dye is right, but youth is wrong;
+     She fel away like fruit blowne downe with winde.
+     Weepe, Shepheard! weepe, to make my undersong.
+
+Thus in both his literary enterprises, Spenser had been signally
+successful. The _Shepherd's Calendar_ in 1580 had immediately raised
+high hopes of his powers. The _Faery Queen_ in 1590 had more than
+fulfilled them. In the interval a considerable change had happened in
+English cultivation. Shakespere had come to London, though the world
+did not yet know all that he was. Sidney had published his _Defense of
+Poesie_, and had written the _Arcadia_, though it was not yet published.
+Marlowe had begun to write, and others beside him were preparing the
+change which was to come on the English Drama. Two scholars who had
+shared with Spenser in the bounty of Robert Newell were beginning, in
+different lines, to raise the level of thought and style. Hooker was
+beginning to give dignity to controversy, and to show what English prose
+might rise to. Lancelot Andrewes, Spenser's junior at school and
+college, was training himself at St. Paul's, to lead the way to a larger
+and higher kind of preaching than the English clergy had yet reached.
+The change of scene from Ireland to the centre of English interests,
+must have been, as Spenser describes it, very impressive. England was
+alive with aspiration and effort; imaginations were inflamed and hearts
+stirred by the deeds of men who described with the same energy with
+which they acted. Amid such influences, and with such a friend as
+Ralegh, Spenser may naturally have been tempted by some of the dreams of
+advancement of which Ralegh's soul was full. There is strong
+probability, from the language of his later poems, that he indulged such
+hopes, and that they were disappointed. A year after the entry in the
+Stationers' Register of the _Faery Queen_ (29 Dec., 1590), Ponsonby, his
+publisher, entered a volume of "_Complaints, containing sundry small
+poems of the World's Vanity_," to which he prefixed the following
+notice.
+
+     THE PRINTER TO THE GENTLE READER.
+
+     SINCE my late setting foorth of the _Faerie Queene_, finding
+     that it hath found a favourable passage amongst you, I have
+     sithence endevoured by all good meanes (for the better
+     encrease and accomplishment of your delights,) to get into my
+     handes such smale Poemes of the same Authors, as I heard were
+     disperst abroad in sundrie hands, and not easie to bee come
+     by, by himselfe; some of them having bene diverslie imbeziled
+     and purloyned from him since his departure over Sea. Of the
+     which I have, by good meanes, gathered togeather these fewe
+     parcels present, which I have caused to bee imprinted
+     altogeather, for that they al seeme to containe like matter of
+     argument in them; being all complaints and meditations of the
+     worlds vanitie, verie grave and profitable. To which effect I
+     understand that he besides wrote sundrie others, namelie
+     _Ecclesiastes_ and _Canticum canticorum_ translated, _A
+     senights slumber_, _The hell of lovers_, _his Purgatorie_,
+     being all dedicated to Ladies; so as it may seeme he ment them
+     all to one volume. Besides some other Pamphlets looselie
+     scattered abroad, as _The dying Pellican_, _The howers of the
+     Lord_, _The sacrifice of a sinner_, _The seven Psalmes_, &c.,
+     which when I can, either by himselfe or otherwise, attaine
+     too, I meane likewise for your favour sake to set foorth. In
+     the meane time, praying you gentlie to accept of these, and
+     graciouslie to entertaine the new Poet, _I take leave_.
+
+The collection is a miscellaneous one, both as to subjects and date: it
+contains among other things, the translations from Petrarch and Du
+Bellay, which had appeared in Vander Noodt's _Theatre of Worldlings_, in
+1569. But there are also some pieces of later date; and they disclose
+not only personal sorrows and griefs, but also an experience which had
+ended in disgust and disappointment. In spite of Ralegh's friendship, he
+had found that in the Court he was not likely to thrive. The two
+powerful men who had been his earliest friends had disappeared. Philip
+Sidney had died in 1586; Leicester, soon after the destruction of the
+Armada, in 1588. And they had been followed (April, 1590) by Sidney's
+powerful father-in-law, Francis Walsingham. The death of Leicester,
+untended, unlamented, powerfully impressed Spenser, always keenly alive
+to the pathetic vicissitudes of human greatness. In one of these pieces,
+_The Ruins of Time_, addressed to Sidney's sister, the Countess of
+Pembroke, Spenser thus imagines the death of Leicester,--
+
+     It is not long, since these two eyes beheld
+     A mightie Prince, of most renowmed race,
+     Whom England high in count of honour held,
+     And greatest ones did sue to gaine his grace;
+     Of greatest ones he, greatest in his place,
+     Sate in the bosome of his Soveraine,
+     And _Right and loyall_ did his word maintaine.
+
+     I saw him die, I saw him die, as one
+     Of the meane people, and brought foorth on beare;
+     I saw him die, and no man left to mone
+     His dolefull fate, that late him loved deare:
+     Scarse anie left to close his eylids neare;
+     Scarse anie left upon his lips to laie
+     The sacred sod, or Requiem to saie.
+
+     O! trustless state of miserable men,
+     That builde your blis on hope of earthly thing,
+     And vainlie thinke your selves halfe happie then,
+     When painted faces with smooth flattering
+     Doo fawne on you, and your wide praises sing;
+     And, when the courting masker louteth lowe,
+     Him true in heart and trustie to you trow.
+
+For Sidney, the darling of the time, who had been to him not merely a
+cordial friend, but the realized type of all that was glorious in
+manhood, and beautiful in character and gifts, his mourning was more
+than that of a looker-on at a moving instance of the frailty of
+greatness. It was the poet's sorrow for the poet, who had almost been to
+him what the elder brother is to the younger. Both now, and in later
+years, his affection for one who was become to him a glorified saint,
+showed itself in deep and genuine expression, through the affectations
+which crowned the "herse" of Astrophel and Philisides. He was persuaded
+that Sidney's death had been a grave blow to literature and learning.
+The _Ruins of Time_, and still more the _Tears of the Muses_, are full
+of lamentations over returning barbarism and ignorance, and the slight
+account made by those in power of the gifts and the arts of the writer,
+the poet, and the dramatist. Under what was popularly thought the
+crabbed and parsimonious administration of Burghley, and with the
+churlishness of the Puritans, whom he was supposed to foster, it seemed
+as if the poetry of the time was passing away in chill discouragement.
+The effect is described in lines which, as we now naturally suppose, and
+Dryden also thought, can refer to no one but Shakespere. But it seems
+doubtful whether all this could have been said of Shakespere in 1590. It
+seems more likely that this also is an extravagant compliment to Philip
+Sidney, and his masking performances. He was lamented elsewhere under
+the poetical name of _Willy_. If it refers to him, it was probably
+written before his death, though not published till after it; for the
+lines imply, not that he is literally dead, but that he is in
+retirement. The expression that he is "dead of late," is explained in
+four lines below, as "choosing to sit in idle cell," and is one of
+Spenser's common figures for inactivity or sorrow.[107:1]
+
+The verses are the lamentations of the Muse of Comedy.
+
+     THALIA.
+
+     Where be the sweete delights of learning's treasure
+     That wont with Comick sock to beautefie
+     The painted Theaters, and fill with pleasure
+     The listners eyes and eares with melodie;
+     In which I late was wont to raine as Queene,
+     And maske in mirth with Graces well bescene?
+
+     O! all is gone; and all that goodly glee,
+     Which wont to be the glorie of gay wits,
+     Is layed abed, and no where now to see;
+     And in her roome unseemly Sorrow sits,
+     With hollow browes and greisly countenaunce,
+     Marring my joyous gentle dalliaunce.
+
+     And him beside sits ugly Barbarisme,
+     And brutish Ignorance, ycrept of late
+     Out of dredd darknes of the deepe Abysme,
+     Where being bredd, he light and heaven does hate:
+     They in the mindes of men now tyrannize,
+     And the faire Scene with rudenes foule disguize.
+
+     All places they with follie have possest,
+     And with vaine toyes the vulgare entertaine;
+     But me have banished, with all the rest
+     That whilome wont to wait upon my traine,
+     Fine Counterfesaunce, and unhurtfull Sport,
+     Delight, and Laughter, deckt in seemly sort.
+
+     All these, and all that els the Comick Stage
+     With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced,
+     By which mans life in his likest image
+     Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced;
+     And those sweete wits, which wont the like to frame,
+     Are now despizd, and made a laughing game.
+
+     And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made
+     To mock her selfe, and truth to imitate,
+     With kindly counter under Mimick shade,
+     Our pleasant Willy, ah! _is dead of late_;
+     With whom all joy and jolly merriment
+     Is also deaded, and in dolour drent.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     But that same gentle Spirit, from whose pen
+     Large streames of honnie and sweete Nectar flowe,
+     Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men,
+     Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,
+     Doth rather choose to sit in idle Cell,
+     Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell.
+
+But the most remarkable of these pieces is a satirical fable, _Mother
+Hubberd's Tale of the Ape and Fox_, which may take rank with the
+satirical writings of Chaucer and Dryden for keenness of touch, for
+breadth of treatment, for swing and fiery scorn, and sustained strength
+of sarcasm. By his visit to the Court, Spenser had increased his
+knowledge of the realities of life. That brilliant Court, with a goddess
+at its head, and full of charming swains and divine nymphs, had also
+another side. It was still his poetical heaven. But with that odd
+insensibility to anomaly and glaring contrasts, which is seen in his
+time, and perhaps exists at all times, he passed from the celebration of
+the dazzling glories of Cynthia's Court, into a fierce vein of invective
+against its treacheries, its vain shows, its unceasing and mean
+intrigues, its savage jealousies, its fatal rivalries, the scramble
+there for preferment in Church and State. When it is considered what
+great persons might easily and naturally have been identified at the
+time with the _Ape and the Fox_, the confederate impostors, charlatans,
+and bullying swindlers, who had stolen the lion's skin, and by it
+mounted to the high places of the State, it seems to be a proof of the
+indifference of the Court to the power of mere literature, that it
+should have been safe to write and publish so freely, and so cleverly.
+Dull Catholic lampoons and Puritan scurrilities did not pass thus
+unnoticed. They were viewed as dangerous to the State, and dealt with
+accordingly. The fable contains what we can scarcely doubt to be some of
+that wisdom which Spenser learnt by his experience of the Court.
+
+     So pitifull a thing is Suters state!
+     Most miserable man, whom wicked fate
+     Hath brought to Court, to sue for _had-ywist_,
+     That few have found, and manie one hath mist!
+     Full little knowest thou, that hast not tride,
+     What hell it is in suing long to bide:
+     To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;
+     To wast long nights in pensive discontent;
+     To speed to day, to be put back to morrow;
+     To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow;
+     To have thy Princes grace, yet want her Peeres;
+     To have thy asking, yet waite manie yeeres;
+     To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;
+     To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires;
+     To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,
+     To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.
+     Unhappie wight, borne to disastrous end,
+     That doth his life in so long tendance spend!
+       Who ever leaves sweete home, where meane estate
+     In safe assurance, without strife or hate,
+     Findes all things needfull for contentment meeke,
+     And will to Court for shadowes vaine to seeke,
+     Or hope to gaine, himselfe will a daw trie:
+     That curse God send unto mine enemie!
+
+Spenser probably did not mean his characters to fit too closely to
+living persons. That might have been dangerous. But it is difficult to
+believe that he had not distinctly in his eye a very great personage,
+the greatest in England next to the Queen, in the following picture of
+the doings of the Fox installed at Court.
+
+       But the false Foxe most kindly plaid his part;
+     For whatsoever mother-wit or arte
+     Could worke, he put in proofe: no practise slie,
+     No counterpoint of cunning policie,
+     No reach, no breach, that might him profit bring,
+     But he the same did to his purpose wring.
+     Nought suffered he the Ape to give or graunt,
+     But through his hand must passe the Fiaunt.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     He chaffred Chayres in which Churchmen were set,
+     And breach of lawes to privie ferme did let:
+     No statute so established might bee,
+     Nor ordinaunce so needfull, but that hee
+     Would violate, though not with violence,
+     Yet under colour of the confidence
+     The which the Ape repos'd in him alone,
+     And reckned him the kingdomes corner stone.
+     And ever, when he ought would bring to pas,
+     His long experience the platforme was:
+     And, when he ought not pleasing would put by
+     The cloke was care of thrift, and husbandry,
+     For to encrease the common treasures store;
+     But his owne treasure he encreased more,
+     And lifted up his loftie towres thereby,
+     That they began to threat the neighbour sky;
+     The whiles the Princes pallaces fell fast
+     To ruine (for what thing can ever last?)
+     And whilest the other Peeres, for povertie,
+     Were forst their auncient houses to let lie,
+     And their olde Castles to the ground to fall,
+     Which their forefathers, famous over-all,
+     Had founded for the Kingdome's ornament,
+     And for their memories long moniment:
+     But he no count made of Nobilitie,
+     Nor the wilde beasts whom armes did glorifie,
+     The Realmes chiefe strength and girlond of the crowne.
+     All these through fained crimes he thrust adowne,
+     Or made them dwell in darknes of disgrace;
+     For none, but whom he list, might come in place.
+       Of men of armes he had but small regard,
+     But kept them lowe, and streigned verie hard.
+     For men of learning little he esteemed;
+     His wisdome he above their learning deemed.
+     As for the rascall Commons, least he cared,
+     For not so common was his bountie shared.
+     Let God, (said he) if please, care for the manie,
+     I for my selfe must care before els anie.
+     So did he good to none, to manie ill,
+     So did he all the kingdome rob and pill;
+     Yet none durst speake, ne none durst of him plaine,
+     So groat he was in grace, and rich through gaine.
+     Ne would he anie let to have accesse
+     Unto the Prince, but by his owne addresse,
+     For all that els did come were sure to faile.
+
+Even at Court, however, the poet finds a contrast to all this: he had
+known Philip Sidney, and Ralegh was his friend.
+
+     Yet the brave Courtier, in whose beauteous thought
+     Regard of honour harbours more than ought,
+     Doth loath such base condition, to backbite
+     Anies good name for envie or despite:
+     He stands on tearmes of honourable minde,
+     Ne will be carried with the common winde
+     Of Courts inconstant mutabilitie,
+     Ne after everie tattling fable flie;
+     But heares and sees the follies of the rest,
+     And thereof gathers for himselfe the best.
+     He will not creepe, nor crouche with fained face,
+     But walkes upright with comely stedfast pace,
+     And unto all doth yeeld due curtesie;
+     But not with kissed hand belowe the knee,
+     As that same Apish crue is wont to doo:
+     For he disdaines himselfe t' embase theretoo.
+     He hates fowle leasings, and vile flatterie,
+     Two filthie blots in noble gentrie;
+     And lothefull idlenes he doth detest,
+     The canker worme of everie gentle brest.
+
+     Or lastly, when the bodie list to pause,
+     His minde unto the Muses he withdrawes:
+     Sweete Ladie Muses, Ladies of delight,
+     Delights of life, and ornaments of light!
+     With whom he close confers with wise discourse,
+     Of Natures workes, of heavens continuall course,
+     Of forreine lands, of people different,
+     Of kingdomes change, of divers gouvernment,
+     Of dreadfull battailes of renowned Knights;
+     With which he kindleth his ambitious sprights
+     To like desire and praise of noble fame,
+     The onely upshot whereto he doth ayme:
+     For all his minde on honour fixed is,
+     To which he levels all his purposis,
+     And in his Princes service spends his dayes,
+     Not so much for to gaine, or for to raise
+     Himselfe to high degree, as for his grace,
+     And in his liking to winne worthie place,
+     Through due deserts and comely carriage.
+
+The fable also throws light on the way in which Spenser regarded the
+religious parties, whose strife was becoming loud and threatening.
+Spenser is often spoken of as a Puritan. He certainly had the Puritan
+hatred of Rome; and in the Church system as it existed in England he saw
+many instances of ignorance, laziness, and corruption; and he agreed
+with the Puritans in denouncing them. His pictures of the "formal
+priest," with his excuses for doing nothing, his new-fashioned and
+improved substitutes for the ornate and also too lengthy ancient
+service, and his general ideas of self-complacent comfort, has in it an
+odd mixture of Roman Catholic irony with Puritan censure. Indeed, though
+Spenser hated with an Englishman's hatred all that he considered Roman
+superstition and tyranny, he had a sense of the poetical impressiveness
+of the old ceremonial, and the ideas which clung to it, its pomp, its
+beauty, its suggestiveness, very far removed from the iconoclastic
+temper of the Puritans. In his _View of the State of Ireland_, he notes
+as a sign of its evil condition the state of the churches, "most of them
+ruined and even with the ground," and the rest "so unhandsomely patched
+and thatched, that men do even shun the places, for the uncomeliness
+thereof." "The outward form (assure yourself)," he adds, "doth greatly
+draw the rude people to the reverencing and frequenting thereof,
+_whatever some of our late too nice fools may say_, that there is
+nothing in the seemly form and comely order of the church."
+
+     "Ah! but (said th' Ape) the charge is wondrous great,
+     To feede mens soules, and hath an heavie threat."
+     "To feed mens soules (quoth he) is not in man;
+     For they must feed themselves, doo what we can.
+     We are but charged to lay the meate before:
+     Eate they that list, we need to doo no more.
+     But God it is that feeds them with his grace,
+     The bread of life powr'd downe from heavenly place.
+     Therefore said he, that with the budding rod
+     Did rule the Jewes, _All shalbe taught of God_.
+     That same hath Jesus Christ now to him raught,
+     By whom the flock is rightly fed, and taught:
+     He is the Shepheard, and the Priest is hee;
+     We but his shepheard swaines ordain'd to bee.
+     Therefore herewith doo not your selfe dismay;
+     Ne is the paines so great, but beare ye may,
+     For not so great, as it was wont of yore,
+     It's now a dayes, ne halfe so streight and sore.
+     They whilome used duly everie day
+     Their service and their holie things to say,
+     At morne and even, besides their Anthemes sweete,
+     Their penie Masses, and their Complynes meete,
+     Their Diriges, their Trentals, and their shrifts,
+     Their memories, their singings, and their gifts.
+     Now all those needlesse works are laid away;
+     Now once a weeke, upon the Sabbath day,
+     It is enough to doo our small devotion,
+     And then to follow any merrie motion.
+     Ne are we tyde to fast, but when we list;
+     Ne to weare garments base of wollen twist,
+     But with the finest silkes us to aray,
+     That before God we may appeare more gay,
+     Resembling Aarons glorie in his place:
+     For farre unfit it is, that person bace
+     Should with vile cloaths approach Gods majestie,
+     Whom no uncleannes may approachen nie;
+     Or that all men, which anie master serve,
+     Good garments for their service should deserve;
+     But he that serves the Lord of hoasts most high,
+     And that in highest place, t' approach him nigh,
+     And all the peoples prayers to present
+     Before his throne, as on ambassage sent
+     Both too and fro, should not deserve to weare
+     A garment better than of wooll or heare.
+     Beside, we may have lying by our sides
+     Our lovely Lasses, or bright shining Brides:
+     We be not tyde to wilfull chastitie,
+     But have the Gospell of free libertie."
+
+But his weapon is double-edged, and he had not much more love for
+
+     That ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace.
+
+The first prescription which the Priest gives to the Fox who desires to
+rise to preferment in the Church is to win the favour of some great
+Puritan noble.
+
+     First, therefore, when ye have in handsome wise
+     Your selfe attyred, as you can devise,
+     Then to some Noble-man your selfe applye,
+     Or other great one in the world�s eye,
+     That hath a zealous disposition
+     To God, and so to his religion.
+     There must thou fashion eke a godly zeale,
+     Such as no carpers may contrayre reveale;
+     For each thing fained ought more warie bee.
+     There thou must walke in sober gravitee,
+     And seeme as Saintlike as Sainte Radegund:
+     Fast much, pray oft, looke lowly on the ground,
+     And unto everie one doo curtesie meeke:
+     These lookes (nought saying) doo a benefice seeke,
+     And be thou sure one not to lack or long.
+
+But he is impartial, and points out that there are other ways of
+rising--by adopting the fashions of the Court, "facing, and forging, and
+scoffing, and crouching to please," and so to "mock out a benefice;" or
+else, by compounding with a patron to give him half the profits, and in
+the case of a bishopric, to submit to the alienation of its manors to
+some powerful favourite, as the Bishop of Salisbury had to surrender
+Sherborn to Sir Walter Ralegh. Spenser, in his dedication of _Mother
+Hubberd's Tale_ to one of the daughters of Sir John Spencer, Lady
+Compton and Monteagle, speaks of it as "long sithence composed in the
+raw conceit of youth." But, whatever this may mean, and it was his way
+thus to deprecate severe judgments, his allowing the publication of it
+at this time, shows, if the work itself did not show it, that he was in
+very serious earnest in his bitter sarcasms on the base and evil arts
+which brought success at the Court.
+
+He stayed in England about a year and a half [1590-91], long enough
+apparently to make up his mind that he had not much to hope for from his
+great friends, Ralegh and perhaps Essex, who were busy on their own
+schemes. Ralegh, from whom Spenser might hope most, was just beginning
+to plunge into that extraordinary career, in the thread of which, glory
+and disgrace, far-sighted and princely public spirit and insatiate
+private greed, were to be so strangely intertwined. In 1592 he planned
+the great adventure which astonished London by the fabulous plunder of
+the Spanish treasure-ships; in the same year he was in the Tower, under
+the Queen's displeasure for his secret marriage, affecting the most
+ridiculous despair at her going away from the neighbourhood, and pouring
+forth his flatteries on this old woman of sixty as if he had no bride of
+his own to love:--"I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander,
+hunting like Diana, walking like Venus; the gentle wind blowing her fair
+hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph; sometimes, sitting in the shade
+like a goddess; sometimes, singing like an angel; sometimes, playing
+like Orpheus--behold the sorrow of this world--once amiss, hath bereaved
+me of all." Then came the exploration of Guiana, the expedition to
+Cadiz, the Island voyage [1595-1597]. Ralegh had something else to do
+than to think of Spenser's fortunes.
+
+Spenser turned back once more to Ireland, to his clerkship of the
+Council of Munster, which he soon resigned; to be worried with law-suits
+about "lands in Shanballymore and Ballingrath," by his time-serving and
+oppressive Irish neighbour, Maurice Roche, Lord Fermoy; to brood still
+over his lost ideal and hero, Sidney; to write the story of his visit in
+the pastoral supplement to the _Shepherd's Calendar_, _Colin Clout's
+come home again_; to pursue the story of Gloriana's knights; and to find
+among the Irish maidens another Elizabeth, a wife instead of a queen,
+whose wooing and winning were to give new themes to his imagination.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[107:1] _v. Colin Clout_, l. 31. _Astrophel_, l. 175.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE FAERY QUEEN.
+
+
+"_Uncouth_ [= unknown], _unkist_," are the words from Chaucer,[118:1]
+with which the friend, who introduced Spenser's earliest poetry to the
+world, bespeaks forbearance, and promises matter for admiration and
+delight in the _Shepherd's Calendar_. "You have to know my new poet, he
+says in effect: and when you have learned his ways, you will find how
+much you have to honour and love him." "I doubt not," he says, with a
+boldness of prediction, manifestly sincere, which is remarkable about an
+unknown man, "that so soon as his name shall come into the knowledge of
+men, and his worthiness be sounded in the trump of fame, but that he
+shall be not only kissed, but also beloved of all, embraced of the most,
+and wondered at of the best." Never was prophecy more rapidly and more
+signally verified, probably beyond the prophet's largest expectation.
+But he goes on to explain and indeed apologize for certain features of
+the new poet's work, which even to readers of that day might seem open
+to exception. And to readers of to-day, the phrase, _uncouth, unkist_,
+certainly expresses what many have to confess, if they are honest, as to
+their first acquaintance with the _Faery Queen_. Its place in
+literature is established beyond controversy. Yet its first and
+unfamiliar aspect inspires respect, perhaps interest, rather than
+attracts and satisfies. It is not the remoteness of the subject alone,
+nor the distance of three centuries which raises a bar between it and
+those to whom it is new. Shakespere becomes familiar to us from the
+first moment. The impossible legends of Arthur have been made in the
+language of to-day once more to touch our sympathies, and have lent
+themselves to express our thoughts. But at first acquaintance the _Faery
+Queen_ to many of us has been disappointing. It has seemed not only
+antique, but artificial. It has seemed fantastic. It has seemed, we
+cannot help avowing, tiresome. It is not till the early appearances have
+worn off, and we have learned to make many allowances and to surrender
+ourselves to the feelings and the standards by which it claims to affect
+and govern us, that we really find under what noble guidance we are
+proceeding, and what subtle and varied spells are ever round us.
+
+I. The _Faery Queen_ is the work of an unformed literature, the product
+of an unperfected art. English poetry, English language, in Spenser's,
+nay in Shakespere's day, had much to learn, much to unlearn. They never,
+perhaps, have been stronger or richer, than in that marvellous burst of
+youth, with all its freedom of invention, of observation, of reflection.
+But they had not that which only the experience and practice of eventful
+centuries could give them. Even genius must wait for the gifts of time.
+It cannot forerun the limitations of its day, nor anticipate the
+conquests and common possessions of the future. Things are impossible to
+the first great masters of art which are easy to their second-rate
+successors. The possibility, or the necessity of breaking through some
+convention, of attempting some unattempted effort, had not, among other
+great enterprises, occurred to them. They were laying the steps in a
+magnificent fashion on which those after them were to rise. But we ought
+not to shut our eyes to mistakes or faults to which attention had not
+yet been awakened, or for avoiding which no reasonable means had been
+found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognize, both what is
+still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is
+no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon,
+which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the
+scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But
+all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, is always
+limited and imperfect.
+
+The _Faery Queen_, as a whole, bears on its face a great fault of
+construction. It carries with it no adequate account of its own story;
+it does not explain itself, or contain in its own structure what would
+enable a reader to understand how it arose. It has to be accounted for
+by a prose explanation and key outside of itself. The poet intended to
+reserve the central event, which was the occasion of all the adventures
+of the poem, till they had all been related, leaving them as it were in
+the air, till at the end of twelve long books the reader should at last
+be told how the whole thing had originated, and what it was all about.
+He made the mistake of confounding the answer to a riddle with the
+crisis which unties the tangle of a plot and satisfies the suspended
+interest of a tale. None of the great model poems before him, however
+full of digression and episode, had failed to arrange their story with
+clearness. They needed no commentary outside themselves to say why they
+began as they did, and out of what antecedents they arose. If they
+started at once from the middle of things, they made their story, as it
+unfolded itself, explain, by more or less skilful devices, all that
+needed to be known about their beginnings. They did not think of rules
+of art. They did of themselves naturally what a good story-teller does,
+to make himself intelligible and interesting; and it is not easy to be
+interesting, unless the parts of the story are in their place.
+
+The defect seems to have come upon Spenser when it was too late to
+remedy it in the construction of his poem; and he adopted the somewhat
+clumsy expedient of telling us what the poem itself ought to have told
+us of its general story, in a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. Ralegh
+himself, indeed, suggested the letter: apparently (from the date, Jan.
+23, 1590), after the first part had gone through the press. And without
+this after-thought, as the twelfth book was never reached, we should
+have been left to gather the outline and plan of the story, from
+imperfect glimpses and allusions, as we have to fill up from hints and
+assumptions the gaps of an unskilful narrator, who leaves out what is
+essential to the understanding of his tale.
+
+Incidentally, however, this letter is an advantage: for we have in it
+the poet's own statement of his purpose in writing, as well as a
+necessary sketch of his story. His allegory, as he had explained to
+Bryskett and his friends, had a moral purpose. He meant to shadow forth,
+under the figures of twelve knights, and in their various exploits, the
+characteristics of "a gentleman or noble person," "fashioned in virtuous
+and gentle discipline." He took his machinery from the popular legends
+about King Arthur, and his heads of moral philosophy from the current
+Aristotelian catalogue of the Schools.
+
+     Sir, knowing how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed,
+     and this booke of mine, which I have entituled the Faery
+     Queene, being a continued Allegory, or darke conceit, I haue
+     thought good, as well for avoyding of gealous opinions and
+     misconstructions, as also for your better light in reading
+     thereof, (being so by you commanded,) to discover unto you the
+     general intention and meaning, which in the whole course
+     thereof I have fashioned, without expressing of any particular
+     purposes, or by accidents, therein occasioned. The generall
+     end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or
+     noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline: Which for that
+     I conceived shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being
+     coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part
+     of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter then for
+     profite of the ensample, I chose the historye of King Arthure,
+     as most fitte for the excellency of his person, being made
+     famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the
+     daunger of envy, and suspition of present time. In which I
+     have followed all the antique Poets historicall; first Homere,
+     who in the Persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a
+     good governour and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the
+     other in his Odysseis: then Virgil, whose like intention was
+     to doe in the person of Aeneas: after him Ariosto comprised
+     them both in his Orlando: and lately Tasso dissevered them
+     againe, and formed both parts in two persons, namely that part
+     which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a private
+     man, coloured in his Rinaldo; the other named Politice in his
+     Godfredo. By ensample of which excellente Poets, I labour to
+     pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a
+     brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues,
+     as Aristotle hath devised; the which is the purpose of these
+     first twelve bookes: which if I finde to be well accepted, I
+     may be perhaps encoraged to frame the other part of polliticke
+     vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king.
+
+Then, after explaining that he meant the _Faery Queen_ "for glory in
+general intention, but in particular" for Elizabeth, and his Faery Land
+for her kingdom, he proceeds to explain, what the first three books
+hardly explain, what the Faery Queen had to do with the structure of the
+poem.
+
+     But, because the beginning of the whole worke seemeth abrupte,
+     and as depending upon other antecedents, it needs that ye know
+     the occasion of these three knights seuerall adventures. For
+     the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an
+     Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of
+     affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the
+     times as the actions; but a Poet thrusteth into the middest,
+     even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the
+     thinges forepaste, and divining of thinges to come, maketh a
+     pleasing Analysis of all.
+
+     The beginning therefore of my history, if it were to be told
+     by an Historiographer should be the twelfth booke, which is
+     the last; where I devise that the Faery Queene kept her
+     Annuall feaste xii. dayes; uppon which xii. severall dayes,
+     the occasions of the xii. severall adventures hapned, which,
+     being undertaken by xii. severall knights, are in these xii.
+     books severally handled and discoursed. The first was this. In
+     the beginning of the feast, there presented him selfe a tall
+     clownishe younge man, who falling before the Queene of Faries
+     desired a boone (as the manner then was) which during that
+     feast she might not refuse; which was that hee might have the
+     atchievement of any adventure, which during that feaste should
+     happen: that being graunted, he rested him on the floore,
+     unfitte through his rusticity for a better place. Soone after
+     entred a faire Ladye in mourning weedes, riding on a white
+     Asse, with a dwarfe behinde her leading a warlike steed, that
+     bore the Armes of a knight, and his speare in the dwarfes
+     hand. Shee, falling before the Queene of Faeries, complayned
+     that her father and mother, an ancient King and Queene, had
+     beene by an huge dragon many years shut up in a brasen Castle,
+     who thence suffred them not to yssew; and therefore besought
+     the Faery Queene to assygne her some one of her knights to
+     take on him that exployt. Presently that clownish person,
+     upstarting, desired that adventure: whereat the Queene much
+     wondering, and the Lady much gainesaying, yet he earnestly
+     importuned his desire. In the end the Lady told him, that
+     unlesse that armour which she brought would serve him (that
+     is, the armour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul, vi.
+     Ephes.) that he could not succeed in that enterprise; which
+     being forthwith put upon him, with dewe furnitures thereunto,
+     he seemed the goodliest man in al that company, and was well
+     liked of the Lady. And eftesoones taking on him knighthood,
+     and mounting on that straunge courser, he went forth with her
+     on that adventure: where beginneth the first booke, viz.
+
+          A gentle knight was pricking on the playne, &c.
+
+That it was not without reason that this explanatory key was prefixed to
+the work, and that either Spenser or Ralegh felt it to be almost
+indispensable, appear from the concluding paragraph.
+
+     Thus much, Sir, I have briefly overronne to direct your
+     understanding to the wel-head of the History; that from thence
+     gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as in a
+     handfull gripe al the discourse, which otherwise may happily
+     seeme tedious and confused.
+
+According to the plan thus sketched out, we have but a fragment of the
+work. It was published in two parcels, each of three books, in 1590 and
+1596; and after his death two cantos, with two stray stanzas, of a
+seventh book were found and printed. Each perfect book consists of
+twelve cantos of from thirty-five to sixty of his nine-line stanzas. The
+books published in 1590 contain, as he states in his prefatory letter,
+the legends of _Holiness_, of _Temperance_, and of _Chastity_. Those
+published in 1596, contain the legends of _Friendship_, of _Justice_,
+and of _Courtesy_. The posthumous cantos are entitled, _Of Mutability_,
+and are said to be apparently parcel of a legend of _Constancy_. The
+poem which was to treat of the "politic" virtues was never approached.
+Thus we have but a fourth part of the whole of the projected work. It is
+very doubtful whether the remaining six books were completed. But it is
+probable that a portion of them was written, which, except the cantos
+_On Mutability_, has perished. And the intended titles or legends of the
+later books have not been preserved.
+
+Thus the poem was to be an allegorical story; a story branching out into
+twelve separate stories, which themselves would branch out again and
+involve endless other stories. It is a complex scheme to keep well in
+hand, and Spenser's art in doing so has been praised by some of his
+critics. But the art, if there is any, is so subtle that it fails to
+save the reader from perplexity. The truth is that the power of ordering
+and connecting a long and complicated plan was not one of Spenser's
+gifts. In the first two books, the allegorical story proceeds from point
+to point with fair coherence and consecutiveness. After them the attempt
+to hold the scheme together, except in the loosest and most general way,
+is given up as too troublesome or too confined. The poet prefixes indeed
+the name of a particular virtue to each book, but, with slender
+reference to it, he surrenders himself freely to his abundant flow of
+ideas, and to whatever fancy or invention tempts him, and ranges
+unrestrained over the whole field of knowledge and imagination. In the
+first two books, the allegory is transparent and the story connected.
+The allegory is of the nature of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. It starts
+from the belief that religion, purified from falsehood, superstition,
+and sin, is the foundation of all nobleness in man; and it portrays,
+under images and with names, for the most part easily understood, and
+easily applied to real counterparts, the struggle which every one at
+that time supposed to be going on, between absolute truth and
+righteousness on one side, and fatal error and bottomless wickedness on
+the other. Una, the Truth, the one and only Bride of man's spirit,
+marked out by the tokens of humility and innocence, and by her power
+over wild and untamed natures--the single Truth, in contrast to the
+counterfeit Duessa, false religion, and its actual embodiment in the
+false rival Queen of Scots--Truth, the object of passionate homage, real
+with many, professed with all, which after the impostures and scandals
+of the preceding age, had now become characteristic of that of
+Elizabeth--Truth, its claims, its dangers, and its champions, are the
+subject of the first book: and it is represented as leading the manhood
+of England, in spite, not only of terrible conflict, but of defeat and
+falls, through the discipline of repentance, to holiness and the
+blessedness which comes with it. The Red Cross Knight, St. George of
+England, whose name Georgos, the Ploughman, is dwelt upon, apparently to
+suggest that from the commonalty, the "tall clownish young men," were
+raised up the great champions of the Truth,--though sorely troubled by
+the wiles of Duessa, by the craft of the arch-sorcerer, by the force and
+pride of the great powers of the Apocalyptic Beast and Dragon, finally
+overcomes them, and wins the deliverance of Una and her love.
+
+The second book, _Of Temperance_, pursues the subject, and represents
+the internal conquests of self-mastery, the conquests of a man over his
+passions, his violence, his covetousness, his ambition, his despair, his
+sensuality. Sir Guyon, after conquering many foes of goodness, is the
+destroyer of the most perilous of them all, Acrasia, licentiousness, and
+her ensnaring Bower of Bliss. But after this, the thread at once of
+story and allegory, slender henceforth at the best, is neglected and
+often entirely lost. The third book, the _Legend of Chastity_, is a
+repetition of the ideas of the latter part of the second, with a
+heroine, Britomart, in place of the Knight of the previous book, Sir
+Guyon, and with a special glorification of the high-flown and romantic
+sentiments about purity, which wore the poetic creed of the courtiers of
+Elizabeth, in flagrant and sometimes in tragic contrast to their
+practical conduct of life. The loose and ill-compacted nature of the
+plan becomes still more evident in the second instalment of the work.
+Even the special note of each particular virtue becomes more faint and
+indistinct. The one law to which the poet feels bound is to have twelve
+cantos in each book; and to do this he is sometimes driven to what in
+later times has been called padding. One of the cantos of the third book
+is a genealogy of British kings from Geoffrey of Monmouth; one of the
+cantos of the _Legend of Friendship_ is made up of an episode,
+describing the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, with an elaborate
+catalogue of the English and Irish rivers, and the names of the
+sea-nymphs. In truth, he had exhausted his proper allegory, or he got
+tired of it. His poem became an elastic framework, into which he could
+fit whatever interested him and tempted him to composition. The gravity
+of the first books disappears. He passes into satire and caricature. We
+meet with Braggadochio and Trompart, with the discomfiture of Malecasta,
+with the conjugal troubles of Malbecco and Helenore, with the imitation
+from Ariosto of the Squire of Dames. He puts into verse a poetical
+physiology of the human body; he translates Lucretius, and speculates on
+the origin of human souls; he speculates, too, on social justice, and
+composes an argumentative refutation of the Anabaptist theories of right
+and equality among men. As the poem proceeds, he seems to feel himself
+more free to introduce what he pleases. Allusions to real men and events
+are sometimes clear, at other times evident, though they have now ceased
+to be intelligible to us. His disgust and resentment breaks out at the
+ways of the Court in sarcastic moralizing, or in pictures of dark and
+repulsive imagery. The characters and pictures of his friends furnish
+material for his poem; he does not mind touching on the misadventures of
+Ralegh, and even of Lord Grey, with sly humour or a word of candid
+advice. He becomes bolder in the distinct introduction of contemporary
+history. The defeat of Duessa was only figuratively shown in the first
+portion; in the second the subject is resumed. As Elizabeth is the "one
+form of many names," Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, so
+"under feigned colours shading a true case" he deals with her rival.
+Mary seems at one time the false Florimel, the creature of enchantment,
+stirring up strife, and fought for by the foolish knights whom she
+deceives, Blandamour and Paridell, the counterparts of Norfolk and the
+intriguers of 1571. At another, she is the fierce Amazonian queen,
+Radegund, by whom for a moment, even Arthegal is brought into
+disgraceful thraldom, till Britomart, whom he has once fought against,
+delivers him. And finally the fate of the typical Duessa is that of the
+real Mary Queen of Scots described in great detail--a liberty in dealing
+with great affairs of state for which James of Scotland actually desired
+that he should be tried and punished.[128:2] So Philip II. is at one
+time the Soldan, at another the Spanish monster Geryoneo, at another the
+fosterer of Catholic intrigues in France and Ireland, Grantorto. But
+real names are also introduced with scarcely any disguise: Guizor, and
+Burbon, the Knight who throws away his shield, Henry IV., and his Lady
+Flourdelis, the Lady Beige, and her seventeen sons: the Lady Irena, whom
+Arthegal delivers. The overthrow of the Armada, the English war in the
+Low Countries, the apostasy of Henry IV., the deliverance of Ireland
+from the "great wrong" of Desmond's rebellion, the giant Grantorto,
+form, under more or less transparent allegory, great part of the _Legend
+of Justice_. Nay, Spenser's long fostered revenge on the lady who had
+once scorned him, the _Rosalind_ of the _Shepherd's Calendar_, the
+_Mirabella_ of the _Faery Queen_, and his own late and happy marriage in
+Ireland, are also brought in to supply materials for the _Legend of
+Courtesy_. So multifarious is the poem, full of all that he thought, or
+observed, or felt; a receptacle, without much care to avoid repetition,
+or to prune, correct, and condense, for all the abundance of his ideas,
+as they welled forth in his mind day by day. It is really a collection
+of separate tales and allegories, as much as the _Arabian Nights_, or,
+as its counterpart and rival of our own century, the _Idylls of the
+King_. As a whole it is confusing: but we need not treat it as a whole.
+Its continued interest soon breaks down. But it is probably best that
+Spenser gave his mind the vague freedom which suited it, and that he did
+not make efforts to tie himself down to his pre-arranged but too
+ambitious plan. We can hardly lose our way in it, for there is no way to
+lose. It is a wilderness in which we are left to wander. But there may
+be interest and pleasure in a wilderness, if we are prepared for the
+wandering.
+
+Still, the complexity, or rather, the uncared-for and clumsy arrangement
+of the poem is matter which disturbs a reader's satisfaction, till he
+gets accustomed to the poet's way, and resigns himself to it. It is a
+heroic poem, in which the heroine, who gives her name to it, never
+appears: a story, of which the basis and starting-point is whimsically
+withheld for disclosure in the last book, which was never written. If
+Ariosto's jumps and transitions are more audacious, Spenser's intricacy
+is more puzzling. Adventures begin which have no finish. Actors in them
+drop from the clouds, claim an interest, and we ask in vain what has
+become of them. A vein of what are manifestly contemporary allusions
+breaks across the moral drift of the allegory, with an apparently
+distinct yet obscured meaning, and one of which it is the work of
+dissertations to find the key. The passion of the age was for ingenious
+riddling in morality as in love. And in Spenser's allegories we are not
+seldom at a loss to make out what and how much was really intended, amid
+a maze of overstrained analogies and over-subtle conceits, and attempts
+to hinder a too close and dangerous identification.
+
+Indeed Spenser's mode of allegory, which was historical as well as
+moral, and contains a good deal of history, if we knew it, often seems
+devised to throw curious readers off the scent. It was purposely
+baffling and hazy. A characteristic trait was singled out. A name was
+transposed in anagram, like Irena, or distorted, as if by imperfect
+pronunciation, like Burbon and Arthegal, or invented to express a
+quality, like Una, or Gloriana, or Corceca, or Fradubio, or adopted with
+no particular reason from the _Morte d'Arthur_, or any other old
+literature. The personage is introduced with some feature, or amid
+circumstances which seem for a moment to fix the meaning. But when we
+look to the sequence of history being kept up in the sequence of the
+story, we find ourselves thrown out. A character which fits one person
+puts on the marks of another: a likeness which we identify with one real
+person passes into the likeness of some one else. The real, in person,
+incident, institution, shades off into the ideal; after showing itself
+by plain tokens, it turns aside out of its actual path of fact, and
+ends, as the poet thinks it ought to end, in victory or defeat, glory or
+failure. Prince Arthur passes from Leicester to Sidney, and then back
+again to Leicester. There are double or treble allegories; Elizabeth is
+Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, perhaps Amoret; her rival is
+Duessa, the false Florimel, probably the fierce temptress, the Amazon
+Radegund. Thus, what for a moment was clear and definite, fades like the
+changing fringe of a dispersing cloud. The character which we identified
+disappears in other scenes and adventures, where we lose sight of all
+that identified it. A complete transformation destroys the likeness
+which was begun. There is an intentional dislocation of the parts of the
+story, when they might make it imprudently close in its reflection of
+facts or resemblance in portraiture. A feature is shown, a manifest
+allusion made, and then the poet starts off in other directions, to
+confuse and perplex all attempts at interpretation, which might be too
+particular and too certain. This was no doubt merely according to the
+fashion of the time, and the habits of mind into which the poet had
+grown. But there were often reasons for it, in an age so suspicious, and
+so dangerous to those who meddled with high matters of state.
+
+2. Another feature which is on the surface of the _Faery Queen_, and
+which will displease a reader who has been trained to value what is
+natural and genuine, is its affectation of the language and the customs
+of life belonging to an age which is not its own. It is indeed redolent
+of the present: but it is almost avowedly an imitation of what was
+current in the days of Chaucer: of what were supposed to be the words,
+and the social ideas and conditions, of the age of chivalry. He looked
+back to the fashions and ideas of the Middle Ages, as Pindar sought his
+materials in the legends and customs of the Homeric times, and created a
+revival of the spirit of the age of the Heroes in an age of tyrants and
+incipient democracies.[132:3] The age of chivalry, in Spenser's day far
+distant, had yet left two survivals, one real, the other formal. The
+real survival was the spirit of armed adventure, which was never
+stronger or more stirring than in the gallants and discoverers of
+Elizabeth's reign, the captains of the English companies in the Low
+Countries, the audacious sailors who explored unknown oceans and
+plundered the Spaniards, the scholars and gentlemen equally ready for
+work on sea and land, like Ralegh and Sir Richard Grenville, of the
+"Revenge." The formal survival was the fashion of keeping up the
+trappings of knightly times, as we keep up Judge's wigs, court dresses,
+and Lord Mayor's shows. In actual life it was seen in pageants and
+ceremonies, in the yet lingering parade of jousts and tournaments, in
+the knightly accoutrements still worn in the days of the bullet and the
+cannon-ball. In the apparatus of the poet, as all were shepherds, when
+he wanted to represent the life of peace and letters, so all were
+knights or the foes and victims of knights, when his theme was action
+and enterprise. It was the custom that the Muse masked, to use Spenser's
+word, under these disguises; and this conventional masquerade of
+pastoral poetry or knight errantry was the form under which the poetical
+school that preceded the dramatists naturally expressed their ideas. It
+seems to us odd that peaceful sheepcotes and love-sick swains should
+stand for the world of the Tudors and Guises, or that its cunning
+statecraft and relentless cruelty should be represented by the generous
+follies of an imaginary chivalry. But it was the fashion which Spenser
+found, and he accepted it. His genius was not of that sort which breaks
+out from trammels, but of that which makes the best of what it finds.
+And whatever we may think of the fashion, at least he gave it new
+interest and splendour by the spirit with which he threw himself into
+it.
+
+The condition which he took as the groundwork of his poetical fabric
+suggested the character of his language. Chaucer was then the "God of
+English poetry;" his was the one name which filled a place apart in the
+history of English verse. Spenser was a student of Chaucer, and borrowed
+as he judged fit, not only from his vocabulary, but from his grammatical
+precedents and analogies, with the object of giving an appropriate
+colouring to what was to be raised as far as possible above familiar
+life. Besides this, the language was still in such an unsettled state
+that from a man with resources like Spenser's, it naturally invited
+attempts to enrich and colour it, to increase its flexibility and power.
+The liberty of reviving old forms, of adopting from the language of the
+street and market homely but expressive words or combinations, of
+following in the track of convenient constructions, of venturing on new
+and bold phrases, was rightly greater in his time than at a later stage
+of the language. Many of his words, either invented or preserved, are
+happy additions; some which have not taken root in the language, we may
+regret. But it was a liberty which he abused. He was extravagant and
+unrestrained in his experiments on language. And they were made not
+merely to preserve or to invent a good expression. On his own authority,
+he cuts down, or he alters a word, or he adopts a mere corrupt
+pronunciation, to suit a place in his metre, or because he wants a rime.
+Precedents, as Mr. Guest has said, may no doubt be found for each one of
+these sacrifices to the necessities of metre or rime, in some one or
+other living dialectic usage, or even in printed books--"_blend_" for
+"_blind_," "_misleeke_" for "_mislike_," "_kest_" for "_cast_,"
+"_cherry_" for "_cherish_," "_vilde_" for "_vile_," or even "_wawes_"
+for "_waves_," because it has to rime to "_jaws_." But when they are
+profusely used as they are in Spenser, they argue, as critics of his own
+age such as Puttenham, remarked,--either want of trouble, or want of
+resource. In his impatience he is reckless in making a word which he
+wants--"fortunize," "mercified," "unblindfold," "relive"--he is reckless
+in making one word do the duty of another, interchanging actives and
+passives, transferring epithets from their proper subjects. The "humbled
+grass," is the grass on which a man lies humbled: the "lamentable eye,"
+is the eye which laments. "His treatment of words," says Mr. Craik, "on
+such occasions"--occasions of difficulty to his verse--"is like nothing
+that ever was seen, unless it might be Hercules breaking the back of the
+Nemean lion. He gives them any sense and any shape that the case may
+demand. Sometimes he merely alters a letter or two; sometimes he twists
+off the head or the tail of the unfortunate vocable altogether. But this
+fearless, lordly, truly royal style makes one only feel the more how
+easily, if he chose, he could avoid the necessity of having recourse to
+such outrages."
+
+His own generation felt his licence to be extreme. "In affecting the
+ancients," said Ben Jonson, "he writ no language." Daniel writes
+sarcastically, soon after the _Faery Queen_ appeared, of those who
+
+     Sing of knights and Palladines,
+     In aged accents and untimely words.
+
+And to us, though students of the language must always find interest in
+the storehouse of ancient or invented language to be found in Spenser,
+this mixture of what is obsolete or capriciously new is a bar, and not
+an unreasonable one, to a frank welcome at first acquaintance. Fuller
+remarks with some slyness, that "the many Chaucerisms used (for I will
+not say, affected) by him, are thought by the ignorant to be blemishes,
+known by the learned to be beauties, in his book; which notwithstanding
+had been more saleable, if more conformed to our modern language." The
+grotesque, though it has its place as one of the instruments of poetical
+effect, is a dangerous element to handle. Spenser's age was very
+insensible to the presence and the dangers of the grotesque, and he was
+not before his time in feeling what was unpleasing in incongruous
+mixtures. Strong in the abundant but unsifted learning of his day, a
+style of learning, which in his case was strangely inaccurate, he not
+only mixed the past with the present, fairyland with politics, mythology
+with the most serious Christian ideas, but he often mixed together the
+very features which are most discordant, in the colours, forms, and
+methods by which he sought to produce the effect of his pictures.
+
+3. Another source of annoyance and disappointment is found in the
+imperfections and inconsistencies of the poet's standard of what is
+becoming to say and to write about. Exaggeration, diffuseness,
+prolixity, were the literary diseases of the age; an age of great
+excitement and hope, which had suddenly discovered its wealth and its
+powers, but not the rules of true economy in using them. With the
+classics open before it, and alive to much of the grandeur of their
+teaching, it was almost blind to the spirit of self-restraint,
+proportion, and simplicity which governed the great models. It was left
+to a later age to discern these and appreciate them. This unresisted
+proneness to exaggeration produced the extravagance and the horrors of
+the Elizabethan Drama, full, as it was, nevertheless, of insight and
+originality. It only too naturally led the earlier Spenser astray. What
+Dryden, in one of his interesting critical prefaces says of himself, is
+true of Spenser; "Thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast
+upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject; to run them
+into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose." There was in
+Spenser a facility for turning to account all material, original or
+borrowed, an incontinence of the descriptive faculty, which was ever
+ready to exercise itself on any object, the most unfitting and
+loathsome, as on the noblest, the purest, or the most beautiful. There
+are pictures in him which seem meant to turn our stomach. Worse than
+that there are pictures which for a time rank the poet of _Holiness_ or
+_Temperance_, with the painters who used their great art to represent at
+once the most sacred and holiest forms, and also scenes which few people
+now like to look upon in company--scenes and descriptions which may
+perhaps from the habits of the time may have been playfully and
+innocently produced, but which it is certainly not easy to dwell upon
+innocently now. And apart from these serious faults, there is
+continually haunting us, amid incontestable richness, vigour, and
+beauty, a sense that the work is over-done. Spenser certainly did not
+want for humour and an eye for the ridiculous. There is no want in him,
+either, of that power of epigrammatic terseness, which, in spite of its
+diffuseness, his age valued and cultivated. But when he gets on a story
+or a scene, he never knows where to stop. His duels go on stanza after
+stanza till there is no sound part left in either champion. His palaces,
+landscapes, pageants, feasts, are taken to pieces in all their parts,
+and all these parts are likened to some other things. "His abundance,"
+says Mr. Craik, "is often oppressive; _it is like wading among unmown
+grass_." And he drowns us in words. His abundant and incongruous
+adjectives may sometimes, perhaps, startle us unfairly, because their
+associations and suggestions have quite altered; but very often they are
+the idle outpouring of an unrestrained affluence of language. The
+impression remains that he wants a due perception of the absurd, the
+unnatural, the unnecessary; that he does not care if he makes us smile,
+or does not know how to help it, when he tries to make us admire or
+sympathize.
+
+Under this head comes a feature which the "charity of history" may lead
+us to treat as simple exaggeration, but which often suggests something
+less pardonable, in the great characters, political or literary, of
+Elizabeth's reign. This was the gross, shameless, lying flattery paid to
+the Queen. There is really nothing like it in history. It is unique as a
+phenomenon that proud, able, free-spoken men, with all their high
+instincts of what was noble and true, with all their admiration of the
+Queen's high qualities, should have offered it, even as an unmeaning
+custom; and that a proud and free-spoken people should not, in the very
+genuineness of their pride in her and their loyalty, have received it
+with shouts of derision and disgust. The flattery of Roman emperors and
+Roman Popes, if as extravagant, was not so personal. Even Louis XIV. was
+not celebrated in his dreary old age, as a model of ideal beauty and a
+paragon of romantic perfection. It was no worship of a secluded
+and distant object of loyalty: the men who thus flattered knew
+perfectly well, often by painful experience, what Elizabeth was:
+able, indeed, high-spirited, successful, but ungrateful to her
+servants, capricious, vain, ill-tempered, unjust, and in her old age,
+ugly. And yet the Gloriana of the _Faery Queen_, the Empress of
+all nobleness,--Belphoebe, the Princess of all sweetness and
+beauty,--Britomart, the armed votaress of all purity,--Mercilla, the
+lady of all compassion and grace,--were but the reflections of the
+language in which it was then agreed upon by some of the greatest of
+Englishmen to speak, and to be supposed to think, of the Queen.
+
+II. But when all these faults have been admitted, faults of design and
+faults of execution--and when it is admitted, further, that there is a
+general want of reality, substance, distinctness, and strength in the
+personages of the poem--that, compared with the contemporary drama,
+Spenser's knights and ladies and villains are thin and ghostlike, and
+that, as Daniel says, he
+
+     Paints shadows in imaginary lines--
+
+it yet remains that our greatest poets since his day have loved him and
+delighted in him. He had Shakespere's praise. Cowley was made a poet by
+reading him. Dryden calls Milton "the poetical son of Spenser:"
+"Milton," he writes, "has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his
+original." Dryden's own homage to him is frequent and generous. Pope
+found as much pleasure in the _Faery Queen_ in his later years as he had
+found in reading it when he was twelve years old: and what Milton,
+Dryden, and Pope admired, Wordsworth too found full of nobleness,
+purity, and sweetness. What is it that gives the _Faery Queen_ its hold
+on those who appreciate the richness and music of English language, and
+who in temper and moral standard are quick to respond to English
+manliness and tenderness? The spell is to be found mainly in three
+things--(1) in the quaint stateliness of Spenser's imaginary world and
+its representatives; (2) in the beauty and melody of his numbers, the
+abundance and grace of his poetic ornaments, in the recurring and
+haunting rhythm of numberless passages, in which thought and imagery and
+language and melody are interwoven in one perfect and satisfying
+harmony; and (3) in the intrinsic nobleness of his general aim, his
+conception of human life, at once so exacting and so indulgent, his high
+ethical principles and ideals, his unfeigned honour for all that is pure
+and brave and unselfish and tender, his generous estimate of what is due
+from man to man of service, affection, and fidelity. His fictions
+embodied truths of character which with all their shadowy incompleteness
+were too real and too beautiful to lose their charm with time.
+
+1. Spenser accepted from his age the quaint stateliness which is
+characteristic of his poem. His poetry is not simple and direct like
+that of the Greeks. It has not the exquisite finish and felicity of the
+best of the Latins. It has not the massive grandeur, the depth, the
+freedom, the shades and subtle complexities of feeling and motive, which
+the English dramatists found by going straight to nature. It has the
+stateliness of highly artificial conditions of society, of the Court,
+the pageant, the tournament, as opposed to the majesty of the great
+events in human life and history, its real vicissitudes, its
+catastrophes, its tragedies, its revolutions, its sins. Throughout the
+prolonged crisis of Elizabeth's reign, her gay and dashing courtiers,
+and even her serious masters of affairs, persisted in pretending to look
+on the world in which they lived, as if through the side-scenes of a
+masque, and relieved against the background of a stage-curtain. Human
+life, in those days, counted for little; fortune, honour, national
+existence hung in the balance; the game was one in which the heads of
+kings and queens and great statesmen were the stakes,--yet the players
+could not get out of their stiff and constrained costume, out of their
+artificial and fantastic figments of thought, out of their conceits and
+affectations of language. They carried it, with all their sagacity, with
+all their intensity of purpose, to the council-board, and the
+judgment-seat. They carried it to the scaffold. The conventional
+supposition was that at the Court, though every one knew better, all was
+perpetual sunshine, perpetual holiday, perpetual triumph, perpetual
+love-making. It was the happy reign of the good and wise and lovely. It
+was the discomfiture of the base, the faithless, the wicked, the
+traitors. This is what is reflected in Spenser's poem; at once, its
+stateliness, for there was no want of grandeur and magnificence in the
+public scene ever before Spenser's imagination; and its quaintness,
+because the whole outward apparatus of representation was borrowed from
+what was past, or from what did not exist, and implied surrounding
+circumstances in ludicrous contrast with fact, and men taught themselves
+to speak in character, and prided themselves on keeping it up by
+substituting for the ordinary language of life and emotion a cumbrous
+and involved indirectness of speech.
+
+And yet that quaint stateliness is not without its attractions. We have
+indeed to fit ourselves for it. But when we have submitted to its
+demands on our imagination, it carries us along as much as the fictions
+of the stage. The splendours of the artificial are not the splendours of
+the natural; yet the artificial has its splendours, which impress and
+captivate and repay. The grandeur of Spenser's poem is a grandeur like
+that of a great spectacle, a great array of the forces of a nation, a
+great series of military effects, a great ceremonial assemblage of all
+that is highest and most eminent in a country, a coronation, a royal
+marriage, a triumph, a funeral. So, though Spenser's knights and ladies
+do what no men ever could do, and speak what no man ever spoke, the
+procession rolls forward with a pomp which never forgets itself, and
+with an inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and incident.
+Nor is it always solemn and high-pitched. Its gravity is relieved from
+time to time with the ridiculous figure or character, the ludicrous
+incident, the jests and antics of the buffoon. It has been said that
+Spenser never smiles. He not only smiles, with amusement or sly irony;
+he wrote what he must have laughed at as he wrote, and meant us to laugh
+at. He did not describe with a grave face the terrors and misadventures
+of the boaster Braggadochio and his Squire, whether or not a caricature
+of the Duke of Alen�on and his "gentleman," the "petit singe," Simier.
+He did not write with a grave face the Irish row about the false
+Florimel (IV. 5),--
+
+       Then unto Satyran she was adjudged,
+     Who was right glad to gaine so goodly meed:
+     But Blandamour thereat full greatly grudged,
+     And litle prays'd his labours evill speed,
+     That for to winne the saddle lost the steed.
+     Ne lesse thereat did Paridell complaine,
+     And thought t'appeale from that which was decreed
+     To single combat with Sir Satyrane:
+     Thereto him At� stird, new discord to maintaine.
+
+       And eke, with these, full many other Knights
+     She through her wicked working did incense
+     Her to demaund and chalenge as their rights,
+     Deserved for their perils recompense.
+     Amongst the rest, with boastfull vaine pretense,
+     Stept Braggadochio forth, and as his thrall
+     Her claym'd, by him in battell wonne long sens:
+     Whereto her selfe he did to witnesse call:
+     Who, being askt, accordingly confessed all.
+
+       Thereat exceeding wroth was Satyran;
+     And wroth with Satyran was Blandamour;
+     And wroth with Blandamour was Erivan;
+     And at them both Sir Paridell did loure.
+     So all together stird up strifull stoure,
+     And readie were new battell to darraine.
+     Each one profest to be her paramoure,
+     And vow'd with speare and shield it to maintaine;
+     Ne Judges powre, ne reasons rule, mote them restraine.
+
+Nor the behaviour of the "rascal many" at the sight of the dead Dragon
+(I. 12),--
+
+       And after all the raskall many ran,
+     Heaped together in rude rablement,
+     To see the face of that victorious man,
+     Whom all admired as from heaven sent,
+     And gazd upon with gaping wonderment;
+     But when they came where that dead Dragon lay,
+     Stretcht on the ground in monstrous large extent,
+     The sight with ydle feare did them dismay,
+     Ne durst approch him nigh to touch, or once assay.
+
+       Some feard, and fledd; some feard, and well it fayned;
+     One, that would wiser seeme then all the rest,
+     Warnd him not touch, for yet perhaps remaynd
+     Some lingring life within his hollow brest,
+     Or in his wombe might lurke some hidden nest
+     Of many Dragonettes, his fruitfull seede:
+     Another saide, that in his eyes did rest
+     Yet sparckling fyre, and badd thereof take heed;
+     Another said, he saw him move his eyes indeed.
+
+       One mother, whenas her foolehardy chyld
+     Did come too neare, and with his talants play,
+     Halfe dead through feare, her litle babe revyld,
+     And to her gossibs gan in counsell say;
+     'How can I tell, but that his talants may
+     Yet scratch my sonne, or rend his tender hand?'
+     So diversly them selves in vaine they fray;
+     Whiles some more bold to measure him nigh stand,
+     To prove how many acres he did spred of land.
+
+And his humour is not the less real that it affects serious argument, in
+the excuse which he urges for his fairy tales (II. 1).
+
+       Right well I wote, most mighty Soveraine,
+     That all this famous antique history
+     Of some th' aboundance of an ydle braine
+     Will judged be, and painted forgery,
+     Rather then matter of just memory;
+     Sith none that breatheth living aire dees know
+     Where is that happy land of Faery,
+     Which I so much doe vaunt, yet no where show,
+     But vouch antiquities, which no body can know.
+
+       But let that man with better sence advize,
+     That of the world least part to us is red;
+     And daily how through hardy enterprize
+     Many great Regions are discovered,
+     Which to late age were never mentioned
+     Who ever heard of th' Indian Peru?
+     Or who in venturous vessell measured
+     The Amazon huge river, now found trew
+     Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?
+
+       Yet all these were, when no man did them know,
+     Yet have from wisest ages hidden beene;
+     And later times thinges more unknowne shall show.
+     Why then should witlesse man so much misweene,
+     That nothing is but that which he hath seene?
+     What if within the Moones fayre shining spheare,
+     What if in every other starre unseene
+     Of other worldes he happily should heare,
+     He wonder would much more; yet such to some appeare.
+
+The general effect is almost always lively and rich: all is buoyant and
+full of movement. That it is also odd, that we see strange costumes and
+hear a language often formal and obsolete, that we are asked to take for
+granted some very unaccustomed supposition and extravagant assumption,
+does not trouble us more than the usages and sights, so strange to
+ordinary civil life, of a camp, or a royal lev�e. All is in keeping,
+whatever may be the details of the pageant; they harmonize with the
+effect of the whole, like the gargoyles and quaint groups in a Gothic
+building harmonize with its general tone of majesty and subtle
+beauty;--nay, as ornaments, in themselves of bad taste, like much of the
+ornamentation of the Renaissance styles, yet find a not unpleasing place
+in compositions grandly and nobly designed:
+
+     So discord oft in music makes the sweeter lay.
+
+Indeed, it is curious how much of real variety is got out of a limited
+number of elements and situations. The spectacle, though consisting only
+of knights, ladies, dwarfs, pagans, "salvage men," enchanters, and
+monsters, and other well-worn machinery of the books of chivalry, is
+ever new, full of vigour and fresh images, even if, as sometimes
+happens, it repeats itself. There is a majestic unconsciousness of all
+violations of probability, and of the strangeness of the combinations
+which it unrolls before us.
+
+2. But there is not only stateliness: there is sweetness and beauty.
+Spenser's perception of beauty of all kinds was singularly and
+characteristically quick and sympathetic. It was one of his great gifts;
+perhaps the most special and unstinted. Except Shakespere, who had it
+with other and greater gifts, no one in that time approached to Spenser,
+in feeling the presence of that commanding and mysterious idea,
+compounded of so many things, yet of which, the true secret escapes us
+still, to which we give the name of beauty. A beautiful scene, a
+beautiful person, a beautiful poem, a mind and character with that
+combination of charms, which, for want of another word, we call by that
+half-spiritual, half-material word "beautiful," at once set his
+imagination at work to respond to it and reflect it. His means of
+reflecting it were as abundant as his sense of it was keen. They were
+only too abundant. They often betrayed him by their affluence and
+wonderful readiness to meet his call. Say what we will, and a great deal
+may be said, of his lavish profusion, his heady and uncontrolled excess,
+in the richness of picture and imagery in which he indulges,--still
+there it lies before us, like the most gorgeous of summer gardens, in
+the glory and brilliancy of its varied blooms, in the wonder of its
+strange forms of life, in the changefulness of its exquisite and
+delicious scents. No one who cares for poetic beauty can be insensible
+to it. He may criticize it. He may have too much of it. He may prefer
+something more severe and chastened. He may observe on the waste of
+wealth and power. He may blame the prodigal expense of language, and the
+long spaces which the poet takes up to produce his effect. He may often
+dislike or distrust the moral aspect of the poet's impartial
+sensitiveness to all outward beauty,--the impartiality which makes him
+throw all his strength into his pictures of Acrasia's Bower of Bliss,
+the Garden of Adonis, and Busirane's Masque of Cupid. But there is no
+gainsaying the beauty which never fails and disappoints, open the poem
+where you will. There is no gainsaying its variety, often so unexpected
+and novel. Face to face with the Epicurean idea of beauty and pleasure
+is the counter-charm of purity, truth, and duty. Many poets have done
+justice to each one separately. Few have shown, with such equal power,
+why it is that both have their roots in man's divided nature, and
+struggle, as it were, for the mastery. Which can be said to be the most
+exquisite in all beauty of imagination, of refined language, of
+faultless and matchless melody, of these two passages, in which the same
+image is used for the most opposite purposes;--first, in that song of
+temptation, the sweetest note in that description of Acrasia's Bower of
+Bliss, which, as a picture of the spells of pleasure, has never been
+surpassed; and next, to represent that stainless and glorious purity
+which is the professed object of his admiration and homage. In both the
+beauty of the rose furnishes the theme of the poet's treatment. In the
+first, it is the "lovely lay" which meets the knight of Temperance amid
+the voluptuousness which he is come to assail and punish.
+
+       The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay:
+     Ah! see, whoso fayre thing doest faine to see,
+     In springing flowre the image of thy day.
+     Ah! see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee
+     Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestee,
+     That fairer seemes the lesse ye see her may.
+     Lo! see soone after how more bold and free
+     Her bared bosome she doth broad display;
+     Lo! see soone after how she fades and falls away.
+
+       So passeth, in the passing of a day,
+     Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre;
+     Ne more doth florish after first decay,
+     That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre
+     Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre.
+     Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime,
+     For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre;
+     Gather the Rose of love whilest yet is time,
+     Whilest loving thou mayst loved be with equall crime.
+
+In the other, it images the power of the will--that power over
+circumstance and the storms of passion, to command obedience to reason
+and the moral law, which Milton sung so magnificently in _Comus_:--
+
+       That daintie Rose, the daughter of her Morne,
+     More deare then life she tendered, whose flowre
+     The girlond of her honour did adorne:
+     Ne suffred she the Middayes scorching powre,
+     Ne the sharp Northerne wind thereon to showre;
+     But lapped up her silken leaves most chayre,
+     When so the froward skye began to lowre;
+     But, soone as calmed was the christall ayre,
+     She did it fayre dispred and let to florish fayre.
+
+       Eternall God, in his almightie powre,
+     To make ensample of his heavenly grace,
+     In Paradize whylome did plant this flowre;
+     Whence he it fetcht out of her native place,
+     And did in stocke of earthly flesh enrace,
+     That mortall men her glory should admyre.
+     In gentle Ladies breste, and bounteous race
+     Of woman kind, it fayrest Flowre doth spyre,
+     And beareth fruit of honour and all chast desyre.
+
+     Fayre ympes of beautie, whose bright shining beames
+     Adorne the worlde with like to heavenly light,
+     And to your willes both royalties and Reames
+     Subdew, through conquest of your wondrous might,
+     With this fayre flowre your goodly girlonds dight
+     Of chastity and vertue virginall,
+     That shall embellish more your beautie bright,
+     And crowne your heades with heavenly coronall,
+     Such as the Angels weare before Gods tribunall!
+
+This sense of beauty, and command of beautiful expression is not seen
+only in the sweetness of which both these passages are examples. Its
+range is wide. Spenser had in his nature besides sweetness, his full
+proportion of the stern and high manliness of his generation; indeed, he
+was not without its severity, its hardness, its unconsidering and cruel
+harshness, its contemptuous indifference to suffering and misery when on
+the wrong side. Noble and heroic ideals captivate him by their
+attractions. He kindles naturally and genuinely at what proves and draws
+out men's courage, their self-command, their self-sacrifice. He
+sympathizes as profoundly with the strangeness of their condition, with
+the sad surprises in their history and fate, as he gives himself up with
+little restraint to what is charming and even intoxicating in it. He can
+moralize with the best in terse and deep-reaching apophthegms of
+melancholy or even despairing experience. He can appreciate the
+mysterious depths and awful outlines of theology--of what our own age
+can see nothing in, but a dry and scholastic dogmatism. His great
+contemporaries were, more perhaps than the men of any age, many-sided.
+He shared their nature; and he used all that he had of sensitiveness and
+of imaginative and creative power, in bringing out its manifold aspects,
+and sometimes contradictory feelings and aims. Not that beauty, even
+varied beauty, is the uninterrupted attribute of his work. It alternates
+with much that no indulgence can call beautiful. It passes but too
+easily into what is commonplace, or forced, or unnatural, or
+extravagant, or careless and poor, or really coarse and bad. He was a
+negligent corrector. He only at times gave himself the trouble to
+condense and concentrate. But for all this, the _Faery Queen_ glows and
+is ablaze with beauty; and that beauty is so rich, so real, and so
+uncommon, that for its sake the severest readers of Spenser have
+pardoned much that is discordant with it, much that in the reading has
+wasted their time and disappointed them.
+
+There is one portion of the beauty of the _Faery Queen_, which in its
+perfection and fulness had never yet been reached in English poetry.
+This was the music and melody of his verse. It was this wonderful,
+almost unfailing sweetness of numbers which probably as much as anything
+set the _Faery Queen_ at once above all contemporary poetry. The English
+language is really a musical one, and say what people will, the English
+ear is very susceptible to the infinite delicacy and suggestiveness of
+musical rhythm and cadence. Spenser found the secret of it. The art has
+had many and consummate masters since, as different in their melody as
+in their thoughts from Spenser. And others at the time, Shakespere
+pre-eminently, heard, only a little later, the same grandeur, and the
+same subtle beauty in the sounds of their mother-tongue, only waiting
+the artist's skill to be combined and harmonized into strains of
+mysterious fascination. But Spenser was the first to show that he had
+acquired a command over what had hitherto been heard only in exquisite
+fragments, passing too soon into roughness and confusion. It would be
+too much to say that his cunning never fails, that his ear is never dull
+or off its guard. But when the length and magnitude of the composition
+are considered, with the restraints imposed by the new nine-line stanza,
+however convenient it may have been, the vigour, the invention, the
+volume and rush of language, and the keenness and truth of ear amid its
+diversified tasks are indeed admirable, which could keep up so prolonged
+and so majestic a stream of original and varied poetical melody. If his
+stanzas are monotonous, it is with the grand monotony of the seashore,
+where billow follows billow, each swelling diversely, and broken into
+different curves and waves upon its mounting surface, till at last it
+falls over, and spreads and rushes up in a last long line of foam upon
+the beach.
+
+3. But all this is but the outside shell and the fancy framework in
+which the substance of the poem is enclosed. Its substance is the poet's
+philosophy of life. It shadows forth, in type and parable, his ideal of
+the perfection of the human character, with its special features, its
+trials, its achievements. There were two accepted forms in poetry in
+which this had been done by poets. One was under the image of warfare.
+The other was under the image of a journey or voyage. Spenser chose the
+former, as Dante and Bunyan chose the latter. Spenser looks on the scene
+of the world as a continual battle-field. It was such in fact to his
+experience in Ireland, testing the mettle of character, its loyalty, its
+sincerity, its endurance. His picture of character is by no means
+painted with sentimental tenderness. He portrays it in the rough work of
+the struggle and the toil, always hardly tested by trial, often
+overmatched, deceived, defeated, and even delivered by its own default
+to disgrace and captivity. He had full before his eyes what abounded in
+the society of his day, often in its noblest representatives--the
+strange perplexing mixture of the purer with the baser elements, in the
+high-tempered and aspiring activity of his time. But it was an ideal of
+character which had in it high aims and serious purposes, which was
+armed with fortitude and strength, which could recover itself after
+failure and defeat.
+
+The unity of a story, or an allegory--that chain and backbone of
+continuous interest, implying a progress and leading up to a climax,
+which holds together the great poems of the world, the _Iliad_ and
+_Odyssey_, the _�neid_, the _Commedia_, the _Paradise Lost_, the
+_Jerusalem Delivered_--this is wanting in the _Faery Queen_. The unity
+is one of character and its ideal. That character of the completed man,
+raised above what is poor and low, and governed by noble tempers and
+pure principles, has in Spenser two conspicuous elements. In the first
+place, it is based on manliness. In the personages which illustrate the
+different virtues, Holiness, Justice, Courtesy, and the rest, the
+distinction is not in nicely discriminated features or shades of
+expression, but in the trials and the occasions which call forth a
+particular action or effort: yet the manliness which is at the
+foundation of all that is good in them is a universal quality common to
+them all, rooted and imbedded in the governing idea or standard of moral
+character in the poem. It is not merely courage, it is not merely
+energy, it is not merely strength. It is the quality of soul which
+frankly accepts the conditions in human life, of labour, of obedience,
+of effort, of unequal success, which does not quarrel with them or evade
+them, but takes for granted with unquestioning alacrity that man is
+called--by his call to high aims and destiny--to a continual struggle
+with difficulty, with pain, with evil, and makes it the point of honour
+not to be dismayed or wearied out by them. It is a cheerful and serious
+willingness for hard work and endurance, as being inevitable and very
+bearable necessities, together with even a pleasure in encountering
+trials which put a man on his mettle, an enjoyment of the contest and
+the risk, even in play. It is the quality which seizes on the paramount
+idea of duty, as something which leaves a man no choice; which despises
+and breaks through the inferior considerations and motives--trouble,
+uncertainty, doubt, curiosity--which hang about and impede duty; which
+is impatient with the idleness and childishness of a life of mere
+amusement, or mere looking on, of continued and self-satisfied levity,
+of vacillation, of clever and ingenious trifling. Spenser's manliness is
+quite consistent with long pauses of rest, with intervals of change,
+with great craving for enjoyment--nay, with great lapses from its ideal,
+with great mixtures of selfishness, with coarseness, with
+licentiousness, with injustice and inhumanity. It may be fatally
+diverted into bad channels; it may degenerate into a curse and scourge
+to the world. But it stands essentially distinct from the nature which
+shrinks from difficulty, which is appalled at effort, which has no
+thought of making an impression on things around it, which is content
+with passively receiving influences and distinguishing between emotions,
+which feels no call to exert itself, because it recognizes no aim
+valuable enough to rouse it, and no obligation strong enough to command
+it. In the character of his countrymen round him, in its highest and in
+its worst features, in its noble ambition, its daring enterprise, its
+self-devotion, as well as in its pride, its intolerance, its fierce
+self-will, its arrogant claims of superiority, moral, political,
+religious, Spenser saw the example of that strong and resolute
+manliness, which, once set on great things, feared nothing--neither toil
+nor disaster nor danger, in their pursuit. Naturally and unconsciously,
+he laid it at the bottom of all his portraitures of noble and virtuous
+achievement in the _Faery Queen_.
+
+All Spenser's "virtues" spring from a root of manliness. Strength,
+simplicity of aim, elevation of spirit, courage are presupposed as their
+necessary conditions. But they have with him another condition as
+universal. They all grow and are nourished from the soil of love; the
+love of beauty, the love and service of fair women. This of course, is a
+survival from the ages of chivalry, an inheritance bequeathed from the
+minstrels of France, Italy, and Germany to the rising poetry of Europe.
+Spenser's types of manhood are imperfect without the idea of an
+absorbing and overmastering passion of love; without a devotion, as to
+the principal and most worthy object of life, to the service of a
+beautiful lady, and to winning her affection and grace. The influence of
+this view of life comes out in numberless ways. Love comes on the scene
+in shapes which are exquisitely beautiful, in all its purity, its
+tenderness, its unselfishness. But the claims of its all-ruling and
+irresistible might are also only too readily verified in the passions of
+men; in the follies of love, its entanglements, its mischiefs, its
+foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never
+absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the
+poem. The picture of life held up before us is the literal rendering of
+Coleridge's lines:--
+
+     All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
+     Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
+     Are all but ministers of Love,
+           And feed his sacred flame.
+
+We still think with Spenser about the paramount place of manliness, as
+the foundation of all worth in human character. We have ceased to think
+with him about the rightful supremacy of love, even in the imaginative
+conception of human life. We have ceased to recognize in it the public
+claims of almost a religion, which it has in Spenser. Love will ever
+play a great part in human life to the end of time. It will be an
+immense element in its happiness, perhaps a still greater one in its
+sorrows, its disasters, its tragedies. It is still an immense power in
+shaping and colouring it, both in fiction and reality; in the family, in
+the romance, in the fatalities and the prosaic ruin of vulgar fact. But
+the place given to it by Spenser is to our thoughts and feelings even
+ludicrously extravagant. An enormous change has taken place in the ideas
+of society on this point: it is one of the things which make a wide
+chasm between centuries and generations which yet are of "the same
+passions," and have in temper, tradition and language, so much in
+common. The ages of the Courts of Love, whom Chaucer reflected and whose
+ideas passed on through him to Spenser, are to us simply strange and
+abnormal states through which society has passed, to us beyond
+understanding and almost belief. The perpetual love-making, as one of
+the first duties and necessities of a noble life, the space which it
+must fill in the cares and thoughts of all gentle and high-reaching
+spirits, the unrestrained language of admiration and worship, the
+unrestrained yielding to the impulses, the anxieties, the pitiable
+despair and agonies of love, the subordination to it of all other
+pursuits and aims, the weeping and wailing and self-torturing which it
+involves, all this is so far apart from what we know of actual life, the
+life not merely of work and business, but the life of affection, and
+even of passion, that it makes the picture of which it is so necessary a
+part, seem to us in the last degree, unreal, unimaginable, grotesquely
+ridiculous. The quaint love sometimes found among children, so quickly
+kindled, so superficial, so violent in its language and absurd in its
+plans, is transferred with the utmost gravity to the serious proceedings
+of the wise and good. In the highest characters it is chastened,
+refined, purified: it appropriates, indeed, language due only to the
+divine, it almost simulates idolatry; yet it belongs to the best part of
+man's nature. But in the lower and average characters, it is not so
+respectable; it is apt to pass into mere toying pastime and frivolous
+love of pleasure: it astonishes us often by the readiness with which it
+displays an affinity for the sensual and impure, the corrupting and
+debasing sides of the relations between the sexes. But however it
+appears, it is throughout a very great affair, not merely with certain
+persons, or under certain circumstances, but with every one: it obtrudes
+itself in public, as the natural and recognized motive of plans of life
+and trials of strength; it is the great spur of enterprise, and its
+highest and most glorious reward. A world of which this is the law, is
+not even in fiction a world which we can conceive possible, or with
+which experience enables us to sympathize.
+
+It is, of course, a purely artificial and conventional reading of the
+facts of human life and feeling. Such conventional readings and
+renderings belong in a measure to all art; but in its highest forms they
+are corrected, interpreted, supplemented by the presence of interspersed
+realities which every one recognizes. But it was one of Spenser's
+disadvantages, that two strong influences combined to entangle him in
+this fantastic and grotesque way of exhibiting the play and action of
+the emotions of love. This all-absorbing, all-embracing passion of love,
+at least, this way of talking about it, was the fashion of the Court.
+Further, it was the fashion of poetry, which he inherited; and he was
+not the man to break through the strong bands of custom and authority.
+In very much he was an imitator. He took what he found; what was his
+own was his treatment of it. He did not trouble himself with
+inconsistencies, or see absurdities and incongruities. Habit and
+familiar language made it not strange that in the Court of Elizabeth,
+the most high-flown sentiments should be in every one's mouth about the
+sublimities and refinements of love, while every one was busy with keen
+ambition, and unscrupulous intrigue. The same blinding power kept him
+from seeing the monstrous contrast between the claims of the queen to be
+the ideal of womanly purity--claims recognized and echoed in ten
+thousand extravagant compliments--and the real licentiousness common all
+round her among her favourites. All these strange contradictions, which
+surprise and shock us, Spenser assumed as natural. He built up his
+fictions on them, as the dramatist built on a basis, which, though more
+nearly approaching to real life, yet differed widely from it in many of
+its preliminary and collateral suppositions; or as the novelist builds
+up his on a still closer adherence to facts and experience. In this
+matter Spenser appears with a kind of double self. At one time he speaks
+as one penetrated and inspired by the highest and purest ideas of love,
+and filled with aversion and scorn for the coarser forms of passion--for
+what is ensnaring and treacherous, as well as for what is odious and
+foul. At another, he puts forth all his power to bring out its most
+dangerous and even debasing aspects in highly coloured pictures, which
+none could paint without keen sympathy with what he takes such pains to
+make vivid and fascinating. The combination is not like anything modern,
+for both the elements are in Spenser so unquestionably and simply
+genuine. Our modern poets are, with all their variations in this
+respect, more homogeneous; and where one conception of love and beauty
+has taken hold of a man, the other does not easily come in. It is
+impossible to imagine Wordsworth dwelling with zest on visions and
+imagery, on which Spenser has lavished all his riches. There can be no
+doubt of Byron's real habits of thought and feeling on subjects of this
+kind, even when his language for the occasion is the chastest; we detect
+in it the mood of the moment, perhaps spontaneous, perhaps put on, but
+in contradiction to the whole movement of the man's true nature. But
+Spenser's words do not ring hollow. With a kind of unconsciousness and
+innocence, which we now find hard to understand, and which perhaps
+belongs to the early childhood or boyhood of a literature, he passes
+abruptly from one standard of thought and feeling to another; and is
+quite as much in earnest when he is singing the pure joys of chastened
+affections, as he is when he is writing with almost riotous luxuriance
+what we are at this day ashamed to read. Tardily, indeed, he appears to
+have acknowledged the contradiction. At the instance of two noble ladies
+of the Court, he composed two Hymns of Heavenly Love and Heavenly
+Beauty, to "retract" and "reform" two earlier ones composed in praise of
+earthly love and beauty. But, characteristically, he published the two
+pieces together, side by side in the same volume.
+
+In the _Faery Queen_, Spenser has brought out, not the image of the
+great Gloriana, but in its various aspects, a form of character which
+was then just coming on the stage of the world, and which has played a
+great part in it since. As he has told us, he aimed at presenting before
+us, in the largest sense of the word, the English gentleman. It was as a
+whole a new character in the world. It had not really existed in the
+days of feudalism and chivalry, though features of it had appeared, and
+its descent was traced from those times: but they were too wild and
+coarse, too turbulent and disorderly, for a character which, however
+ready for adventure and battle, looked to peace, refinement, order, and
+law as the true conditions of its perfection. In the days of Elizabeth
+it was beginning to fill a large place in English life. It was formed
+amid the increasing cultivation of the nation, the increasing varieties
+of public service, the awakening responsibilities to duty and calls to
+self-command. Still making much of the prerogative of noble blood and
+family honours, it was something independent of nobility and beyond it.
+A nobleman might have in him the making of a gentleman: but it was the
+man himself of whom the gentleman was made. Great birth, even great
+capacity, were not enough; there must be added a new delicacy of
+conscience, a new appreciation of what is beautiful and worthy of
+honour, a new measure of the strength and nobleness of self-control, of
+devotion to unselfish interests. This idea of manhood, based not only on
+force and courage, but on truth, on refinement, on public spirit, on
+soberness and modesty, on consideration for others, was taking
+possession of the younger generation of Elizabeth's middle years. Of
+course the idea was very imperfectly apprehended, still more imperfectly
+realized. But it was something which on the same scale had not been yet,
+and which was to be the seed of something greater. It was to grow into
+those strong, simple, noble characters, pure in aim and devoted to duty,
+the Falklands, the Hampdens, who amid so much evil form such a
+remarkable feature in the Civil Wars, both on the Royalist and the
+Parliamentary sides. It was to grow into that high type of cultivated
+English nature, in the present and the last century, common both to its
+monarchical and its democratic embodiments, than which, with all its
+faults and defects, our western civilization has produced few things
+more admirable.
+
+There were three distinguished men of that time, who one after another
+were Spenser's friends and patrons, and who were men in whom he saw
+realized his conceptions of human excellence and nobleness. They were
+Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Grey of Wilton, and Sir Walter Ralegh: and the
+_Faery Queen_ reflects, as in a variety of separate mirrors and
+spiritualized forms, the characteristics of these men and of such as
+they. It reflects their conflicts, their temptations, their weaknesses,
+the evils they fought with, the superiority with which they towered over
+meaner and poorer natures. Sir Philip Sidney may be said to have been
+the first typical example in English society of the true gentleman. The
+charm which attracted men to him in life, the fame which he left behind
+him, are not to be accounted for simply by his accomplishments as a
+courtier, a poet, a lover of literature, a gallant soldier; above all
+this there was something not found in the strong or brilliant men about
+him, a union and harmony of all high qualities differing from any of
+them separately, which gave a fire of its own to his literary
+enthusiasm, and a sweetness of its own to his courtesy. Spenser's
+admiration for that bright but short career was strong and lasting.
+Sidney was to him a verification of what he aspired to and imagined; a
+pledge that he was not dreaming, in portraying Prince Arthur's greatness
+of soul, the religious chivalry of the Red Cross Knight of Holiness, the
+manly purity and self-control of Sir Guyon. It is too much to say that
+in Prince Arthur, the hero of the poem, he always intended Sidney. In
+the first place, it is clear that under that character Spenser in places
+pays compliments to Leicester, in whose service he began life, and
+whose claims on his homage he ever recognized. Prince Arthur is
+certainly Leicester, in the historical passages in the Fifth Book
+relating to the war in the Low Countries in 1576: and no one can be
+meant but Leicester in the bold allusion in the First Book (ix. 17) to
+Elizabeth's supposed thoughts of marrying him. In the next place,
+allegory, like caricature, is not bound to make the same person and the
+same image always or perfectly coincide; and Spenser makes full use of
+this liberty. But when he was painting the picture of the Kingly
+Warrior, in whom was to be summed up in a magnificent unity the
+diversified graces of other men, and who was to be ever ready to help
+and support his fellows in their hour of need, and in their conflict
+with evil, he certainly had before his mind the well-remembered
+lineaments of Sidney's high and generous nature. And he further
+dedicated a separate book, the last that he completed, to the
+celebration of Sidney's special "virtue" of Courtesy. The martial strain
+of the poem changes once more to the pastoral of the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ to describe Sidney's wooing of Frances Walsingham, the fair
+Pastorella; his conquests by his sweetness and grace over the
+churlishness of rivals; and his triumphant war against the monster
+spirit of ignorant and loud-tongued insolence, the "Blatant Beast" of
+religious, political, and social slander.
+
+Again, in Lord Grey of Wilton, gentle by nature, but so stern in the
+hour of trial, called reluctantly to cope not only with anarchy, but
+with intrigue and disloyalty, finding selfishness and thanklessness
+everywhere, but facing all and doing his best with a heavy heart, and
+ending his days prematurely under detraction and disgrace, Spenser had
+before him a less complete character than Sidney, but yet one of grand
+and severe manliness, in which were conspicuous a religious hatred of
+disorder, and an unflinching sense of public duty. Spenser's admiration
+of him was sincere and earnest. In his case the allegory almost becomes
+history. Arthur, Lord Grey, is Sir Arthegal, the Knight of Justice. The
+story touches apparently on some passages of his career, when his
+dislike of the French marriage placed him in opposition to the Queen,
+and even for a time threw him with the supporters of Mary. But the
+adventures of Arthegal mainly preserve the memory of Lord Grey's
+terrible exploits against wrong and rebellion in Ireland. These exploits
+are represented in the doings of the iron man Talus, his squire, with
+his destroying flail, swift, irresistible, inexorable; a figure,
+borrowed and altered, after Spenser's wont, from a Greek legend. His
+overthrow of insolent giants, his annihilation of swarming "rascal
+routs," idealize and glorify that unrelenting policy, of which, though
+condemned in England, Spenser continued to be the advocate. In the story
+of Arthegal, long separated by undeserved misfortunes from the favour of
+the armed lady, Britomart, the virgin champion of right, of whom he was
+so worthy, doomed in spite of his honours to an early death, and
+assailed on his return from his victorious service by the furious
+insults of envy and malice, Spenser portrays almost without a veil, the
+hard fate of the unpopular patron whom he to the last defended and
+honoured.
+
+Ralegh, his last protector, the Shepherd of the Ocean, to whose judgment
+he referred the work of his life, and under whose guidance he once more
+tried the quicksands of the Court, belonged to a different class from
+Sidney or Lord Grey; but of his own class he was the consummate and
+matchless example. He had not Sidney's fine enthusiasm and nobleness; he
+had not either Sidney's affectations. He had not Lord Grey's
+single-minded hatred of wrong. He was a man to whom his own interests
+were much; he was unscrupulous; he was ostentatious; he was not above
+stooping to mean, unmanly compliances with the humours of the Queen. But
+he was a man with a higher ideal than he attempted to follow. He saw,
+not without cynical scorn, through the shows and hollowness of the
+world. His intellect was of that clear and unembarrassed power which
+takes in as wholes things which other men take in part by part. And he
+was in its highest form a representative of that spirit of adventure
+into the unknown and the wonderful of which Drake was the coarser and
+rougher example, realizing in serious earnest, on the sea and in the New
+World, the life of knight-errantry feigned in romances. With Ralegh, as
+with Lord Grey, Spenser comes to history; and he even seems to have been
+moved, as the poem went on, partly by pity, partly by amusement, to
+shadow forth in his imaginary world, not merely Ralegh's brilliant
+qualities, but also his frequent misadventures and mischances in his
+career at Court. Of all her favourites Ralegh was the one whom his
+wayward mistress seemed to find most delight in tormenting. The offence
+which he gave by his secret marriage suggested the scenes describing the
+utter desolation of Prince Arthur's squire, Timias, at the jealous wrath
+of the Virgin Huntress, Belphoebe,--scenes, which extravagant as they
+are, can hardly be called a caricature of Ralegh's real behaviour in the
+Tower in 1593. But Spenser is not satisfied with this one picture. In
+the last Book Timias appears again, the victim of slander and ill-usage,
+even after he had recovered Belphoebe's favour; he is baited like a
+wild bull, by mighty powers of malice, falsehood, and calumny; he is
+wounded by the tooth of the Blatant Beast; and after having been cured,
+not without difficulty, and not without significant indications on the
+part of the poet that his friend had need to restrain and chasten his
+unruly spirit, he is again delivered over to an ignominious captivity,
+and the insults of Disdain and Scorn.
+
+       Then up he made him rise, and forward fare,
+     Led in a rope which both his hands did bynd;
+     Ne ought that foole for pity did him spare,
+     But with his whip, him following behynd,
+     Him often scourg'd, and forst his feete to fynd:
+     And other-whiles with bitter mockes and mowes
+     He would him scorne, that to his gentle mynd
+     Was much more grievous then the others blowes:
+     Words sharpely wound, but greatest griefe of scorning growes.
+
+Spenser knew Ralegh only in the promise of his adventurous prime--so
+buoyant and fearless, so inexhaustible in project and resource, so
+unconquerable by checks and reverses. The gloomier portion of Ralegh's
+career was yet to come: its intrigues, its grand yet really gambling and
+unscrupulous enterprises, the long years of prison and authorship, and
+its not unfitting close, in the English statesman's death by the
+headsman--so tranquil though violent, so ceremoniously solemn, so
+composed, so dignified;--such a contrast to all other forms of capital
+punishment, then or since.
+
+Spenser has been compared to Pindar, and contrasted with Cervantes. The
+contrast, in point of humour, and the truth that humour implies, is
+favourable to the Spaniard: in point of moral earnestness and sense of
+poetic beauty, to the Englishman. What Cervantes only thought
+ridiculous Spenser used, and not in vain, for a high purpose. The ideas
+of knight-errantry were really more absurd than Spenser allowed himself
+to see. But that idea of the gentleman which they suggested, that
+picture of human life as a scene of danger, trial, effort, defeat,
+recovery, which they lent themselves to image forth, was more worth
+insisting on, than the exposure of their folly and extravagance. There
+was nothing to be made of them, Cervantes thought; and nothing to be
+done, but to laugh off what they had left, among living Spaniards, of
+pompous imbecility or mistaken pretensions. Spenser, knowing that they
+must die, yet believed that out of them might be raised something nobler
+and more real, enterprise, duty, resistance to evil, refinement, hatred
+of the mean and base. The energetic and high-reaching manhood which he
+saw in the remarkable personages round him he shadowed forth in the
+_Faery Queen_. He idealized the excellences and the trials of this first
+generation of English gentlemen, as Bunyan afterwards idealized the
+piety, the conflicts, and the hopes of Puritan religion. Neither were
+universal types; neither were perfect. The manhood in which Spenser
+delights, with all that was admirable and attractive in it, had still
+much of boyish incompleteness and roughness: it had noble aims, it had
+generosity, it had loyalty, it had a very real reverence for purity and
+religion; but it was young in experience of a new world, it was wanting
+in self-mastery, it was often pedantic and self-conceited; it was an
+easier prey than it ought to have been to discreditable temptations. And
+there is a long interval between any of Spenser's superficial and thin
+conceptions of character, and such deep and subtle creations as Hamlet
+or Othello, just as Bunyan's strong but narrow ideals of religion, true
+as they are up to a certain point, fall short of the length and breadth
+and depth of what Christianity has made of man, and may yet make of him.
+But in the ways which Spenser chose, he will always delight and teach
+us. The spectacle of what is heroic and self-devoted, of honour for
+principle and truth, set before us with so much insight and sympathy,
+and combined with so much just and broad observation on those accidents
+and conditions of our mortal state which touch us all, will never appeal
+to English readers in vain, till we have learned a new language, and
+adopted new canons of art, of taste, and of morals. It is not merely
+that he has left imperishable images which have taken their place among
+the consecrated memorials of poetry and the household thoughts of all
+cultivated men. But he has permanently lifted the level of English
+poetry by a great and sustained effort of rich and varied art, in which
+one main purpose rules, loyalty to what is noble and pure, and in which
+this main purpose subordinates to itself every feature and every detail,
+and harmonizes some that by themselves seem least in keeping with it.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[118:1]
+
+     "Unknow, unkyst; and lost, that is unsoght."
+
+                                  _Troylus and Cryseide_, lib. i.
+
+[128:2] Hales' _Life_, Globe Edition.
+
+[132:3] _Vid._ Keble, _Pr�lect. Acad._, xxiv. p. 479, 480.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+SECOND PART OF THE FAERY QUEEN.--SPENSER'S LAST YEARS (1590-1599).
+
+
+The publication of the _Faery Queen_ in 1590 had made the new poet of
+the _Shepherd's Calendar_ a famous man. He was no longer merely the
+favourite of a knot of enthusiastic friends, and outside of them only
+recognized and valued at his true measure by such judges as Sidney and
+Ralegh. By the common voice of all the poets of his time he was now
+acknowledged as the first of living English poets. It is not easy for
+us, who live in these late times and are familiar with so many literary
+masterpieces, to realize the surprise of a first and novel achievement
+in literature; the effect on an age, long and eagerly seeking after
+poetical expression, of the appearance at last of a work of such power,
+richness, and finished art.
+
+It can scarcely be doubted, I think, from the bitter sarcasms
+interspersed in his later poems, that Spenser expected more from his
+triumph than it brought him. It opened no way of advancement for him in
+England. He continued for a while in that most ungrateful and
+unsatisfactory employment, the service of the State in Ireland; and that
+he relinquished in 1593.[166:1] At the end of 1591 he was again at
+Kilcolman. He had written and probably sent to Ralegh, though he did not
+publish it till 1595, the record already quoted of the last two year's
+events, _Colin Clout's come home again_,--his visit, under Ralegh's
+guidance, to the Court, his thoughts and recollections of its great
+ladies, his generous criticisms on poets, the people and courtiers whom
+he had seen and heard of; how he had been dazzled, how he had been
+disenchanted, and how he was come home to his Irish mountains and
+streams and lakes, to enjoy their beauty, though in a "salvage" and
+"foreign" land; to find in this peaceful and tranquil retirement
+something far better than the heat of ambition and the intrigues of
+envious rivalries; and to contrast with the profanations of the name of
+love which had disgusted him in a dissolute society, the higher and
+purer ideal of it which he could honour and pursue in the simplicity of
+his country life.
+
+And in Ireland, the rejected adorer of the Rosalind of the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ found another and still more perfect Rosalind, who, though she
+was at first inclined to repeat the cruelty of the earlier one, in time
+relented, and received such a dower of poetic glory as few poets have
+bestowed upon their brides. It has always appeared strange that
+Spenser's passion for the first Rosalind should have been so lasting,
+that in his last pastoral, _Colin Clout's come home again_, written so
+late as 1591, and published after he was married, he should end his poem
+by reverting to this long-past love passage, defending her on the ground
+of her incomparable excellence and his own unworthiness, against the
+blame of friendly "shepherds," witnesses of the "languors of his too
+long dying," and angry with her hard-heartedness. It may be that,
+according to Spenser's way of making his masks and figures suggest but
+not fully express their antitypes,[168:2] Rosalind here bears the image
+of the real mistress of this time, the "country lass," the Elizabeth of
+the sonnets, who was, in fact, for a while as unkind as the earlier
+Rosalind. The history of this later wooing, its hopes and anguish, its
+varying currents, its final unexpected success, is the subject of a
+collection of Sonnets, which have the disadvantage of provoking
+comparison with the Sonnets of Shakespere. There is no want in them of
+grace and sweetness, and they ring true with genuine feeling and warm
+affection, though they have of course their share of the conceits then
+held proper for love poems. But they want the power and fire, as well as
+the perplexing mystery, of those of the greater master. His bride was
+also immortalized as a fourth among the three Graces, in a
+richly-painted passage in the last book of the _Faery Queen_. But the
+most magnificent tribute to her is the great Wedding Ode, the
+_Epithalamion_, the finest composition of its kind, probably, in any
+language: so impetuous and unflagging, so orderly and yet so rapid in
+the onward march of its stately and varied stanzas; so passionate, so
+flashing with imaginative wealth, yet so refined and self-restrained. It
+was always easy for Spenser to open the floodgates of his inexhaustible
+fancy. With him,--
+
+     The numbers flow as fast as spring doth rise.
+
+But here he has thrown into his composition all his power of
+concentration, of arrangement, of strong and harmonious government over
+thought and image, over language and measure and rhythm; and the result
+is unquestionably one of the grandest lyrics in English poetry. We have
+learned to think the subject unfit for such free poetical treatment;
+Spenser's age did not.
+
+Of the lady of whom all this was said, and for whom all this was
+written, the family name has not been thought worth preserving. We know
+that by her Christian name she was a namesake of the great queen, and of
+Spenser's mother. She is called a country lass, which may mean anything;
+and the marriage appears to have been solemnized in Cork, on what was
+then Midsummer Day, "Barnaby the Bright," the day when "the sun is in
+his cheerful height," June 11/22, 1594. Except that she survived
+Spenser, that she married again, and had some legal quarrels with one of
+her own sons about his lands, we know nothing more about her. Of two of
+the children whom she brought him, the names have been preserved, and
+they indicate that in spite of love and poetry, and the charms of
+Kilcolman, Spenser felt as Englishmen feel in Australia or in India. To
+call one of them _Sylvanus_, and the other _Peregrine_, reveals to us
+that Ireland was still to him a "salvage land," and he a pilgrim and
+stranger in it; as Moses called his firstborn Gershom, a stranger
+here--"for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land."
+
+In the year after his marriage, he sent over these memorials of it to be
+published in London, and they were entered at Stationers' Hall in
+November, 1595. The same year he came over himself, bringing with him
+the second instalment of the _Faery Queen_, which was entered for
+publication the following January, 1595/6. Thus the half of the
+projected work was finished; and finished, as we know from one of the
+Sonnets (80), before his marriage. After his long "race through Fairy
+land," he asks leave to rest, and solace himself with his "love's sweet
+praise;" and then "as a steed refreshed after toil," he will "stoutly
+that second worke assoyle." The first six books were published together
+in 1596. He remained most of the year in London, during which _The Four
+Hymns on Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly_, were published; and
+also a Dirge (_Daphnaida_) on Douglas Howard, the wife of Arthur Gorges,
+the spirited narrator of the Island Voyage of Essex and Ralegh, written
+in 1591; and a "spousal verse" (_Prothalamion_), on the marriage of the
+two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, late in 1596. But he was only a
+visitor in London. The _Prothalamion_ contains a final record of his
+disappointments in England.
+
+                   I, (whom sullein care,
+     Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay
+     In Princes Court, and expectation vayne
+     Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away,
+     Like empty shaddowes, did afflict my brayne,)
+     Walkt forth to ease my payne
+     Along the shoare of silver streaming Themmes--
+
+His marriage ought to have made him happy. He professed to find the
+highest enjoyment in the quiet and retirement of country life. He was in
+the prime of life, successful beyond all his fellows in his special
+work, and apparently with unabated interest in what remained to be done
+of it. And though he could not but feel himself at a distance from the
+"sweet civility" of England, and socially at disadvantage compared to
+those whose lines had fallen to them in its pleasant places, yet
+nature, which he loved so well, was still friendly to him, if men were
+wild and dangerous. He is never weary of praising the natural advantages
+of Ireland. Speaking of the North, he says,--
+
+     And sure it is yet a most beautifull and sweet countrey as any
+     is under heaven, seamed throughout with many goodly rivers,
+     replenished with all sortes of fish, most aboundantly
+     sprinckled with many sweet Ilandes, and goodly lakes, like
+     litle Inland Seas, that will carry even ships upon theyr
+     waters, adorned with goodly woodes fitt for building of howses
+     and shippes, soe comodiously, as that yf some princes in the
+     world had them, they would soone hope to be lordes of all the
+     seas, and ere long of all the world; also full of good portes
+     and havens opening upon England and Scotland, as inviting us
+     to come to them, to see what excellent comodityes that
+     countrey can affoord, besides the soyle it self most fertile,
+     fitt to yeeld all kind of fruite that shal be comitted
+     therunto. And lastly, the heavens most milde and temperat,
+     though somewhat more moyst then the part toward the West.
+
+His own home at Kilcolman charmed and delighted him. It was not his
+fault that its trout streams, its Mulla and Fanchin, are not as famous
+as Walter Scott's Teviot and Tweed, or Wordsworth's Yarrow and Duddon,
+or that its hills, Old Mole, and Arlo Hill, have not kept a poetic name
+like Helvellyn and "Eildon's triple height." They have failed to become
+familiar names to us. But the beauties of his home inspired more than
+one sweet pastoral picture in the _Faery Queen_; and in the last
+fragment remaining to us of it, he celebrates his mountains and woods
+and valleys as once the fabled resort of the Divine Huntress and her
+Nymphs, and the meeting-place of the Gods.
+
+There was one drawback to the enjoyment of his Irish country life, and
+of the natural attractiveness of Kilcolman. "Who knows not Arlo Hill?"
+he exclaims, in the scene just referred to from the fragment on
+_Mutability_. "Arlo, the best and fairest hill in all the holy island's
+heights." It was well known to all Englishmen who had to do with the
+South of Ireland. How well it was known in the Irish history of the
+time, may be seen in the numerous references to it, under various forms,
+such as Aharlo, Harlow, in the Index to the Irish Calendar of Papers of
+this troublesome date, and to continual encounters and ambushes in its
+notoriously dangerous woods. He means by it the highest part of the
+Galtee range, below which to the north, through a glen or defile, runs
+the "river Aherlow." Galtymore, the summit, rises, with precipice and
+gully, more than 3000 feet, above the plains of Tipperary, and is seen
+far and wide. It was connected with the "great wood," the wild region of
+forest, mountain, and bog which stretched half across Munster from the
+Suir to the Shannon. It was the haunt and fastness of Irish outlawry and
+rebellion in the South, which so long sheltered Desmond and his
+followers. Arlo and its "fair forests," harbouring "thieves and wolves,"
+was an uncomfortable neighbour to Kilcolman. The poet describes it as
+ruined by a curse pronounced on the lovely land by the offended goddess
+of the Chase,--
+
+     Which too too true that land's in-dwellers since have found.
+
+He was not only living in an insecure part, on the very border of
+disaffection and disturbance, but like every Englishman living in
+Ireland, he was living amid ruins. An English home in Ireland, however
+fair, was a home on the sides of �tna or Vesuvius: it stood where the
+lava flood had once passed, and upon not distant fires. Spenser has left
+us his thoughts on the condition of Ireland, in a paper written between
+the two rebellions, some time between 1595 and 1598, after the twelve
+or thirteen years of so-called peace which followed the overthrow of
+Desmond, and when Tyrone's rebellion was becoming serious. It seems to
+have been much copied in manuscript, but though entered for publication
+in 1598, it was not printed till long after his death in 1633. A copy of
+it among the Irish papers of 1598 shows that it had come under the eyes
+of the English Government. It is full of curious observations, of shrewd
+political remarks, of odd and confused ethnography; but more than all
+this, it is a very vivid and impressive picture of what Sir Walter
+Ralegh called "the common woe of Ireland." It is a picture of a noble
+realm, which its inhabitants and its masters did not know what to do
+with; a picture of hopeless mistakes, misunderstandings, misrule; a
+picture of piteous misery and suffering on the part of a helpless and
+yet untameable and mischievous population--of unrelenting and scornful
+rigour on the part of their stronger rulers, which yet was absolutely
+ineffectual to reclaim or subdue them. "Men of great wisdom," Spenser
+writes, "have often wished that all that land were a sea-pool."
+Everything, people thought, had been tried, and tried in vain.
+
+     Marry, soe there have beene divers good plottes and wise
+     counsells cast alleready about reformation of that realme; but
+     they say, it is the fatall desteny of that land, that noe
+     purposes, whatsoever are meant for her good, will prosper or
+     take good effect, which, whether it proceede from the very
+     GENIUS of the soyle, or influence of the starres, or that
+     Allmighty God hath not yet appoynted the time of her
+     reformation, or that He reserveth her in this unquiett state
+     still for some secrett scourdge, which shall by her come unto
+     England, it is hard to be knowen, but yet much to be feared.
+
+The unchanging fatalities of Ireland appear in Spenser's account in all
+their well-known forms; some of them, as if they were what we were
+reading of yesterday. Throughout the work there is an honest zeal for
+order, an honest hatred of falsehood, sloth, treachery, and disorder.
+But there does not appear a trace of consideration for what the Irish
+might feel or desire or resent. He is sensible indeed of English
+mismanagement and vacillation, of the way in which money and force were
+wasted by not being boldly and intelligently employed; he enlarges on
+that power of malignity and detraction which he has figured in the
+Blatant Beast of the _Faery Queen_: but of English cruelty, of English
+injustice, of English rapacity, of English prejudice, he is profoundly
+unconscious. He only sees that things are getting worse and more
+dangerous; and though he, like others, has his "plot" for the
+subjugation and pacification of the island, and shrinks from nothing in
+the way of severity, not even, if necessary, from extermination, his
+outlook is one of deep despair. He calculates the amount of force, of
+money, of time, necessary to break down all resistance: he is minute and
+perhaps skilful in building his forts and disposing his garrisons; he is
+very earnest about the necessity of cutting broad roads through the
+woods, and building bridges in place of fords; he contemplates restored
+churches, parish schools, a better order of clergy. But where the spirit
+was to come from of justice, of conciliation, of steady and firm
+resistance to corruption and selfishness, he gives us no light. What it
+comes to is, that with patience, temper, and public spirit, Ireland
+might be easily reformed and brought into order: but unless he hoped for
+patience, temper, and public spirit from Lord Essex, to whom he seems to
+allude as the person "on whom the eye of England is fixed, and our last
+hopes now rest," he too easily took for granted what was the real
+difficulty. His picture is exact and forcible, of one side of the
+truth; it seems beyond the thought of an honest, well-informed, and
+noble-minded Englishman that there was another side.
+
+But he was right in his estimate of the danger, and of the immediate
+evils which produced it. He was right in thinking that want of method,
+want of control, want of confidence, and an untimely parsimony,
+prevented severity from having a fair chance of preparing a platform for
+reform and conciliation. He was right in his conviction of the
+inveterate treachery of the Irish Chiefs, partly the result of ages of
+mismanagement, but now incurable. While he was writing, Tyrone, a
+craftier and bolder man than Desmond, was taking up what Desmond had
+failed in. He was playing a game with the English authorities which as
+things then were is almost beyond belief. He was outwitting or cajoling
+the veterans of Irish government, who knew perfectly well what he was,
+and yet let him amuse them with false expectations--men like Sir John
+Norreys, who broke his heart when he found out how Tyrone had baffled
+and made a fool of him. Wishing to gain time for help from Spain, and to
+extend the rebellion, he revolted, submitted, sued for pardon but did
+not care to take it when granted, fearlessly presented himself before
+the English officers while he was still beleaguering their posts, led
+the English forces a chase through mountains and bogs, inflicted heavy
+losses on them, and yet managed to keep negotiations open as long as it
+suited him. From 1594 to 1598, the rebellion had been gaining ground; it
+had crept round from Ulster to Connaught, from Connaught to Leinster,
+and now from Connaught to the borders of Munster. But Munster, with its
+English landlords and settlers, was still on the whole quiet. At the end
+of 1597, the Council at Dublin reported home that "Munster was the best
+tempered of all the rest at this present time; for that though not long
+since sundry loose persons" (among them the base sons of Lord Roche,
+Spenser's adversary in land suits) "became Robin Hoods and slew some of
+the undertakers, dwelling scattered in thatched houses and remote places
+near to woods and fastnesses, yet now they are cut off, and no known
+disturbers left who are like to make any dangerous alteration on the
+sudden." But they go on to add that they "have intelligence that many
+are practised withal from the North, to be of combination with the rest,
+and stir coals in Munster, whereby the whole realm might be in a general
+uproar." And they repeat their opinion that they must be prepared for a
+"universal Irish war, intended to shake off all English government."
+
+In April, 1598, Tyrone received a new pardon; in the following August,
+he surprised an English army near Armagh, and shattered it with a
+defeat, the bloodiest and most complete ever received by the English in
+Ireland. Then the storm burst. Tyrone sent a force into Munster: and
+once more Munster rose. It was a rising of the dispossessed proprietors
+and the whole native population against the English undertakers; a
+"ragged number of rogues and boys," as the English Council describes
+them; rebel kernes, pouring out of the "great wood," and from Arlo, the
+"chief fastness of the rebels." Even the chiefs, usually on good terms
+with the English, could not resist the stream. Even Thomas Norreys, the
+President, was surprised, and retired to Cork, bringing down on himself
+a severe reprimand from the English Government. "You might better have
+resisted than you did, considering the many defensible houses and
+castles possessed by the undertakers, who, for aught we can hear, were
+by no means comforted nor supported by you, but either from lack of
+comfort from you, or out of mere cowardice, fled away from the rebels on
+the first alarm." "Whereupon," says Cox, the Irish historian, "the
+Munsterians, generally, rebel in October, and kill, murder, ravish and
+spoil without mercy; and Tyrone made James Fitz-Thomas, Earl of Desmond,
+on condition to be tributary to him; he was the handsomest man of his
+time, and is commonly called the _Sugan_ Earl."
+
+On the last day of the previous September (Sept. 30, 1598), the English
+Council had written to the Irish Government to appoint Edmund Spenser,
+Sheriff of the County of Cork, "a gentleman dwelling in the County of
+Cork, who is so well known unto you all for his good and commendable
+parts, being a man endowed with good knowledge in learning, and not
+unskilful or without experience in the wars." In October, Munster was in
+the hands of the insurgents, who were driving Norreys before them, and
+sweeping out of house and castle the panic-stricken English settlers. On
+December 9th, Norreys wrote home a despatch about the state of the
+province. This despatch was sent to England by Spenser, as we learn from
+a subsequent despatch of Norreys of December 21.[177:3] It was received
+at Whitehall, as appears from Robert Cecil's endorsement, on the 24th of
+December. The passage from Ireland seems to have been a long one. And
+this is the last original document which remains about Spenser.
+
+What happened to him in the rebellion we learn generally from two
+sources, from Camden's _History_, and from Drummond of Hawthornden's
+Recollections of Ben Jonson's conversations with him in 1619. In the
+Munster insurrection of October, the new Earl of Desmond's followers did
+not forget that Kilcolman was an old possession of the Desmonds. It was
+sacked and burnt. Jonson related that a little new-born child of
+Spenser's perished in the flames. Spenser and his wife escaped, and he
+came over to England, a ruined and heart-broken man. He died Jan. 16,
+1598/9; "he died," said Jonson, "for lack of bread in King Street
+[Westminster], and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of
+Essex, saying that he had no time to spend them." He was buried in the
+Abbey, near the grave of Chaucer, and his funeral was at the charge of
+the Earl of Essex. Beyond this we know nothing; nothing about the
+details of his escape, nothing of the fate of his manuscripts, or the
+condition in which he left his work, nothing about the suffering he went
+through in England. All conjecture is idle waste of time. We only know
+that the first of English poets perished miserably and prematurely, one
+of the many heavy sacrifices which the evil fortune of Ireland has cost
+to England; one of many illustrious victims to the madness, the evil
+customs, the vengeance of an ill-treated and ill-governed people.
+
+One Irish rebellion brought him to Ireland, another drove him out of it.
+Desmond's brought him to pass his life there, and to fill his mind with
+the images of what was then Irish life, with its scenery, its
+antipathies, its tempers, its chances, and necessities. Tyrone's swept
+him from Ireland, beggared and hopeless. Ten years after his death, a
+bookseller, reprinting the six books of the _Faery Queen_, added two
+cantos and a fragment, _On Mutability_, supposed to be part of the
+_Legend of Constancy_. Where and how he got them he has not told us. It
+is a strange and solemn meditation, on the universal subjection of all
+things to the inexorable conditions of change. It is strange, with its
+odd episode and fable which Spenser cannot resist about his neighbouring
+streams, its borrowings from Chaucer, and its quaint mixture of
+mythology with sacred and with Irish scenery, Olympus and Tabor, and his
+own rivers and mountains. But it is full of his power over thought and
+imagery; and it is quite in a different key from anything in the first
+six books. It has an undertone of awe-struck and pathetic sadness.
+
+     What man that sees the ever whirling wheel
+     Of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway,
+     But that thereby doth find and plainly feel
+     How Mutability in them doth play
+     Her cruel sports to many men's decay.
+
+He imagines a mighty Titaness, sister of Hecate and Bellona, most
+beautiful and most terrible, who challenges universal dominion over all
+things in earth and heaven, sun and moon, planets and stars, times and
+seasons, life and death; and finally over the wills and thoughts and
+natures of the gods, even of Jove himself; and who pleads her cause
+before the awful Mother of all things, figured as Chaucer had already
+imagined her:--
+
+     Great Nature, ever young, yet full of eld;
+     Still moving, yet unmoved from her stead;
+     Unseen of any, yet of all beheld,
+     Thus sitting on her throne.
+
+He imagines all the powers of the upper and nether worlds assembled
+before her on his own familiar hills, instead of Olympus, where she
+shone like the Vision which "dazed" those "three sacred saints" on
+"Mount Thabor." Before her pass all things known of men, in rich and
+picturesque procession; the Seasons pass, and the Months, and the
+Hours, and Day and Night, Life, as "a fair young lusty boy," Death, grim
+and grisly;--
+
+     Yet is he nought but parting of the breath,
+     Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene,
+     Unbodied, unsoul'd, unheard, unseene--
+
+and on all of them the claims of the Titaness, Mutability, are
+acknowledged. Nothing escapes her sway in this present state, except
+Nature which, while seeming to change, never really changes her ultimate
+constituent elements, or her universal laws. But when she seemed to have
+extorted the admission of her powers, Nature silences her. Change is
+apparent, and not real; and the time is coming when all change shall end
+in the final changeless change.
+
+       "I well consider all that ye have said,
+     And find that all things stedfastnesse do hate
+     And changed be; yet, being rightly wayd,
+     They are not changed from their first estate;
+     But by their change their being do dilate,
+     And turning to themselves at length againe,
+     Do worke their owne perfection so by fate:
+     Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne,
+     But they raigne over Change, and do their states maintaine.
+
+       "Cease therefore, daughter, further to aspire,
+     And thee content thus to be rul'd by mee,
+     For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire;
+     But time shall come that all shall changed bee,
+     And from thenceforth none no more change shal see."
+     So was the Titanesse put downe and whist,
+     And Jove confirm'd in his imperiall see.
+     Then was that whole assembly quite dismist,
+     And Natur's selfe did vanish, whither no man wist.
+
+What he meant--how far he was thinking of those daring arguments of
+religious and philosophical change of which the world was beginning to
+be full, we cannot now tell. The allegory was not finished: at least it
+is lost to us. We have but a fragment more, the last fragment of his
+poetry. It expresses the great commonplace which so impressed itself on
+the men of that time, and of which his works are full. No words could be
+more appropriate to be the last words of one who was so soon to be in
+his own person such an instance of their truth. They are fit closing
+words to mark his tragic and pathetic disappearance from the high and
+animated scene in which his imagination worked. And they record, too,
+the yearning hope of rest not extinguished by terrible and fatal
+disaster:--
+
+       When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare
+     Of Mutabilitie, and well it way,
+     Me seemes, that though she all unworthy were
+     Of the Heav'ns Rule; yet, very sooth to say,
+     In all things else she beares the greatest sway:
+     Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle,
+     And love of things so vaine to cast away;
+     Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle,
+     Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.
+
+       Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
+     Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
+     But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd
+     Upon the pillours of Eternity,
+     That is contrayr to Mutabilitie;
+     For all that moveth doth in Change delight:
+     But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
+     With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight:
+     O! that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabaoths sight.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[166:1] Who is _Edmondus Spenser, Prebendary of Effin_ (Elphin)? in a
+list of arrears of first fruits; Calendar of State Papers, _Ireland_,
+Dec. 8, 1586, p. 222. Church preferments were under special
+circumstances allowed to be held by laymen. See the Queen's
+"Instructions," 1579; in Preface to Calendar of Carew MSS. 1589-1600, p.
+ci.
+
+[168:2] "In these kind of historical allusions Spenser usually perplexes
+the subject: he leads you on, and then designedly misleads you."--Upton,
+quoted by Craik, iii. 92.
+
+[177:3] I am indebted for this reference to Mr. Hans Claude Hamilton.
+See also his Preface to Calendar of Irish Papers, 1574-85, p. lxxvi.
+
+
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+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+The following words use an oe ligature in the original:
+
+     Belphoebe
+     Belphoebe's
+     Phoebus
+
+The following corrections have been made to the text:
+
+     Page 6: dust was raised.[6:5][anchor missing in original
+
+     Page 41: scenery on which the poet's sweetness[original has
+     sweetnesss]
+
+     Page 42: "[quotation mark missing in original]Shepherd that
+     did fetch
+
+     Page 48: Discourse[original has Discouse] of English Poetrie
+
+     Page 76: as deputy for the said Briskett)[ending parenthesis
+     missing in original]
+
+     Page 83: [original has extraneous quotation mark]In the meane
+     while I must struggle
+
+     Page 105: looselie scattered abroad,[original has comma]
+
+     Page 122: as most fitte[original has fittte] for the
+     excellency
+
+     Page 151: standard of moral character[original has charater]
+
+     Page 173: "Men of great wisdom," Spenser writes[original has
+     writers]
+
+     Page 174: Throughout the work there is an[original has a]
+     honest zeal
+
+     Page 178: through in England.[original has comma] All
+     conjecture
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Spenser, by R. W. Church
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Spenser, by R. W. Church
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Spenser
+       (English Men of Letters Series)
+
+Author: R. W. Church
+
+Release Date: January 27, 2010 [EBook #31101]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPENSER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lisa Reigel, and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="notebox">
+<p>Transcriber's Notes: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been
+left as in the original. Some typographical and punctuation errors have
+been corrected. A complete <a href="#TN">list</a> follows the text. Greek words that may
+not display correctly in all browsers are transliterated in the text
+using popups like this: <ins class="greek" title="biblos">&#946;&#953;&#946;&#955;&#959;&#962;</ins>. Position
+your mouse over the line to see the transliteration. Ellipses match the
+original. In quoted material, a row of asterisks represents an ellipsis.
+Click on the page number to see an image of the page.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="smallgap"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i"></a>[<a href="./images/i.png">i</a>]</span></p>
+<h1>SPENSER</h1>
+
+
+<p class="gap">&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="p3">BY</p>
+
+<h2>R. W. CHURCH,</h2>
+
+<p class="p3">DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S,<br />
+HONORARY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE.</p>
+
+
+<p class="gap">&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>London:<br />
+MACMILLAN AND CO.<br />
+1879</h4>
+
+
+<p class="smallgap">&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.</i></p>
+<p class="smallgap">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii"></a>[<a href="./images/ii.png">ii</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii"></a>[<a href="./images/iii.png">iii</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>NOTICE.</h2>
+
+<p>As the plan of these volumes does not encourage footnotes, I wish to say
+that, besides the biographies prefixed to the various editions of
+Spenser, there are two series of publications, which have been very
+useful to me. One is the series of Calendars of State Papers, especially
+the State Papers on Ireland and the Carew MSS. at Lambeth, with the
+prefaces of Mr. Hans Claude Hamilton and the late Professor Brewer. The
+other is Mr. E. Arber's series of reprints of old English books, and his
+Transcript of the Stationers' Registers, a work, I suppose, without
+parallel in its information about the early literature of a country, and
+edited by him with admirable care and public spirit. I wish also to say
+that I am much indebted to Mr. Craik's excellent little book on <i>Spenser
+and his Poetry</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="author">R. W. C.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>March, 1879.</i></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv"></a>[<a href="./images/iv.png">iv</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v"></a>[<a href="./images/v.png">v</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table summary="Table of Contents" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4" border="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER I.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright" colspan="2" style="font-size: 70%;">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">Spenser's Early Life (1552-1579)</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER II.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">The new Poet&mdash;The Shepherd's Calendar (1579)</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_29">29</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER III.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">Spenser in Ireland (1580)</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER IV.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">The Faery Queen&mdash;the First Part (1580-1590)</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER V.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc">The Faery Queen</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER VI.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" style="padding-right: 4em;">Second Part of the Faery Queen&mdash;Spenser's last Years (1590-1599)</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_166">166</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi"></a>[<a href="./images/vi.png">vi</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1"></a>[<a href="./images/1.png">1</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>SPENSER.</h2>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+<h3>SPENSER'S EARLY LIFE.</h3>
+
+<h4>[1552-1579.]</h4>
+
+<p>Spenser marks a beginning in English literature. He is the first
+Englishman who, in that great division of our history which dates from
+the Reformation, attempted and achieved a poetical work of the highest
+order. Born about the same time as Hooker (1552-1554), in the middle of
+that eventful century which began with Henry VIII., and ended with
+Elizabeth, he was the earliest of our great modern writers in poetry, as
+Hooker was the earliest of our great modern writers in prose. In that
+reviving English literature, which, after Chaucer's wonderful promise,
+had been arrested in its progress, first by the Wars of the Roses, and
+then by the religious troubles of the Reformation, these two were the
+writers who first realized to Englishmen the ideas of a high literary
+perfection. These ideas vaguely filled many minds; but no one had yet
+shown the genius and the strength to grasp and exhibit them in a way to
+challenge comparison with what had been accomplished by the poetry and
+prose of Greece, Rome, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2"></a>[<a href="./images/2.png">2</a>]</span>Italy. There had been poets in England since
+Chaucer, and prose writers since Wycliffe had translated the Bible.
+Surrey and Wyatt have deserved to live, while a crowd of poets, as
+ambitious as they, and not incapable of occasional force and sweetness,
+have been forgotten. Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, Tyndale, the
+translator of the New Testament, Bishop Latimer, the writers of many
+state documents, and the framers, either by translation or composition,
+of the offices of the English Prayer Book, showed that they understood
+the power of the English language over many of the subtleties and
+difficulties of thought, and were alive to the music of its cadences.
+Some of these works, consecrated by the highest of all possible
+associations, have remained, permanent monuments and standards of the
+most majestic and most affecting English speech. But the verse of
+Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville, and the prose of More and Ascham were but
+noble and promising efforts. Perhaps the language was not ripe for their
+success; perhaps the craftsmen's strength and experience were not equal
+to the novelty of their attempt. But no one can compare the English
+styles of the first half of the sixteenth century with the contemporary
+styles of Italy, with Ariosto, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, without
+feeling the immense gap in point of culture, practice, and skill&mdash;the
+immense distance at which the Italians were ahead, in the finish and
+reach of their instruments, in their power to handle them, in command
+over their resources, and facility and ease in using them. The Italians
+were more than a century older; the English could not yet, like the
+Italians, say what they would; the strength of English was, doubtless,
+there in germ, but it had still to reach its full growth and
+development. Even the French prose of Rabelais and Montaigne was more
+mature. But in Spenser, as in Hooker, all these <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a>[<a href="./images/3.png">3</a>]</span>tentative essays of
+vigorous but unpractised minds have led up to great and lasting works.
+We have forgotten all these preliminary attempts, crude and imperfect,
+to speak with force and truth, or to sing with measure and grace. There
+is no reason why they should be remembered, except by professed
+inquirers into the antiquities of our literature; they were usually
+clumsy and awkward, sometimes grotesque, often affected, always
+hopelessly wanting in the finish, breadth, moderation, and order which
+alone can give permanence to writing. They were the necessary exercises
+by which Englishmen were recovering the suspended art of Chaucer, and
+learning to write; and exercises, though indispensably necessary, are
+not ordinarily in themselves interesting and admirable. But when the
+exercises had been duly gone through, then arose the original and
+powerful minds, to take full advantage of what had been gained by all
+the practising, and to concentrate and bring to a focus all the hints
+and lessons of art which had been gradually accumulating. Then the
+sustained strength and richness of the <i>Faery Queen</i> became possible;
+contemporary with it, the grandeur and force of English prose began in
+Hooker's <i>Ecclesiastical Polity</i>; and then, in the splendid Elizabethan
+Drama, that form of art which has nowhere a rival, the highest powers of
+poetic imagination became wedded, as they had never been before in
+England or in the world, to the real facts of human life, and to its
+deepest thoughts and passions.</p>
+
+<p>More is known about the circumstances of Spenser's life than about the
+lives of many men of letters of that time; yet our knowledge is often
+imperfect and inaccurate. The year 1552 is now generally accepted as the
+year of his birth. The date is inferred from a passage in one of his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a>[<a href="./images/4.png">4</a>]</span>Sonnets,<a name="FNanchor_4-1_1" id="FNanchor_4-1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_4-1_1" class="fnanchor">[4:1]</a> and this probably is near the truth. That is to say that
+Spenser was born in one of the last two years of Edward VI.; that his
+infancy was passed during the dark days of Mary; and that he was about
+six years old when Elizabeth came to the throne. About the same time
+were born Ralegh, and, a year or two later (1554), Hooker and Philip
+Sidney. Bacon (1561), and Shakespere (1564), belong to the next decade
+of the century.</p>
+
+<p>He was certainly a Londoner by birth, and early training. This also we
+learn from himself, in the latest poem published in his life-time. It is
+a bridal ode (<i>Prothalamion</i>), to celebrate the marriage of two
+daughters of the Earl of Worcester, written late in 1596. It was a time
+in his life of disappointment and trouble, when he was only a rare
+visitor to London. In the poem he imagines himself on the banks of
+London's great river, and the bridal procession arriving at Lord Essex's
+house; and he takes occasion to record the affection with which he still
+regarded "the most kindly nurse" of his boyhood.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Calm was the day, and through the trembling air<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When I, (whom sullen care,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Through discontent of my long fruitless stay<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In Princes Court, and expectation vain<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of idle hopes, which still do fly away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain,)<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Walkt forth to ease my pain<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a>[<a href="./images/5.png">5</a>]</span>
+<span class="i1">Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Was painted all with variable flowers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And all the meads adorned with dainty gems<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Fit to deck maidens' bowers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And crown their paramours<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Against the bridal day, which is not long:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">At length they all <i>to merry London came,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>To merry London, my most kindly nurse,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>That to me gave this life's first native source,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Though from another place I take my name,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>A house of ancient fame</i>.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">There, when they came, whereas those bricky towers<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The which on Thames broad aged back do ride,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">There whilome wont the Templar Knights to bide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Till they decayed through pride:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Next whereunto there stands a stately place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Where oft I gained gifts and goodly grace<a name="FNanchor_5-2_2" id="FNanchor_5-2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_5-2_2" class="fnanchor" style="font-style: normal;">[5:2]</a></i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Of that great Lord, which therein wont to dwell;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Whose want too well now feels my friendless case;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>But ah! here fits not well</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Old woes, but joys, to tell</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Against the bridal day, which is not long:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Yet therein now doth lodge a noble peer,<a name="FNanchor_5-3_3" id="FNanchor_5-3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_5-3_3" class="fnanchor">[5:3]</a><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Great England's glory and the wide world's wonder,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Whose dreadful name late through all Spain did thunder,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And Hercules two pillars, standing near,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Did make to quake and fear.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Fair branch of honour, flower of chivalry!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That fillest England with thy triumph's fame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Joy have thou of thy noble victory,<a name="FNanchor_5-4_4" id="FNanchor_5-4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_5-4_4" class="fnanchor">[5:4]</a><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And endless happiness of thine own name<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That promiseth the same.<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a>[<a href="./images/6.png">6</a>]</span>
+<span class="i1">That through thy prowess, and victorious arms,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thy country may be freed from foreign harms;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And great Elisa's glorious name may ring<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Through all the world, filled with thy wide alarms.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Who his father was, and what was his employment we know not. From one of
+the poems of his later years we learn that his mother bore the famous
+name of Elizabeth, which was also the cherished one of Spenser's wife.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">My love, my life's best ornament,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By whom my spirit out of dust was raised.<a name="FNanchor_6-5_5" id="FNanchor_6-5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_6-5_5" class="fnanchor">[6:5]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But his family, whatever was his father's condition, certainly claimed
+kindred, though there was a difference in the spelling of the name, with
+a house then rising into fame and importance, the Spencers of Althorpe,
+the ancestors of the Spencers and Churchills of modern days. Sir John
+Spencer had several daughters, three of whom made great marriages.
+Elizabeth was the wife of Sir George Carey, afterwards the second Lord
+Hunsdon, the son of Elizabeth's cousin and Counsellor. Anne, first, Lady
+Compton, afterwards married Thomas Sackville, the son of the poet, Lord
+Buckhurst, and then Earl of Dorset. Alice, the youngest, whose first
+husband, Lord Strange, became Earl of Derby, after his death married
+Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper, Baron Ellesmere, and then Viscount
+Brackley. These three sisters are celebrated by him in a gallery of the
+noble ladies of the Court,<a name="FNanchor_6-6_6" id="FNanchor_6-6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6-6_6" class="fnanchor">[6:6]</a> under poetical names&mdash;"Phyllis, the
+flower of rare perfection," "Charillis, the pride and primrose of the
+rest," and "Sweet Amaryllis, the youngest but the highest in degree."
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a>[<a href="./images/7.png">7</a>]</span>Alice, Lady Strange, Lady Derby, Lady Ellesmere and Brackley, and then
+again Dowager Lady Derby, the "Sweet Amaryllis" of the poet, had the
+rare fortune to be a personal link between Spenser and Milton. She was
+among the last whom Spenser honoured with his homage: and she was the
+first whom Milton honoured; for he composed his Arcades to be acted
+before her by her grandchildren, and the <i>Masque of Comus</i> for her
+son-in-law, Lord Bridgewater, and his daughter, another Lady Alice. With
+these illustrious sisters Spenser claimed kindred. To each of these he
+dedicated one of his minor poems; to Lady Strange, the <i>Tears of the
+Muses</i>; to Lady Compton, the Apologue of the Fox and the Ape, <i>Mother
+Hubberd's Tale</i>; to Lady Carey, the Fable of the Butterfly and the
+Spider, <i>Muiopotmos</i>. And in each dedication he assumed on their part
+the recognition of his claim.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">The sisters three,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The honour of the noble family,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of which I meanest boast myself to be.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Whatever his degree of relationship to them, he could hardly even in the
+days of his fame have ventured thus publicly to challenge it, unless
+there had been some acknowledged ground for it. There are obscure
+indications, which antiquarian diligence may perhaps make clear, which
+point to East Lancashire as the home of the particular family of
+Spensers to which Edmund Spenser's father belonged. Probably he was,
+however, in humble circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Edmund Spenser was a Londoner by education as well as birth. A recent
+discovery by Mr. R. B. Knowles, further illustrated by Dr. Grosart,<a name="FNanchor_7-7_7" id="FNanchor_7-7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7-7_7" class="fnanchor">[7:7]</a>
+has made us acquainted with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a>[<a href="./images/8.png">8</a>]</span>Spenser's school. He was a pupil, probably
+one of the earliest ones, of the grammar school, then recently (1560)
+established by the Merchant Taylors' Company, under a famous teacher,
+Dr. Mulcaster. Among the manuscripts at Townley Hall are preserved the
+account books of the executors of a bountiful London citizen, Robert
+Nowell, the brother of Dr. Alexander Nowell, who was Dean of St. Paul's
+during Elizabeth's reign, and was a leading person in the ecclesiastical
+affairs of the time. In these books, in a crowd of unknown names of
+needy relations and dependents, distressed foreigners, and parish
+paupers, who shared from time to time the liberality of Mr. Robert
+Nowell's representatives, there appear among the numerous "poor
+scholars" whom his wealth assisted, the names of Richard Hooker, and
+Lancelot Andrewes. And there, also, in the roll of the expenditure at
+Mr. Nowell's pompous funeral at St. Paul's in February, 1568/9, among
+long lists of unknown men and women, high and low, who had mourning
+given them, among bills for fees to officials, for undertakers' charges,
+for heraldic pageantry and ornamentation, for abundant supplies for the
+sumptuous funeral banquet, are put down lists of boys, from the chief
+London schools, St. Paul's, Westminster, and others, to whom two yards
+of cloth were to be given to make their gowns: and at the head of the
+six scholars named from Merchant Taylors' is the name of Edmund Spenser.</p>
+
+<p>He was then, probably, the senior boy of the school, and in the
+following May he went to Cambridge. The Nowells still helped him: we
+read in their account books under April 28, 1569, "to Edmond Spensore,
+scholler of the m'chante tayler scholl, at his gowinge to penbrocke
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></a>[<a href="./images/9.png">9</a>]</span>hall in chambridge, x<sup>s</sup>." On the 20th of May, he was admitted sizar,
+or serving clerk at Pembroke Hall; and on more than one occasion
+afterwards, like Hooker and like Lancelot Andrewes, also a Merchant
+Taylors' boy, two or three years Spenser's junior, and a member of the
+same college, Spenser had a share in the benefactions, small in
+themselves, but very numerous, with which the Nowells after the fine
+fashion of the time, were accustomed to assist poor scholars at the
+Universities. In the visitations of Merchant Taylors' School, at which
+Grindal, Bishop of London, was frequently present,<a name="FNanchor_9-8_8" id="FNanchor_9-8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_9-8_8" class="fnanchor">[9:8]</a> it is not
+unlikely that his interest was attracted, in the appositions or
+examinations, to the promising senior boy of the school. At any rate
+Spenser, who afterwards celebrated Grindal's qualities as a bishop, was
+admitted to a place, one which befitted a scholar in humble
+circumstances, in Grindal's old college. It is perhaps worth noticing
+that all Spenser's early friends, Grindal, the Nowells, Dr. Mulcaster,
+his master, were north country men.</p>
+
+<p>Spenser was sixteen or seventeen when he left school for the university,
+and he entered Cambridge at the time when the struggle which was to
+occupy the reign of Elizabeth was just opening. At the end of the year
+1569, the first distinct blow was struck against the queen and the new
+settlement of religion, by the Rising of the North. In the first ten
+years of Elizabeth's reign, Spenser's school time at Merchant Taylors',
+the great quarrel had slumbered. Events abroad occupied men's minds; the
+religious wars in France, the death of the Duke of Guise (1563), the
+loss of Havre, and expulsion of the English garrisons, the close of the
+Council of Trent (1563), the French peace, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></a>[<a href="./images/10.png">10</a>]</span>the accession of Pius V.
+(1565/6). Nearer home, there was the marriage of Mary of Scotland with
+Henry Darnley (1565), and all the tragedy which followed, Kirk of Field
+(1567), Lochleven, Langside, Carlisle, the imprisonment of the pretender
+to the English Crown (1568). In England, the authority of Elizabeth had
+established itself, and the internal organization of the Reformed Church
+was going on, in an uncertain and tentative way, but steadily. There was
+a struggle between Genevan exiles, who were for going too fast, and
+bishops and politicians who were for going too slow; between authority
+and individual judgment, between home-born state traditions and foreign
+revolutionary zeal. But outwardly, at least, England had been peaceful.
+Now however a great change was at hand. In 1566, the Dominican
+Inquisitor, Michael Ghislieri, was elected Pope, under the title of Pius
+V.</p>
+
+<p>In Pius (1566-72), were embodied the new spirit and policy of the Roman
+Church, as they had been created and moulded by the great Jesuit order,
+and by reforming bishops like Ghiberti of Verona, and Carlo Borromeo of
+Milan. Devout and self-denying as a saint, fierce and inflexible against
+abuses as a puritan, resolute and uncompromising as a Jacobin idealist
+or an Asiatic despot, ruthless and inexorable as an executioner, his
+soul was bent on re-establishing, not only by preaching and martyrdom,
+but by the sword and by the stake, the unity of Christendom and of its
+belief. Eastwards and westwards, he beheld two formidable foes and two
+serious dangers; and he saw before him the task of his life in the
+heroic work of crushing English heresy and beating back Turkish
+misbelief. He broke through the temporizing caution of his predecessors
+by the Bull of Deposition against Elizabeth in 1570. He was the soul of
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></a>[<a href="./images/11.png">11</a>]</span>confederacy which won the day of Lepanto against the Ottomans in
+1571. And though dead, his spirit was paramount in the slaughter of St.
+Bartholomew in 1572.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1569, while Spenser was passing from school to college, his
+emissaries were already in England, spreading abroad that Elizabeth was
+a bastard and an apostate, incapable of filling a Christian throne,
+which belonged by right to the captive Mary. The seed they sowed bore
+fruit. In the end of the year, southern England was alarmed by the news
+of the rebellion of the two great Earls in the north, Percy of
+Northumberland and Neville of Westmoreland. Durham was sacked and the
+mass restored by an insurgent host, before which an "aged gentleman,"
+Richard Norton with his sons, bore the banner of the Five Wounds of
+Christ. The rebellion was easily put down, and the revenge was stern. To
+the men who had risen at the instigation of the Pope and in the cause of
+Mary, Elizabeth gave, as she had sworn "such a breakfast as never was in
+the North before." The hangman finished the work on those who had
+escaped the sword. Poetry, early and late, has recorded the dreary fate
+of those brave victims of a mistaken cause, in the ballad of the <i>Rising
+of the North</i>, and in the <i>White Doe of Rylstone</i>. It was the signal
+given for the internecine war which was to follow between Rome and
+Elizabeth. And it was the first great public event which Spenser would
+hear of in all men's mouths, as he entered on manhood, the prelude and
+augury of fierce and dangerous years to come. The nation awoke to the
+certainty&mdash;one which so profoundly affects sentiment and character both
+in a nation and in an individual&mdash;that among the habitual and fixed
+conditions of life is that of having a serious and implacable enemy ever
+to reckon with.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a>[<a href="./images/12.png">12</a>]</span>
+And in this year, apparently in the transition time between school and
+college, Spenser's literary ventures began. The evidence is curious, but
+it seems to be clear. In 1569, a refugee Flemish physician from Antwerp,
+who had fled to England from the "abominations of the Roman Antichrist"
+and the persecutions of the Duke of Alva, John Vander Noodt, published
+one of those odd miscellanies, fashionable at the time, half moral and
+poetical, half fiercely polemical, which he called a "<i>Theatre</i>, wherein
+be represented as well the Miseries and Calamities which follow the
+voluptuous Worldlings, as also the great Joys and Pleasures which the
+Faithful do enjoy&mdash;an argument both profitable and delectable to all
+that sincerely love the word of God." This "little treatise," was a
+mixture of verse and prose, setting forth in general, the vanity of the
+world, and, in particular, predictions of the ruin of Rome and
+Antichrist: and it enforced its lessons by illustrative woodcuts. In
+this strange jumble are preserved, we can scarcely doubt, the first
+compositions which we know of Spenser's. Among the pieces are some
+Sonnets of Petrarch, and some Visions of the French poet Joachim du
+Bellay, whose poems were published in 1568. In the collection itself,
+these pieces are said by the compiler to have been translated by him
+"out of the Brabants speech," and "out of Dutch into English." But in a
+volume of "poems of the world's vanity," and published years afterwards
+in 1591, ascribed to Spenser, and put together, apparently with his
+consent, by his publisher, are found these very pieces from Petrarch and
+Du Bellay. The translations from Petrarch are almost literally the same,
+and are said to have been "formerly translated." In the Visions of Du
+Bellay there is this difference, that the earlier translations are in
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a>[<a href="./images/13.png">13</a>]</span>blank verse, and the later ones are rimed as sonnets; but the change
+does not destroy the manifest identity of the two translations. So that
+unless Spenser's publisher, to whom the poet had certainly given some of
+his genuine pieces for the volume, is not to be trusted,&mdash;which, of
+course, is possible, but not probable&mdash;or unless,&mdash;what is in the last
+degree inconceivable,&mdash;Spenser had afterwards been willing to take the
+trouble of turning the blank verse of Du Bellay's unknown translator
+into rime, the Dutchman who dates his <i>Theatre of Worldlings</i> on the
+25th May, 1569, must have employed the promising and fluent school boy,
+to furnish him with an English versified form, of which he himself took
+the credit, for compositions which he professes to have known only in
+the Brabants or Dutch translations. The sonnets from Petrarch are
+translated with much command of language; there occurs in them, what was
+afterwards a favourite thought of Spenser's:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9h">&mdash;The Nymphs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That sweetly in accord did <i>tune their voice</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>To the soft sounding of the waters' fall</i>.<a name="FNanchor_13-9_9" id="FNanchor_13-9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_13-9_9" class="fnanchor">[13:9]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is scarcely credible that the translator of the sonnets could have
+caught so much as he has done of the spirit of Petrarch without having
+been able to read the Italian original; and if Spenser was the
+translator, it is a curious illustration of the fashionableness of
+Italian literature in the days of Elizabeth, that a school-boy just
+leaving Merchant Taylors' should have been so much interested in it. Dr.
+Mulcaster, his master, is said by Warton to have given special attention
+to the teaching of the English language.</p>
+
+<p>If these translations were Spenser's, he must have <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a>[<a href="./images/14.png">14</a>]</span>gone to Cambridge
+with a faculty of verse, which for his time may be compared to that with
+which winners of prize poems go to the universities now. But there was
+this difference, that the school-boy versifiers of our days are rich
+with the accumulated experience and practice of the most varied and
+magnificent poetical literature in the world; while Spenser had but one
+really great English model behind him; and Chaucer, honoured as he was,
+had become in Elizabeth's time, if not obsolete, yet in his diction,
+very far removed from the living language of the day. Even Milton, in
+his boyish compositions, wrote after Spenser and Shakespeare, with their
+contemporaries, had created modern English poetry. Whatever there was in
+Spenser's early verses of grace and music was of his own finding: no one
+of his own time, except in occasional and fitful snatches, like stanzas
+of Sackville's, had shown him the way. Thus equipped, he entered the
+student world, then full of pedantic and ill-applied learning, of the
+disputations of Calvinistic theology, and of the beginnings of those
+highly speculative puritanical controversies, which were the echo at the
+University of the great political struggles of the day, and were soon to
+become so seriously practical. The University was represented to the
+authorities in London as being in a state of dangerous excitement,
+troublesome and mutinous. Whitgift, afterwards Elizabeth's favourite
+archbishop, Master, first of Pembroke, and then of Trinity, was
+Vice-Chancellor of the University; but as the guardian of established
+order, he found it difficult to keep in check the violent and
+revolutionary spirit of the theological schools. Calvin was beginning to
+be set up there as the infallible doctor of Protestant theology.
+Cartwright from the Margaret Professor's chair was teaching <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a>[<a href="./images/15.png">15</a>]</span>the
+exclusive and divine claims of the Geneva platform of discipline, and in
+defiance of the bishops and the government was denouncing the received
+Church polity and ritual as Popish and anti-Christian. Cartwright, an
+extreme and uncompromising man, was deprived in 1570; but the course
+which things were taking under the influence of Rome and Spain gave
+force to his lessons and warnings, and strengthened his party. In this
+turmoil of opinions, amid these hard and technical debates, these fierce
+conflicts between the highest authorities, and this unsparing violence
+and bitterness of party recriminations, Spenser, with the tastes and
+faculties of a poet, and the love not only of what was beautiful, but of
+what was meditative and dreamy, began his university life.</p>
+
+<p>It was not a favourable atmosphere for the nurture of a great poet. But
+it suited one side of Spenser's mind, as it suited that of all but the
+most independent Englishmen of the time, Shakespere, Bacon, Ralegh.
+Little is known of Spenser's Cambridge career. It is probable, from the
+persons with whom he was connected, that he would not be indifferent to
+the debates around him, and that his religious prepossessions were then,
+as afterwards, in favour of the conforming puritanism in the Church, as
+opposed to the extreme and thorough-going puritanism of Cartwright. Of
+the conforming puritans, who would have been glad of a greater
+approximation to the Swiss model, but who, whatever their private wishes
+or dislikes, thought it best, for good reasons or bad, to submit to the
+strong determination of the government against it, and to accept what
+the government approved and imposed, Grindal, who held successively the
+great sees of London, York, and Canterbury, and Nowell, Dean of St.
+Paul's, Spenser's benefactor, were representative types. Grindal, a
+waverer like many others <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a>[<a href="./images/16.png">16</a>]</span>in opinion, had also a noble and manly side to
+his character, in his hatred of practical abuses, and in the courageous
+and obstinate resistance which he could offer to power, when his sense
+of right was outraged. Grindal, as has been said, was perhaps
+instrumental in getting Spenser into his own old college, Pembroke Hall,
+with the intention, it may be, as was the fashion of bishops of that
+time, of becoming his patron. But certainly after his disgrace in 1577,
+and when it was not quite safe to praise a great man under the
+displeasure of the Court, Grindal is the person whom Spenser first
+singled out for his warmest and heartiest praise. He is introduced under
+a thin disguise, "Algrind," in Spenser's earliest work after he left
+Cambridge, the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>, as the pattern of the true and
+faithful Christian pastor. And if Pembroke Hall retained at all the tone
+and tendencies of such masters as Ridley, Grindal, and Whitgift, the
+school in which Spenser grew up was one of their mitigated puritanism.
+But his puritanism was political and national, rather than religious. He
+went heartily with the puritan party in their intense hatred of Rome and
+Roman partisans; he went with them also in their denunciations of the
+scandals and abuses of the ecclesiastical government at home. But in
+temper of mind and intellectual bias he had little in common with the
+puritans. For the stern austerities of Calvinism, its fierce and eager
+scholasticism, its isolation from human history, human enjoyment, and
+all the manifold play and variety of human character, there could not be
+much sympathy in a man like Spenser, with his easy and flexible nature,
+keenly alive to all beauty, an admirer even when he was not a lover of
+the alluring pleasures of which the world is full, with a perpetual
+struggle going on in him, between his strong instincts of purity and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a>[<a href="./images/17.png">17</a>]</span>right, and his passionate appreciation of every charm and grace. He
+shows no signs of agreement with the internal characteristics of the
+puritans, their distinguishing theology, their peculiarities of thought
+and habits, their protests, right or wrong, against the fashions and
+amusements of the world. If not a man of pleasure, he yet threw himself
+without scruple into the tastes, the language, the pursuits, of the gay
+and gallant society in which they saw so much evil: and from their
+narrow view of life, and the contempt, dislike, and fear, with which
+they regarded the whole field of human interest, he certainly was parted
+by the widest gulf. Indeed, he had not the sternness and concentration
+of purpose, which made Milton the great puritan poet.</p>
+
+<p>Spenser took his Master's degree in 1576, and then left Cambridge. He
+gained no Fellowship, and there is nothing to show how he employed
+himself. His classical learning, whether acquired there or elsewhere,
+was copious, but curiously inaccurate; and the only specimen remaining
+of his Latin composition in verse is contemptible in its medi&aelig;val
+clumsiness. We know nothing of his Cambridge life except the friendships
+which he formed there. An intimacy began at Cambridge of the closest and
+most affectionate kind, which lasted long into after-life, between him
+and two men of his college, one older in standing than himself, the
+other younger; Gabriel Harvey, first a fellow of Pembroke, and then a
+student or teacher of civil law at Trinity Hall, and Edward Kirke, like
+Spenser, a sizar at Pembroke, recently identified with the E. K., who
+was the editor and commentator of Spenser's earliest work, the anonymous
+<i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>. Of the younger friend this is the most that is
+known. That he was deeply in Spenser's <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a>[<a href="./images/18.png">18</a>]</span>confidence as a literary
+coadjutor, and possibly in other ways, is shown in the work which he
+did. But Gabriel Harvey was a man who had influence on Spenser's ideas
+and purposes, and on the direction of his efforts. He was a classical
+scholar of much distinction in his day, well read in the Italian authors
+then so fashionable, and regarded as a high authority on questions of
+criticism and taste. Except to students of Elizabethan literary history,
+he has become an utterly obscure personage; and he has not usually been
+spoken of with much respect. He had the misfortune, later in life, to
+plunge violently into the scurrilous quarrels of the day, and as he was
+matched with wittier and more popular antagonists, he has come down to
+us as a foolish pretender, or at least as a dull and stupid scholar who
+knew little of the real value of the books he was always ready to quote,
+like the pedant of the comedies, or Shakespere's schoolmaster
+Holofernes. Further, he was one who, with his classical learning, had
+little belief in the resources of his mother tongue, and he was one of
+the earliest and most confident supporters of a plan then fashionable,
+for reforming English verse, by casting away its natural habits and
+rhythms, and imposing on it the laws of the classical metres. In this he
+was not singular. The professed treatises of this time on poetry, of
+which there were several, assume the same theory, as the mode of
+"reforming" and duly elevating English verse. It was eagerly accepted by
+Philip Sidney and his Areopagus of wits at court, who busied themselves
+in devising rules of their own&mdash;improvements as they thought on those of
+the university men&mdash;for English hexameters and sapphics, or as they
+called it, artificial versifying. They regarded the comparative value of
+the native English rhythms and the classical metres, much as our
+ancestors of Addison's <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a>[<a href="./images/19.png">19</a>]</span>day regarded the comparison between Gothic and
+Palladian architecture. One, even if it sometimes had a certain romantic
+interest, was rude and coarse; the other was the perfection of polite
+art and good taste. Certainly in what remains of Gabriel Harvey's
+writing, there is much that seems to us vain and ridiculous enough; and
+it has been naturally surmised that he must have been a dangerous friend
+and counsellor to Spenser. But probably we are hard upon him. His
+writings, after all, are not much more affected and absurd in their
+outward fashion than most of the literary composition of the time; his
+verses are no worse than those of most of his neighbours; he was not
+above, but he was not below, the false taste and clumsiness of his age;
+and the rage for "artificial versifying" was for the moment in the air.
+And it must be said, that though his enthusiasm for English hexameters
+is of a piece with the puritan use of scripture texts in divinity and
+morals, yet there is no want of hard-headed shrewdness in his remarks;
+indeed, in his rules for the adaptation of English words and accents to
+classical metres, he shows clearness and good sense in apprehending the
+conditions of the problem, while Sidney and Spenser still appear
+confused and uncertain. But in spite of his pedantry, and though he had
+not, as we shall see, the eye to discern at first the genius of the
+<i>Faery Queen</i>, he has to us the interest of having been Spenser's first,
+and as far as we can see, to the last, dearest friend. By both of his
+younger fellow-students at Cambridge, he was looked up to with the
+deepest reverence, and the most confiding affection. Their language is
+extravagant, but there is no reason to think that it was not genuine. E.
+Kirke, the editor of Spenser's first venture, the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>,
+commends the "new poet" to his patronage, and to the protection <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a>[<a href="./images/20.png">20</a>]</span>of his
+"mighty rhetoric," and exhorts Harvey himself to seize the poetical
+"garland which to him alone is due." Spenser speaks in the same terms;
+"<i>veruntamen te sequor solum; nunquam vero assequar</i>." Portions of the
+early correspondence between Harvey and Spenser have been preserved to
+us, possibly by Gabriel Harvey's self-satisfaction in regard to his own
+compositions. But with the pedagogue's jocoseness, and a playfulness
+which is like that of an elephant, it shows on both sides easy
+frankness, sincerity, and warmth, and not a little of the early
+character of the younger man. In Spenser's earliest poetry, his
+pastorals, Harvey appears among the imaginary rustics, as the poet's
+"special and most familiar friend," under the name of Hobbinol,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Good Hobbinol, that was so true."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>To him Spenser addresses his confidences, under the name of Colin Clout,
+a name borrowed from Skelton, a satirical poet of Henry VIII.'s time,
+which Spenser kept throughout his poetical career. Harvey reappears in
+one of Spenser's latest writings, a return to the early pastoral, <i>Colin
+Clout's come home again</i>, a picture drawn in distant Ireland, of the
+brilliant but disappointing court of Elizabeth. And from Ireland in
+1586, was addressed to Harvey by "his devoted friend during life," the
+following fine sonnet, which, whatever may have been the merit of
+Harvey's criticisms and his literary quarrels with Greene and Nash,
+shows at least Spenser's unabated honour for him.</p>
+
+<p class="ctrsc">To the Right Worshipful, my singular good Friend, M.<br />
+Gabriel Harvey, Doctor of the Laws.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Harvey</span>, the happy above happiest men<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I read; that, sitting like a looker on<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of this world's stage, dost note with critic pen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sharp dislikes of each condition;<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a>[<a href="./images/21.png">21</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">And, as one careless of suspicion,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne fawnest for the favour of the great;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne fearest foolish reprehension<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of faulty men, which danger to thee threat;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But freely dost, of what thee list, entreat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like a great lord of peerless liberty;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lifting the good up to high honour's seat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the evil damning over more to die;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For life and death is in thy doomful writing;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So thy renown lives ever by enditing.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Dublin, this xviii. of July, 1586. Your devoted friend, during life,</p>
+
+<p class="authorscpoem">Edmund Spenser.</p>
+
+<p>Between Cambridge and Spenser's appearance in London, there is a short
+but obscure interval. What is certain is, that he spent part of it in
+the North of England; that he was busy with various poetical works, one
+of which was soon to make him known as a new star in the poetical
+heaven; and lastly, that in the effect on him of a deep but unrequited
+passion, he then received what seems to have been a strong and
+determining influence on his character and life. It seems likely that
+his sojourn in the north, which perhaps first introduced the London-bred
+scholar, the "Southern Shepherd's Boy," to the novel and rougher country
+life of distant Lancashire, also gave form and local character to his
+first considerable work. But we do not know for certain where his abode
+was in the north; of his literary activity, which must have been
+considerable, we only partially know the fruit; and of the lady whom he
+made so famous, that her name became a consecrated word in the poetry of
+the time, of Rosalind, the "Widow's Daughter of the Glen," whose refusal
+of his suit, and preference for another, he lamented so bitterly, yet
+would allow no one else to blame, we know absolutely nothing. She would
+not be his wife; but apparently, he never ceased to love her through all
+the chances and temptations, and possibly errors of his life, even
+apparently in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a>[<a href="./images/22.png">22</a>]</span>the midst of his passionate admiration of the lady whom,
+long afterwards, he did marry. To her kindred and condition, various
+clues have been suggested, only to provoke and disappoint us. Whatever
+her condition, she was able to measure Spenser's powers: Gabriel Harvey
+has preserved one of her compliments&mdash;"Gentle Mistress Rosalind once
+reported him to have all the intelligences at commandment; and at
+another, christened him her <i>Signior Pegaso</i>." But the unknown Rosalind
+had given an impulse to the young poet's powers, and a colour to his
+thoughts, and had enrolled Spenser in that band and order of
+poets,&mdash;with one exception, not the greatest order,&mdash;to whom the
+wonderful passion of love, in its heights and its depths, is the element
+on which their imagination works, and out of which it moulds its most
+beautiful and characteristic creations.</p>
+
+<p>But in October, 1579, he emerges from obscurity. If we may trust the
+correspondence between Gabriel Harvey and Spenser, which was published
+at the time, Spenser was then in London.<a name="FNanchor_22-1_10" id="FNanchor_22-1_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_22-1_10" class="fnanchor">[22:1]</a> It was the time of the
+crisis of the Alen&ccedil;on courtship, while the Queen was playing fast and
+loose with her Valois lover, whom she playfully called her frog; when
+all about her, Burghley, Leicester, Sidney, and Walsingham, were
+dismayed, both at the plan itself, and at her vacillations; and just
+when the Puritan pamphleteer, who had given expression to the popular
+disgust at a French marriage, especially at a connexion with the family
+which had on its hands the blood of St. Bartholomew, was sentenced to
+lose his right hand as a seditious <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a>[<a href="./images/23.png">23</a>]</span>libeller. Spenser had become
+acquainted with Philip Sidney, and Sidney's literary and courtly
+friends. He had been received into the household of Sidney's uncle, Lord
+Leicester, and dates one of his letters from Leicester House. Among his
+employments he had written, "<i>Stemmata Dudleiana</i>." He is doubting
+whether or not to publish, "to utter," some of his poetical
+compositions: he is doubting, and asks Harvey's advice, whether or not
+to dedicate them to His Excellent Lordship, "lest by our much cloying
+their noble ears he should gather contempt of myself, or else seem
+rather for gain and commodity to do it, and some sweetness that I have
+already tasted." Yet, he thinks, that when occasion is so fairly offered
+of estimation and preferment, it may be well to use it: "while the iron
+is hot, it is good striking; and minds of nobles vary, as their
+estates." And he was on the eve of starting across the sea to be
+employed in Leicester's service, on some permanent mission in France,
+perhaps in connexion with the Alen&ccedil;on intrigues. He was thus launched
+into what was looked upon as the road of preferment; in his case, as it
+turned out, a very subordinate form of public employment, which was to
+continue almost for his lifetime. Sidney had recognized his unusual
+power, if not yet his genius. He brought him forward; perhaps he
+accepted him as a friend. Tradition makes him Sidney's companion at
+Penshurst; in his early poems, Kent is the county with which he seems
+most familiar. But Sidney certainly made him known to the queen; he
+probably recommended him as a promising servant to Leicester: and he
+impressed his own noble and beautiful character deeply on Spenser's
+mind. Spenser saw and learned in him what was then the highest type of
+the finished gentleman. He led Spenser astray. Sidney was not <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a>[<a href="./images/24.png">24</a>]</span>without
+his full share of that affectation, which was then thought refinement.
+Like Gabriel Harvey, he induced Spenser to waste his time on the
+artificial versifying which was in vogue. But such faults and mistakes
+of fashion, and in one shape or another they are inevitable in all ages,
+were as nothing, compared to the influence on a highly receptive nature,
+of a character so elevated and pure, so genial, so brave and true. It
+was not in vain that Spenser was thus brought so near to his
+"Astrophel."</p>
+
+<p>These letters tell us all that we know of Spenser's life at this time.
+During these anxious eighteen months, and connected with persons like
+Sidney and Leicester, Spenser only writes to Harvey on literary
+subjects. He is discreet, and will not indulge Harvey's "desire to hear
+of my late being with her Majesty." According to a literary fashion of
+the time, he writes and is addressed as <i>M. Immerito</i>, and the great
+business which occupies him and fills the letters is the scheme devised
+in Sidney's <i>Areopagus</i> for the "general surceasing and silence of bald
+Rymers, and also of the very best of them too; and for prescribing
+certain laws and rules of quantities of English syllables for English
+verse." Spenser "is more in love with his English versifying than with
+ryming,"&mdash;"which," he says to Harvey, "I should have done long since, if
+I would then have followed your counsel." Harvey, of course, is
+delighted; he thanks the good angel which puts it into the heads of
+Sidney and Edward Dyer, "the two very diamonds of her Majesty's court,"
+"our very Castor and Pollux," to "help forward our new famous enterprise
+for the exchanging of barbarous rymes for artificial verses;" and the
+whole subject is discussed at great length between the two friends; "Mr.
+Drant's" rules are compared with those of "Mr. Sidney," revised by "Mr.
+Immerito;" and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a>[<a href="./images/25.png">25</a>]</span>examples, highly illustrative of the character of the
+"famous enterprise" are copiously given. In one of Harvey's letters we
+have a curious account of changes of fashion in studies and ideas at
+Cambridge. They seem to have changed since Spenser's time.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I beseech you all this while, what news at <i>Cambridge</i>?
+<i>Tully</i> and <i>Demosthenes</i> nothing so much studied as they were
+wont: <i>Livy</i> and <i>Sallust</i> perhaps more, rather than less:
+<i>Lucian</i> never so much: <i>Aristotle</i> much named but little
+read: <i>Xenophon</i> and <i>Plato</i> reckoned amongst discoursers, and
+conceited superficial fellows; much verbal and sophistical
+jangling; little subtle and effectual disputing. <i>Machiavel</i> a
+great man: <i>Castilio</i>, of no small repute: <i>Petrarch</i> and
+<i>Boccace</i> in every man's mouth: <i>Galateo</i> and <i>Guazzo</i> never
+so happy: but some acquainted with <i>Unico Aretino</i>: the
+<i>French</i> and <i>Italian</i> highly regarded: the <i>Latin</i> and
+<i>Greek</i> but lightly. The <i>Queen Mother</i> at the beginning or
+end of every conference: all inquisitive after news: new
+<i>books</i>, new fashions, new laws, new officers, and some after
+new elements, some after new heavens and hells too. <i>Turkish</i>
+affairs familiarly known: castles built in the air: much ado,
+and little help: in no age so little so much made of; every
+one highly in his own favour. Something made of nothing, in
+spight of Nature: numbers made of cyphers, in spight of Art.
+Oxen and asses, notwithstanding the absurdity it seemed to
+<i>Plautus</i>, drawing in the same yoke: the Gospel taught, not
+learnt; Charity cold; nothing good, but by imputation; the
+Ceremonial Law in word abrogated, the Judicial in effect
+disannull'd, the Moral abandon'd; <i>the Light, the Light</i> in
+every man's lips, but mark their eyes, and you will say they
+are rather like owls than eagles. As of old books, so of
+ancient virtue, honesty, fidelity, equity, new abridgments;
+every day spawns new opinions: heresy in divinity, in
+philosophy, in humanity, in manners, grounded upon hearsay;
+doctors contemn'd; the <i>devil</i> not so hated as the <i>pope</i>;
+many invectives, but no amendment. No more ado about caps and
+surplices; Mr. <i>Cartwright</i> quite forgotten.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a>[<a href="./images/26.png">26</a>]</span>
+<i>David</i>, <i>Ulysses</i>, and <i>Solon</i>, feign'd themselves fools and
+madmen; our fools and madmen feign themselves <i>Davids</i>,
+<i>Ulysses's</i>, and <i>Solons</i>. It is pity fair weather should do
+any hurt; but I know what peace and quietness hath done with
+some melancholy pickstraws.</p></div>
+
+<p>The letters preserve a good many touches of character which are
+interesting. This, for instance, which shows Spenser's feeling about
+Sidney. "New books," writes Spenser, "I hear of none, but only of one,
+that writing a certain book called <i>The School of Abuse</i>, [Stephen
+Gosson's <i>Invective against poets, pipers, players, &amp;c.</i>] and dedicating
+to M. Sidney, was for his labour scorned: <i>if at least it be in the
+goodness of that nature to scorn</i>." As regards Spenser himself, it is
+clear from the letters that Harvey was not without uneasiness lest his
+friend, from his gay and pleasure-loving nature, and the temptations
+round him, should be carried away into the vices of an age, which,
+though very brilliant and high-tempered, was also a very dissolute one.
+He couches his counsels mainly in Latin; but they point to real danger;
+and he adds in English,&mdash;"Credit me, I will never lin [= cease] baiting
+at you, till I have rid you quite of this yonkerly and womanly humour."
+But in the second pair of letters of April, 1580, a lady appears.
+Whether Spenser was her husband or her lover, we know not; but she is
+his "sweetheart." The two friends write of her in Latin. Spenser sends
+in Latin the saucy messages of his sweetheart, "meum corculum," to
+Harvey; Harvey, with academic gallantry, sends her in Latin as many
+thanks for her charming letter as she has hairs, "half golden, half
+silver, half jewelled, in her little head;"&mdash;she is a second little
+Rosalind&mdash;"altera Rosalindula," whom he salutes as "Domina Immerito, mea
+bellissima Colina Clouta." But <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a>[<a href="./images/27.png">27</a>]</span>whether wife or mistress, we hear of her
+no more. Further, the letters contain notices of various early works of
+Spenser. The "new" <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>, of which more will be said,
+had just been published. And in this correspondence of April, 1580, we
+have the first mention of the <i>Faery Queen</i>. The compositions here
+mentioned have been either lost, or worked into his later poetry; his
+<i>Dreams</i>, <i>Epithalamion Thamesis</i>, apparently in the "reformed verse,"
+his <i>Dying Pelican</i>, his <i>Slumber</i>, his <i>Stemmata Dudleiana</i>, his
+<i>Comedies</i>. They show at least the activity and eagerness of the writer
+in his absorbing pursuit. But he was still in bondage to the belief that
+English poetry ought to try to put on a classical dress. It is strange
+that the man who had written some of the poetry in the <i>Shepherd's
+Calendar</i> should have found either satisfaction or promise in the
+following attempt at Trimeter Iambics.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And nowe requite I you with the like, not with the verye
+beste, but with the verye shortest, namely, with a few
+Iambickes: I dare warrant they be precisely perfect for the
+feete (as you can easily judge), and varie not one inch from
+the Rule. I will imparte yours to Maister <i>Sidney</i> and Maister
+<i>Dyer</i> at my nexte going to the Courte. I praye you, keepe
+mine close to your selfe, or your verie entire friends,
+Maister <i>Preston</i>, Maister <i>Still</i>, and the reste.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Iambicum Trimetrum.</i></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Unhappie Verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Make thy selfe fluttring wings of thy fast flying<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thought, and fly forth unto my Love wheresoever she be:<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Whether lying reastlesse in heavy bedde, or else<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sitting so cheerlesse at the cheerfull boorde, or else<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Playing alone carelesse on hir heavenlie Virginals.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a>[<a href="./images/28.png">28</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">If in Bed, tell hir, that my eyes can take no reste:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If at Boorde, tell hir that my mouth can eate no meate:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If at hir Virginals, tell hir, I can heare no mirth.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Asked why? say: Waking Love suffereth no sleepe:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Say, that raging Love dothe appall the weake stomacke:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Say, that lamenting Love marreth the Musicall.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Tell hir, that hir pleasures were wonte to lull me asleepe:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Tell hir, that hir beautie was wonte to feede mine eyes:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Tell hir, that hir sweete Tongue was wonte to make me mirth.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Nowe doe I nightly waste, wanting my kindely reste:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nowe doe I dayly starve, wanting my lively foode:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nowe doe I alwayes dye, wanting thy timely mirth.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And if I waste, who will bewaile my heavy chaunce?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And if I starve, who will record my cursed end?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And if I dye, who will saye: <i>this was Immerito</i>?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4-1_1" id="Footnote_4-1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4-1_1"><span class="label">[4:1]</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="ihalf">&mdash;&mdash;Since the winged god his planet clear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Began in me to move, one year is spent:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The which doth longer unto me appear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than <i>all those forty</i> which my life outwent.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="author"><i>Sonnet</i> LX., probably written in 1593 or 1594.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5-2_2" id="Footnote_5-2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5-2_2"><span class="label">[5:2]</span></a> Leicester House, then Essex House, in the Strand.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5-3_3" id="Footnote_5-3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5-3_3"><span class="label">[5:3]</span></a> Earl of Essex.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5-4_4" id="Footnote_5-4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5-4_4"><span class="label">[5:4]</span></a> At Cadiz, June 21, 1596.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6-5_5" id="Footnote_6-5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6-5_5"><span class="label">[6:5]</span></a> <i>Sonnet</i> LXXIV.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6-6_6" id="Footnote_6-6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6-6_6"><span class="label">[6:6]</span></a> <i>Colin Clout's come Home again</i>, l. 536. Craik,
+<i>Spenser</i>, i. 9. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7-7_7" id="Footnote_7-7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7-7_7"><span class="label">[7:7]</span></a> See <i>The Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell</i>,
+1568-1580: from the MSS. at Towneley Hall. Edited by Rev. A. B. Grosart,
+1877.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9-8_8" id="Footnote_9-8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9-8_8"><span class="label">[9:8]</span></a> H. B. Wilson, <i>Hist. of Merchant Taylors' School</i>, p.
+23.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13-9_9" id="Footnote_13-9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13-9_9"><span class="label">[13:9]</span></a> Comp. <i>Sheph. Cal.</i> April l. 36. June l. 8. F. Q. 6. 10.
+7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22-1_10" id="Footnote_22-1_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22-1_10"><span class="label">[22:1]</span></a> Published in June, 1580. Reprinted incompletely in
+Haslewood, <i>Ancient Critical Essays</i> (1815), ii. 255. Extracts given in
+editions of Spenser by Hughes, Todd, and Morris. The letters are of
+April, 1579, and October, 1580.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a>[<a href="./images/29.png">29</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE NEW POET&mdash;THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR.</h3>
+
+<h4>[1579.]</h4>
+
+<p>It is clear that when Spenser appeared in London, he had found out his
+powers and vocation as a poet. He came from Cambridge, fully conscious
+of the powerful attraction of the imaginative faculties, conscious of an
+extraordinary command over the resources of language, and with a
+singular gift of sensitiveness to the grace and majesty and
+suggestiveness of sound and rhythm, such as makes a musician. And
+whether he knew it or not, his mind was in reality made up, as to what
+his English poetry was to be. In spite of opinions and fashions round
+him, in spite of university pedantry and the affectations of the court,
+in spite of Harvey's classical enthusiasm, and Sidney's Areopagus, and
+in spite of half-fancying himself converted to their views, his own
+powers and impulses showed him the truth, and made him understand better
+than his theories what a poet could and ought to do with English speech
+in its free play and genuine melodies. When we first come upon him, we
+find that at the age of twenty-seven, he had not only realized an idea
+of English poetry far in advance of anything which his age had yet
+conceived or seen; but that, besides what he had executed or planned, he
+had already in his mind the outlines of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a>[<a href="./images/30.png">30</a>]</span>the <i>Faery Queen</i>, and, in some
+form or other, though perhaps not yet as we have it, had written some
+portion of it.</p>
+
+<p>In attempting to revive for his own age Chaucer's suspended art, Spenser
+had the tendencies of the time with him. The age was looking out for
+some one to do for England what had been grandly done for Italy. The
+time in truth was full of poetry. The nation was just in that condition
+which is most favourable to an outburst of poetical life or art. It was
+highly excited; but it was also in a state of comparative peace and
+freedom from external disturbance. "An over-faint quietness," writes
+Sidney in 1581, lamenting that there were so few good poets, "should
+seem to strew the house for poets." After the first ten years of
+Elizabeth's reign, and the establishment of her authority, the country
+had begun to breathe freely, and fall into natural and regular ways.
+During the first half of the century, it had had before it the most
+astonishing changes which the world had seen for centuries. These
+changes seemed definitely to have run their course; with the convulsions
+which accompanied them, their uprootings and terrors, they were gone;
+and the world had become accustomed to their results. The nation still
+had before it great events, great issues, great perils, great and
+indefinite prospects of adventure and achievement. The old quarrels and
+animosities of Europe had altered in character: from being wars between
+princes, and disputes of personal ambition, they had attracted into them
+all that interests and divides mankind, from high to low. Their
+animating principle was a high and a sacred cause: they had become wars
+of liberty, and wars of religion. The world had settled down to the
+fixed antipathies and steady rivalries of centuries to come. But <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a>[<a href="./images/31.png">31</a>]</span>the
+mere shock of transition was over. Yet the remembrance of the great
+break-up was still fresh. For fifty years the English people had had
+before its eyes the great vicissitudes which make tragedy. They had seen
+the most unforeseen and most unexpected revolutions in what had for ages
+been held certain and immovable; the overthrow of the strongest
+institutions, and most venerable authorities; the violent shifting of
+feelings from faith to passionate rejection, from reverence to scorn and
+a hate which could not be satisfied. They had seen the strangest turns
+of fortune, the most wonderful elevations to power, the most terrible
+visitations of disgrace. They had seen the mightiest ruined, the
+brightest and most admired brought down to shame and death, men struck
+down with all the forms of law, whom the age honoured as its noblest
+ornaments. They had seen the flames of martyr or heretic, heads which
+had worn a crown laid one after another on the block, controversies, not
+merely between rivals for power, but between the deepest principles and
+the most rooted creeds, settled on the scaffold. Such a time of
+surprise,&mdash;of hope and anxiety, of horror and anguish to-day, of relief
+and exultation to-morrow,&mdash;had hardly been to England as the first half
+of the sixteenth century. All that could stir men's souls, all that
+could inflame their hearts, or that could wring them, had happened.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, compared with previous centuries, and with what was going on
+abroad, the time now was a time of peace, and men lived securely. Wealth
+was increasing. The Wars of the Roses had left the crown powerful to
+enforce order, and protect industry and trade. The nation was beginning
+to grow rich. When the day's work was done, men's leisure was not
+disturbed by <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a>[<a href="./images/32.png">32</a>]</span>the events of neighbouring war. They had time to open
+their imaginations to the great spectacle which had been unrolled before
+them, to reflect upon it, to put into shape their thoughts about it. The
+intellectual movement of the time had reached England, and its strong
+impulse to mental efforts in new and untried directions was acting
+powerfully upon Englishmen. But though there was order and present peace
+at home, there was much to keep men's minds on the stretch. There was
+quite enough danger and uncertainty to wind up their feelings to a high
+pitch. But danger was not so pressing as to prevent them from giving
+full place to the impressions of the strange and eventful scene round
+them, with its grandeur, its sadness, its promises. In such a state of
+things there is everything to tempt poetry. There are its materials and
+its stimulus, and there is the leisure to use its materials.</p>
+
+<p>But the poet had not yet been found; and everything connected with
+poetry was in the disorder of ignorance and uncertainty. Between the
+counsels of a pedantic scholarship, and the rude and hesitating, but
+true instincts of the natural English ear, every one was at sea. Yet it
+seemed as if every one was trying his hand at verse. Popular writing
+took that shape. The curious and unique record of literature preserved
+in the registers of the Stationers' Company, shows that the greater
+proportion of what was published, or at least entered for publication,
+was in the shape of ballads. The ballad vied with the sermon in doing
+what the modern newspaper does, in satisfying the public craving for
+information, amusement, or guidance. It related the last great novelty,
+the last great battle or crime, a storm or monstrous birth. It told some
+pathetic or burlesque story, or it moralized on the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a>[<a href="./images/33.png">33</a>]</span>humours or follies
+of classes and professions, of young and old, of men and of women. It
+sang the lover's hopes or sorrows, or the adventures of some hero of
+history or romance. It might be a fable, a satire, a libel, a squib, a
+sacred song or paraphrase, a homily. But about all that it treated it
+sought to throw more or less the colour of imagination. It appealed to
+the reader's feelings, or sympathy, or passion. It attempted to raise
+its subject above the level of mere matter of fact. It sought for choice
+and expressive words; it called in the help of measure and rhythm. It
+aimed at a rude form of art. Presently the critical faculty came into
+play. Scholars, acquainted with classical models and classical rules,
+began to exercise their judgment on their own poetry, to construct
+theories, to review the performances before them, to suggest plans for
+the improvement of the poetic art. Their essays are curious, as the
+beginnings of that great critical literature, which in England, in spite
+of much infelicity, has only been second to the poetry which it judged.
+But in themselves they are crude, meagre, and helpless; interesting
+mainly, as showing how much craving there was for poetry, and how little
+good poetry to satisfy it, and what inconceivable doggrel could be
+recommended by reasonable men, as fit to be admired and imitated. There
+is fire and eloquence in Philip Sidney's <i>Apologie for Poetrie</i> (1581);
+but his ideas about poetry were floating, loose, and ill defined, and he
+had not much to point to as of first-rate excellence in recent writers.
+Webbe's <i>Discourse of English Poetrie</i> (1586), and the more elaborate
+work ascribed to George Puttenham (1589), works of tame and artificial
+learning without Sidney's fire, reveal equally the poverty, as a whole,
+of what had been as yet produced in England as poetry, in spite of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a>[<a href="./images/34.png">34</a>]</span>widespread passion for poetry. The specimens which they quote and praise
+are mostly grotesque to the last degree. Webbe improves some gracefully
+flowing lines of Spenser's into the most portentous Sapphics; and
+Puttenham squeezes compositions into the shapes of triangles, eggs, and
+pilasters. Gabriel Harvey is accused by his tormentor, Nash, of doing
+the same, "of having writ verse in all kinds, as in form of a pair of
+gloves, a dozen of points, a pair of spectacles, a two-hand sword, a
+poynado, a colossus, a pyramid, a painter's easel, a market cross, a
+trumpet, an anchor, a pair of pot-hooks." Puttenham's Art of Poetry,
+with its books, one on Proportion, the other on Ornament, might be
+compared to an Art of War, of which one book treated of barrack drill,
+and the other of busbies, sabretasches, and different forms of
+epaulettes and feathers. These writers do not want good sense or the
+power to make a good remark. But the stuff and material for good
+criticism, the strong and deep poetry, which makes such criticisms as
+theirs seem so absurd, had not yet appeared.</p>
+
+<p>A change was at hand; and the suddenness of it is one of the most
+astonishing things in literary history. The ten years from 1580 to 1590
+present a set of critical essays, giving a picture of English poetry of
+which, though there are gleams of a better hope, and praise is specially
+bestowed on a "new poet," the general character is feebleness, fantastic
+absurdity, affectation and bad taste. Force, and passion, and simple
+truth, and powerful thoughts of the world and man, are rare; and
+poetical reformers appear maundering about miserable attempts at English
+hexameters and sapphics. What was to be looked for from all that? Who
+could suppose what was preparing under it all? But the dawn was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a>[<a href="./images/35.png">35</a>]</span>come.
+The next ten years, from 1590 to 1600, not only saw the <i>Faery Queen</i>,
+but they were the years of the birth of the English Drama. Compare the
+idea which we get of English poetry from Philip Sidney's Defense in
+1581, and Puttenham's treatise in 1589, I do not say with Shakespere,
+but with Lamb's selections from the Dramatic Poets, many of them unknown
+names to the majority of modern readers; and we see at once what a bound
+English poetry has made; we see that a new spring time of power and
+purpose in poetical thought has opened; new and original forms have
+sprung to life of poetical grandeur, seriousness, and magnificence. From
+the poor and rude play-houses, with their troops of actors most of them
+profligate and disreputable, their coarse excitements, their buffoonery,
+license, and taste for the monstrous and horrible,&mdash;denounced not
+without reason as corruptors of public morals, preached against at
+Paul's Cross, expelled the city by the Corporation, classed by the law
+with rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and patronized by the great
+and unscrupulous nobles in defiance of it&mdash;there burst forth suddenly a
+new poetry, which with its reality, depth, sweetness and nobleness took
+the world captive. The poetical ideas and aspirations of the Englishmen
+of the time had found at last adequate interpreters, and their own
+national and unrivalled expression.</p>
+
+<p>And in this great movement Spenser was the harbinger and announcing
+sign. But he was only the harbinger. What he did was to reveal to
+English ears as it never had been revealed before, at least, since the
+days of Chaucer, the sweet music, the refined grace, the inexhaustible
+versatility of the English tongue. But his own efforts were in a
+different direction from that profound and insatiable seeking <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a>[<a href="./images/36.png">36</a>]</span>after the
+real, in thought and character, in representation and expression, which
+made Shakespere so great, and his brethren great in proportion as they
+approached him. Spenser's genius continued to the end under the
+influences which were so powerful when it first unfolded itself. To the
+last it allied itself, in form, at least, with the artificial. To the
+last it moved in a world which was not real, which never had existed,
+which, any how, was only a world of memory and sentiment. He never threw
+himself frankly on human life as it is; he always viewed it through a
+veil of mist which greatly altered its true colours, and often distorted
+its proportions. And thus while more than any one he prepared the
+instruments and the path for the great triumph, he himself missed the
+true field for the highest exercise of poetic power; he missed the
+highest honours of that in which he led the way.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, curiously enough, it seems as if, early in his career, he was
+affected by the strong stream which drew Shakespere. Among the
+compositions of his first period, besides <i>The Shepherd's Calendar</i>, are
+<i>Nine Comedies</i>,&mdash;clearly real plays, which his friend Gabriel Harvey
+praised with enthusiasm. As early as 1579 Spenser had laid before
+Gabriel Harvey for his judgement and advice, a portion of the <i>Fairy
+Queen</i> in some shape or another, and these nine comedies. He was
+standing at the parting of the ways. The allegory, with all its tempting
+associations and machinery, with its ingenuities and pictures, and
+boundless license to vagueness and to fancy, was on one side; and on the
+other, the drama, with its <i>prima facie</i> and superficially prosaic
+aspects, and its kinship to what was customary and commonplace and
+unromantic in human life. Of the nine comedies, composed on the model of
+those of Ariosto <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a>[<a href="./images/37.png">37</a>]</span>and Machiavelli and other Italians, every trace has
+perished. But this was Gabriel Harvey's opinion of the respective value
+of the two specimens of work submitted to him, and this was his counsel
+to their author. In April, 1580, he thus writes to Spenser.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In good faith I had once again nigh forgotten your <i>Faerie
+Queene</i>; howbeit, by good chance, I have now sent her home at
+the last neither in better or worse case than I found her. And
+must you of necessity have my judgement of her indeed? To be
+plain, I am void of all judgement, if your <i>Nine Comedies</i>,
+whereunto in imitation of Herodotus, you give the names of the
+Nine Muses (and in one man's fancy not unworthily), come not
+nearer Ariosto's comedies, either for the fineness of
+plausible elocution, or the rareness of poetical invention,
+than that <i>Elvish Queen</i> doth to his <i>Orlando Furioso</i>, which
+notwithstanding you will needs seem to emulate, and hope to
+overgo, as you flatly professed yourself in one of your last
+letters.</p>
+
+<p>Besides that you know, it hath been the usual practice of the
+most exquisite and odd wits in all nations, and specially in
+Italy rather to show, and advance themselves that way than any
+other: as, namely, those three notorious discoursing heads,
+Bibiena, Machiavel, and Aretino did (to let Bembo and Ariosto
+pass) with the great admiration and wonderment of the whole
+country: being indeed reputed matchable in all points, both
+for conceit of wit and eloquent deciphering of matters, either
+with Aristophanes and Menander in Greek, or with Plautus and
+Terence in Latin, or with any other in any other tongue. But I
+will not stand greatly with you in your own matters. If so be
+the <i>Faery Queene</i> be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses,
+and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo: mark what
+I say, and yet I will not say that I thought, but there is an
+end for this once, and fare you well, till God or some good
+angel put you in a better mind.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is plain on which side Spenser's own judgement inclined. He had
+probably written the comedies, as he had written English hexameters, out
+of deference to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a>[<a href="./images/38.png">38</a>]</span>others, or to try his hand. But the current of his own
+secret thoughts, those thoughts, with their ideals and aims, which tell
+a man what he is made for, and where his power lies, set another way.
+The <i>Fairy Queen was</i> 'fairer in his eye than the Nine Muses, and
+Hobgoblin did run away with the garland from Apollo.' What Gabriel
+Harvey prayed for as the 'better mind' did not come. And we cannot
+repine at a decision which gave us, in the shape which it took at last,
+the allegory of the <i>Fairy Queen</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But the <i>Fairy Queen</i>, though already planned and perhaps begun, belongs
+to the last ten years of the century, to the season of fulfilment not of
+promise, to the blossoming, not to the opening bud. The new hopes for
+poetry which Spenser brought were given in a work, which the <i>Fairy
+Queen</i> has eclipsed and almost obscured, as the sun puts out the morning
+star. Yet that which marked a turning-point in the history of our
+poetry, was the book which came out, timidly and anonymously, in the end
+of 1579, or the beginning of 1580, under the borrowed title of the
+<i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>, a name familiar in those days as that of an early
+medley of astrology and homely receipts from time to time reprinted,
+which was the Moore's or Zadkiel's almanac of the time. It was not
+published ostensibly by Spenser himself, though it is inscribed to
+Philip Sidney in a copy of verses signed with Spenser's masking name of
+<i>Immerito</i>. The avowed responsibility for it might have been
+inconvenient for a young man pushing his fortune among the cross
+currents of Elizabeth's court. But it was given to the world by a friend
+of the author's, signing himself E. K., now identified with Spenser's
+fellow-student at Pembroke, Edward Kirke, who dedicates it in a long,
+critical epistle of some interest to the author's friend, Gabriel
+Harvey, and after the fashion <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a>[<a href="./images/39.png">39</a>]</span>of some of the Italian books of poetry,
+accompanies it with a gloss, explaining words, and to a certain extent,
+allusions. Two things are remarkable in Kirke's epistle. One is the
+confidence with which he announces the yet unrecognized excellence of
+"this one new poet," whom he is not afraid to put side by side with
+"that good old poet," Chaucer, the "loadstar of our language." The other
+point is the absolute reliance which he places on the powers of the
+English language, handled by one who has discerned its genius, and is
+not afraid to use its wealth. "In my opinion, it is one praise of many,
+that are due to this poet, that he hath laboured to restore, as to their
+rightful heritage, such good and natural English words, as have been
+long time out of use, or almost clean disherited, which is the only
+cause, that our mother tongue, which truly of itself is both full enough
+for prose, and stately enough for verse, hath long time been counted
+most bare and barren of both." The friends, Kirke and Harvey, were not
+wrong in their estimate of the importance of Spenser's work. The "new
+poet," as he came to be customarily called, had really made one of those
+distinct steps in his art, which answer to discoveries and inventions in
+other spheres of human interest&mdash;steps which make all behind them seem
+obsolete and mistaken. There was much in the new poetry which was
+immature and imperfect, not a little that was fantastic and affected.
+But it was the first adequate effort of reviving English poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i> consists of twelve compositions, with no other
+internal connexion than that they are assigned respectively to the
+twelve months of the year. They are all different in subject, metre,
+character, and excellence. They are called <i>&AElig;glogues</i>, according to the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a>[<a href="./images/40.png">40</a>]</span>whimsical derivation adopted from the Italians of the word which the
+classical writers called Eclogues: "<i>&AElig;glogai</i>, as it were <ins class="greek" title="aig&ocirc;n">&#945;&#7984;&#947;&#8182;&#957;</ins>
+or <ins class="greek" title="aigonom&ocirc;n logoi">&#945;&#7984;&#947;&#959;&#957;&#8057;&#956;&#969;&#957; &#955;&#8057;&#947;&#959;&#953;</ins>, that is, Goatherd's Tales." The book is in
+its form an imitation of that highly artificial kind of poetry which the
+later Italians of the Renaissance had copied from Virgil, as Virgil had
+copied it from the Sicilian and Alexandrian Greeks, and to which had
+been given the name of Bucolic or Pastoral. Petrarch, in imitation of
+Virgil, had written Latin Bucolics, as he had written a Latin Epic, his
+<i>Africa</i>. He was followed in the next century by Baptista Mantuanus
+(1448-1516), the "old Mantuan," of Holofernes in <i>Love's Labour's Lost</i>,
+whose Latin "Eglogues" became a favourite school-book in England, and
+who was imitated by a writer who passed for a poet in the time of Henry
+VIII., Alexander Barclay. In the hands of the Sicilians, pastoral poetry
+may have been an attempt at idealizing country life almost as genuine as
+some of Wordsworth's poems; but it soon ceased to be that, and in
+Alexandrian hands it took its place among the recognized departments of
+classic and literary copying, in which Virgil found and used it. But a
+further step had been made since Virgil had adopted it as an instrument
+of his genius. In the hands of Mantuan and Barclay it was a vehicle for
+general moralizing, and in particular for severe satire on women and the
+clergy. And Virgil, though he may himself speak under the the names of
+Tityrus and Menalcas, and lament Julius C&aelig;sar as Daphnis, did not
+conceive of the Roman world as peopled by flocks and sheep-cotes, or its
+emperors and chiefs, its poets, senators, and ladies, as shepherds and
+shepherdesses, of higher or lower degree. But in Spenser's time, partly
+through undue deference to what was supposed to be Italian taste, partly
+owing to the tardiness <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a>[<a href="./images/41.png">41</a>]</span>of national culture, and because the poetic
+impulses had not yet gained power to force their way through the
+embarrassment and awkwardness which accompany reviving art,&mdash;the world
+was turned for the purposes of the poetry of civil life, into a pastoral
+scene. Poetical invention was held to consist in imagining an
+environment, a set of outward circumstances, as unlike as possible to
+the familiar realities of actual life and employment, in which the
+primary affections and passions had their play. A fantastic basis,
+varying according to the conventions of the fashion, was held essential
+for the representation of the ideal. Masquerade and hyperbole were the
+stage and scenery on which the poet's sweetness, or tenderness, or
+strength was to be put forth. The masquerade, when his subject belonged
+to peace, was one of shepherds: when it was one of war and adventure, it
+was a masquerade of knight errantry. But a masquerade was necessary, if
+he was to raise his composition above the vulgarities and trivialities
+of the street, the fire-side, the camp, or even the court; if he was to
+give it the dignity, the ornament, the unexpected results, the
+brightness, and colour, which belong to poetry. The fashion had the
+sanction of the brilliant author of the <i>Arcadia</i>, the "Courtier,
+Soldier, Scholar," who was the "mould of form," and whose judgment was
+law to all men of letters in the middle years of Elizabeth, the
+all-accomplished Philip Sidney. Spenser submitted to this fashion from
+first to last. When first he ventured on a considerable poetical
+enterprise, he spoke his thoughts, not in his own name, nor as his
+contemporaries ten years later did, through the mouth of characters in a
+tragic or comic drama, but through imaginary rustics, to whom every one
+else in the world was a rustic, and lived among the sheep-folds, with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a>[<a href="./images/42.png">42</a>]</span>a
+background of downs or vales or fields, and the open sky above. His
+shepherds and goatherds bear the homely names of native English clowns,
+Diggon Davie, Willye, and Piers; Colin Clout, adopted from Skelton,
+stands for Spenser himself; Hobbinol, for Gabriel Harvey; Cuddie,
+perhaps for Edward Kirke; names revived by Ambrose Phillips, and laughed
+at by Pope, when pastorals again came into vogue with the wits of Queen
+Anne.<a name="FNanchor_42-1_11" id="FNanchor_42-1_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_42-1_11" class="fnanchor">[42:1]</a> With them are mingled classical ones like Menalcas, French
+ones from Marot, anagrams like Algrind for Grindal, significant ones
+like Palinode, plain ones like Lettice, and romantic ones like Rosalind;
+and no incongruity seems to be found in matching a beautiful shepherdess
+named Dido with a Great Shepherd called Lobbin, or when the verse
+requires it, Lobb. And not merely the speakers in the dialogue are
+shepherds; every one is in their view a shepherd. Chaucer is the "god of
+shepherds," and Orpheus is a&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Shepherd that did fetch his dame<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From Plutoe's baleful bower withouten leave."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The "fair Elisa," is the Queen of shepherds all; her great father is
+Pan, the shepherds' god, and Anne Boleyn is Syrinx. It is not unnatural
+that when the clergy are spoken of, as they are in three of the poems,
+the figure should be kept up. But it is curious to find that the
+shepherd's god, the great Pan, who stands in one connexion for Henry
+VIII., should in another represent in sober earnest the Redeemer and
+Judge of the world.<a name="FNanchor_42-2_12" id="FNanchor_42-2_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_42-2_12" class="fnanchor">[42:2]</a></p>
+
+<p>The poems framed in this grotesque setting, are on many themes, and of
+various merit, and probably of different <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a>[<a href="./images/43.png">43</a>]</span>dates. Some are simply amatory
+effusions of an ordinary character, full of a lover's despair and
+complaint. Three or four are translations or imitations; translations
+from Marot, imitations from Theocritus, Bion, or Virgil. Two of them
+contain fables told with great force and humour. The story of the Oak
+and the Briar, related as his friendly commentator, Kirke, says, "so
+lively and so feelingly, as if the thing were set forth in some picture
+before our eyes," for the warning of "disdainful younkers," is a first
+fruit, and promise of Spenser's skill in vivid narrative. The fable of
+the Fox and the Kid, a curious illustration of the popular discontent at
+the negligence of the clergy, and the popular suspicions about the arts
+of Roman intriguers, is told with great spirit, and with mingled humour
+and pathos. There is of course a poem in honour of the great queen, who
+was the goddess of their idolatry to all the wits and all the learned of
+England, the "faire Eliza," and a compliment is paid to Leicester,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">The worthy whom she loveth best,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That first the White Bear to the stake did bring.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Two of them are avowedly burlesque imitations of rustic dialect and
+banter, carried on with much spirit. One composition is a funeral
+tribute to some unknown lady; another is a complaint of the neglect of
+poets by the great. In three of the &AElig;glogues he comes on a more serious
+theme; they are vigorous satires on the loose living and greediness of
+clergy forgetful of their charge, with strong invectives against foreign
+corruption and against the wiles of the wolves and foxes of Rome, with
+frequent allusions to passing incidents in the guerilla war with the
+seminary priests, and with a warm eulogy on the faithfulness and wisdom
+of Archbishop Grindal; <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a>[<a href="./images/44.png">44</a>]</span>whose name is disguised as old Algrind, and with
+whom in his disgrace the poet is not afraid to confess deep sympathy.
+They are, in a poetical form, part of that manifold and varied system of
+Puritan aggression on the established ecclesiastical order of England,
+which went through the whole scale from the "Admonition to Parliament,"
+and the lectures of Cartwright and Travers, to the libels of Martin
+Mar-prelate: a system of attack which with all its injustice and
+violence, and with all its mischievous purposes, found but too much
+justification in the inefficiency and corruption of many both of the
+bishops and clergy, and in the rapacious and selfish policy of the
+government, forced to starve and cripple the public service, while great
+men and favourites built up their fortunes out of the prodigal
+indulgence of the Queen.</p>
+
+<p>The collection of poems is thus a very miscellaneous one, and cannot be
+said to be in its subjects inviting. The poet's system of composition,
+also, has the disadvantage of being to a great degree unreal, forced and
+unnatural. Departing from the precedent of Virgil and the Italians, but
+perhaps copying the artificial Doric of the Alexandrians, he professes
+to make his language and style suitable to the "ragged and rustical"
+rudeness of the shepherds whom he brings on the scene, by making it both
+archaic and provincial. He found in Chaucer a store of forms and words
+sufficiently well known to be with a little help intelligible, and
+sufficiently out of common use to give the character of antiquity to a
+poetry which employed them. And from his sojourn in the North he is said
+to have imported a certain number of local peculiarities which would
+seem unfamiliar and harsh in the South. His editor's apology for this
+use of "ancient solemn words," as both proper and as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a>[<a href="./images/45.png">45</a>]</span>ornamental, is
+worth quoting; it is an early instance of what is supposed to be not yet
+common, a sense of pleasure in that wildness which we call picturesque.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And first for the words to speak: I grant they be something
+hard, and of most men unused: yet English, and also used of
+most excellent Authors and most famous Poets. In whom, when as
+this our Poet hath been much travelled and throughly read, how
+could it be, (as that worthy Orator said,) but that 'walking
+in the sun, although for other cause he walked, yet needs he
+mought be sun-burnt'; and having the sound of those ancient
+poets still ringing in his ears, he mought needs, in singing,
+hit out some of their tunes. But whether he useth them by such
+casualty and custom, or of set purpose and choice, as thinking
+them fittest for such rustical rudeness of shepherds, either
+for that their rough sound would make his rymes more ragged
+and rustical, or else because such old and obsolete words are
+most used of country folks, sure I think, and I think not
+amiss, that they bring great grace, and, as one would say,
+authority, to the verse.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Yet neither everywhere must old
+words be stuffed in, nor the common Dialect and manner of
+speaking so corrupted thereby, that, as in old buildings, it
+seem disorderly and ruinous. But as in most exquisite pictures
+they use to blaze and portrait not only the dainty lineaments
+of beauty, but also round about it to shadow the rude thickets
+and craggy cliffs, that by the baseness of such parts, more
+excellency may accrue to the principal&mdash;for ofttimes, we find
+ourselves I know not how, singularly delighted with the show
+of such natural rudeness, and take great pleasure in that
+disorderly order:&mdash;even so do these rough and harsh terms
+enlumine, and make more clearly to appear, the brightness of
+brave and glorious words. So oftentimes a discord in music
+maketh a comely concordance.</p></div>
+
+<p>But when allowance is made for an eclectic and sometimes pedantic
+phraseology, and for mannerisms to which the fashion of the age tempted
+him, such as the extravagant use of alliteration, or, as they called it,
+"hunting the letter," the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i> is, for its time, of
+great interest.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a>[<a href="./images/46.png">46</a>]</span>
+Spenser's force, and sustained poetical power, and singularly musical
+ear are conspicuous in this first essay of his genius. In the poets
+before him of this century, fragments and stanzas, and perhaps single
+pieces might be found, which might be compared with his work. Fugitive
+pieces, chiefly amatory, meet us of real sprightliness, or grace, or
+tenderness. The stanzas which Sackville, afterwards, Lord Buckhurst,
+contributed to the collection called the <i>Mirror of Magistrates</i>,<a name="FNanchor_46-3_13" id="FNanchor_46-3_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_46-3_13" class="fnanchor">[46:3]</a>
+are marked with a pathetic majesty, a genuine sympathy for the
+precariousness of greatness, which seem a prelude to the Elizabethan
+drama. But these fragments were mostly felicitous efforts, which soon
+passed on into the ungainly, the uncouth, the obscure or the grotesque.
+But in the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i> we have for the first time in the
+century, the swing, the command, the varied resources of the real poet,
+who is not driven by failing language or thought into frigid or tumid
+absurdities. Spenser is master over himself and his instrument even when
+he uses it in a way which offends our taste. There are passages in the
+<i>Shepherd's Calendar</i> of poetical eloquence, of refined vigour, and of
+musical and imaginative sweetness, such as the English language had
+never attained to, since the days of him, who was to the age of Spenser,
+what Shakespere and Milton are to ours, the pattern and fount of poetry,
+Chaucer. Dryden is not afraid to class Spenser with Theocritus and
+Virgil, and to write that the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i> is not to be matched
+in any language.<a name="FNanchor_46-4_14" id="FNanchor_46-4_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_46-4_14" class="fnanchor">[46:4]</a> And this was at once recognized. The authorship
+of it, as has been said, was not formally acknowledged. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a>[<a href="./images/47.png">47</a>]</span>Indeed, Mr.
+Collier remarks that seven years after its publication, and after it had
+gone through three or four separate editions, it was praised by a
+contemporary poet, George Whetstone, himself a friend of Spenser's, as
+the "reputed work of Sir Philip Sidney." But if it was officially a
+secret, it was an open secret, known to every one who cared to be well
+informed. It is possible that the free language used in it about
+ecclesiastical abuses was too much in sympathy with the growing
+fierceness and insolence of Puritan invective to be safely used by a
+poet who gave his name: and one of the reasons assigned for Burghley's
+dislike to Spenser is the praise bestowed in the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>
+on Archbishop Grindal, then in deep disgrace for resisting the
+suppression of the puritan prophesyings. But anonymous as it was, it had
+been placed under Sidney's protection; and it was at once warmly
+welcomed. It is not often that in those remote days we get evidence of
+the immediate effect of a book; but we have this evidence in Spenser's
+case. In this year, probably, after it was published, we find it spoken
+of by Philip Sidney, not without discriminating criticism, but as one of
+the few recent examples of poetry worthy to be named after Chaucer.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I account the <i>Mirror of Magistrates</i> meetly furnished of
+beautiful parts; and in the Earl of Surrey's <i>Lyrics</i> many
+things tasting of birth, and worthy of a noble mind. The
+<i>Shepherd's Calendar</i> hath much poetry in his Eglogues: indeed
+worthy the reading if I be not deceived. That same framing of
+his style in an old rustic language I dare not allow, sith
+neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sanazar in
+Italian, did affect it. Besides these do I not remember to
+have seen but few (to speak boldly) printed that have poetical
+sinews in them.</p></div>
+
+<p>Sidney's patronage of the writer and general approval <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a>[<a href="./images/48.png">48</a>]</span>of the work
+doubtless had something to do with making Spenser's name known: but he
+at once takes a place in contemporary judgment which no one else takes,
+till the next decade of the century. In 1586, Webbe published his
+<i>Discourse of English Poetrie</i>. In this, the author of the <i>Shepherd's
+Calendar</i> is spoken of by the name given him by its Editor, E. K&mdash;&mdash;, as
+the "new poet," just as earlier in the century, the <i>Orlando Furioso</i>
+was styled the "nuova poesia;" and his work is copiously used to supply
+examples and illustrations of the critic's rules and observations.
+Webbe's review of existing poetry was the most comprehensive yet
+attempted: but the place which he gives to the new poet, whose name was
+in men's mouths, though like the author of <i>In Memoriam</i>, he had not
+placed it on his title-page, was one quite apart.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This place [to wear the Laurel] have I purposely reserved for
+one, who, if not only, yet in my judgement principally,
+deserveth the title of the rightest English poet that ever I
+read: that is, the author of the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>,
+intituled to the worthy Gentleman Master Philip Sidney,
+whether it was Master Sp. or what rare scholar in Pembroke
+Hall soever, because himself and his friends, for what respect
+I know not, would not reveal it, I force not greatly to set
+down. Sorry I am that I cannot find none other with whom I
+might couple him in this catalogue in his rare gift of poetry:
+although one there is, though now long since seriously
+occupied in graver studies, Master Gabriel Harvey, yet as he
+was once his most special friend and fellow poet, so because
+he hath taken such pains not only in his Latin poetry .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. but
+also to reform our English verse .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. therefore will I
+adventure to set them together as two of the rarest wits and
+learnedest masters of poetry in England.</p></div>
+
+<p>He even ventured to compare him favourably with Virgil.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a>[<a href="./images/49.png">49</a>]</span></p><div class="blockquot"><p>But now yet at the last hath England hatched up one poet of
+this sort, in my conscience comparable with the best in any
+respect: even Master Sp., author of the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>,
+whose travail in that piece of English poetry I think verily
+is so commendable, as none of equal judgement can yield him
+less praise for his excellent skill and skilful excellency
+showed forth in the same than they would to either Theocritus
+or Virgil, whom in mine opinion, if the coarseness of our
+speech, (I mean the course of custom which he would not
+infringe,) had been no more let unto him than their pure
+native tongues were unto them, he would have, if it might be,
+surpassed them.</p></div>
+
+<p>The courtly author of the <i>Arte of English Poesie</i>, 1589, commonly cited
+as G. Puttenham, classes him with Sidney. And from this time his name
+occurs in every enumeration of English poetical writers, till he
+appears, more than justifying this early appreciation of his genius, as
+Chaucer's not unworthy successor, in the <i>Faery Queen</i>. Afterwards, as
+other successful poetry was written, and the standards of taste were
+multiplied, this first enthusiastic reception cooled down. In James the
+First's time, Spenser's use of "old outworn words" is criticized as
+being no more "practical English" than Chaucer or Skelton: it is not
+"courtly" enough.<a name="FNanchor_49-5_15" id="FNanchor_49-5_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_49-5_15" class="fnanchor">[49:5]</a> The success of the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i> had
+also, apparently, substantial results, which some of his friends thought
+of with envy. They believed that it secured him high patronage, and
+opened to him a way to fortune. Poor Gabriel Harvey, writing in the year
+in which the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i> came out, contrasts his own less
+favoured lot, and his ill-repaid poetical efforts, with Colin Clout's
+good luck.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>But ever and ever, methinks, your great Catoes, <i>Ecquid erit
+pretii</i>, and our little Catoes, <i>Res age qu&aelig; prosunt</i>, make
+such <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a>[<a href="./images/50.png">50</a>]</span>a buzzing and ringing in my head, that I have little joy
+to animate and encourage either you or him to go forward,
+unless ye might make account of some certain ordinary wages,
+or at the least wise have your meat and drink for your day's
+works. As for myself, howsoever I have toyed and trifled
+heretofore, I am now taught, and I trust I shall shortly
+learn, (no remedy, I must of mere necessity give you over in
+the plain field) to employ my travail and time wholly or
+chiefly on those studies and practices that carry, as they
+say, meat in their mouth, having evermore their eye upon the
+Title, <i>De pane lucrando</i>, and their hand upon their
+halfpenny. For I pray now what saith Mr. Cuddie, alias you
+know who, in the tenth &AElig;glogue of the aforesaid famous new
+Calendar.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The dapper ditties, that I wont devise<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To feed youths' fancy and the flocking fry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Delighten much: what I the best for thy?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They han the pleasure, I a sclender prize.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I beat the bush, the birds to them do fly.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">What good thereof to Cuddie can arise?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But Master Colin Clout is not everybody, and albeit his old
+companions, Master Cuddie and Master Hobinoll, be as little
+beholding to their mistress poetry as ever you wist: yet he,
+peradventure, by the means of her special favour, and some
+personal privilege, may haply live by <i>Dying Pelicans</i>, and
+purchase great lands and lordships with the money which his
+<i>Calendar</i> and <i>Dreams</i> have, and will afford him.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42-1_11" id="Footnote_42-1_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42-1_11"><span class="label">[42:1]</span></a> In the <i>Guardian</i>, No. 40. Compare Johnson's <i>Life of
+Ambrose Phillips</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42-2_12" id="Footnote_42-2_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42-2_12"><span class="label">[42:2]</span></a> <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>, May, July, and September.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46-3_13" id="Footnote_46-3_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46-3_13"><span class="label">[46:3]</span></a> First published in 1559. It was popular book, and was
+often re-edited.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46-4_14" id="Footnote_46-4_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46-4_14"><span class="label">[46:4]</span></a> Dedication to Virgil.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49-5_15" id="Footnote_49-5_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49-5_15"><span class="label">[49:5]</span></a> Bolton in Haslewood, ii. 249.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a>[<a href="./images/51.png">51</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+<h3>SPENSER IN IRELAND.</h3>
+
+<h4>[1580.]</h4>
+
+<p>In the first week of October, 1579, Spenser was at Leicester House,
+expecting "next week" to be despatched on Leicester's service to France.
+Whether he was sent or not, we do not know. Gabriel Harvey, writing at
+the end of the month, wagers that "for all his saying, he will not be
+gone over sea, neither this week nor the next." In one of the &AElig;glogues
+(September) there are some lines which suggest, but do not necessarily
+imply, the experience of an eye-witness of the state of religion in a
+Roman Catholic country. But we can have nothing but conjecture whether
+at this time or any other Spenser was on the Continent. The <i>Shepherd's
+Calendar</i> was entered at Stationers' Hall, December 5, 1579. In April,
+1580, as we know from one of his letters to Harvey, he was at
+Westminster. He speaks of the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i> as published; he is
+contemplating the publication of other pieces, and then "he will in hand
+forthwith with his <i>Fairie Queene</i>," of which he had sent Harvey a
+specimen. He speaks especially of his <i>Dreams</i> as a considerable work.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I take best my <i>Dreams</i> should come forth alone, being grown
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a>[<a href="./images/52.png">52</a>]</span>by means of the Gloss (running continually in manner of a
+Paraphrase) full as great as my <i>Calendar</i>. Therein be some
+things excellently, and many things wittily discoursed of E.
+K., and the pictures so singularly set forth and portrayed, as
+if Michael Angelo were there, he could (I think) nor amend the
+best, nor reprehend the worst. I know you would like them
+passing well.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is remarkable that of a book so spoken of, as of the <i>Nine Comedies</i>,
+not a trace, as far as appears, is to be found. He goes on to speak with
+much satisfaction of another composition, which was probably
+incorporated, like the <i>Epithalamion Thamesis</i>, in his later work.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Of my <i>Stemmata Dudleiana</i>, and specially of the sundry
+Apostrophes therein, addressed you know to whom, much more
+advisement he had, than so lightly to send them abroad: now
+list, trust me (though I do never very well) yet, in mine own
+fancy, I never did better. <i>Veruntamen te sequor solum:
+nunquam vero assequar.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>He is plainly not dissatisfied with his success, and is looking forward
+to more. But no one in those days could live by poetry. Even scholars,
+in spite of university endowments, did not hope to live by their
+scholarship; and the poet or man of letters only trusted that his work,
+by attracting the favour of the great, might open to him the door of
+advancement. Spenser was probably expecting to push his fortunes in some
+public employment under the patronage of two such powerful favourites as
+Sidney and his uncle Leicester. Spenser's heart was set on poetry: but
+what leisure he might have for it would depend on the course his life
+might take. To have hung on Sidney's protection, or gone with him as his
+secretary to the wars, to have been employed at home or abroad in
+Leicester's intrigues, to have stayed in London filling <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a>[<a href="./images/53.png">53</a>]</span>by Leicester's
+favour some government office, to have had his habits moulded and his
+thoughts affected by the brilliant and unscrupulous society of the
+court, or by the powerful and daring minds which were fast thronging the
+political and literary scene&mdash;any of these contingencies might have
+given his poetical faculty a different direction; nay, might have even
+abridged its exercise or suppressed it. But his life was otherwise
+ordered. A new opening presented itself. He had, and he accepted, the
+chance of making his fortune another way. And to his new manner of life,
+with its peculiar conditions, may be ascribed, not indeed the original
+idea of that which was to be his great work, but the circumstances under
+which the work was carried out, and which not merely coloured it, but
+gave it some of its special and characteristic features.</p>
+
+<p>That which turned the course of his career, and exercised a decisive
+influence, certainly on its events and fate, probably also on the turn
+of his thoughts and the shape and moulding of his work, was his
+migration to Ireland, and his settlement there for the greater part of
+the remaining eighteen years of his life. We know little more than the
+main facts of this change from the court and the growing intellectual
+activity of England, to the fierce and narrow interests of a cruel and
+unsuccessful struggle for colonization, in a country which was to
+England much what Algeria was to France some thirty years ago. Ireland,
+always unquiet, had became a serious danger to Elizabeth's Government.
+It was its "bleeding ulcer." Lord Essex's great colonizing scheme, with
+his unscrupulous severity, had failed. Sir Henry Sidney, wise, firm, and
+wishing to be just, had tried his hand as Deputy for the third time in
+the thankless charge of keeping order; he, too, after a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a>[<a href="./images/54.png">54</a>]</span>short gleam of
+peace, had failed also. For two years Ireland had been left to the local
+administration, totally unable to heal its wounds, or cope with its
+disorders. And now, the kingdom threatened to become a vantage-ground to
+the foreign enemy. In November, 1579, the Government turned their eyes
+on Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, a man of high character, and a soldier
+of distinction. He, or they, seem to have hesitated; or rather, the
+hesitation was on both sides. He was not satisfied with many things in
+the policy of the Queen in England: his discontent had led him, strong
+Protestant as he was, to coquet with Norfolk and the partisans of Mary
+Queen of Scots, when England was threatened with a French marriage ten
+years before. His name stands among the forty nobles on whom Mary's
+friends counted.<a name="FNanchor_54-1_16" id="FNanchor_54-1_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_54-1_16" class="fnanchor">[54:1]</a> And on the other hand, Elizabeth did not like him
+or trust him. For some time she refused to employ him. At length, in the
+summer of 1580, he was appointed to fill that great place which had
+wrecked the reputation and broken the hearts of a succession of able and
+high-spirited servants of the English Crown, the place of Lord-Deputy in
+Ireland. He was a man who was interested in the literary enterprise of
+the time. In the midst of his public employment in Holland, he had been
+the friend and patron of George Gascoigne, who left a high reputation,
+for those days, as poet, wit, satirist, and critic. Lord Grey now took
+Spenser, the "new poet," the friend of Philip Sidney, to Ireland as his
+Secretary.</p>
+
+<p>Spenser was not the only scholar and poet who about this time found
+public employment in Ireland. Names which appear in literary records,
+such as Warton's <i>History of English Poetry</i>, poets like Barnaby Googe
+and Ludovic <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a>[<a href="./images/55.png">55</a>]</span>Bryskett, reappear as despatch-writers or agents in the
+Irish State Papers. But one man came over to Ireland about the same time
+as Spenser, whose fortunes were a contrast to his. Geoffrey Fenton was
+one of the numerous translators of the time. He had dedicated Tragical
+Tales from the French and Italian to Lady Mary Sidney, Guevara's
+Epistles from the Spanish to Lady Oxford, and a translation of
+Guicciardini to the Queen. About this time, he was recommended by his
+brother to Walsingham for foreign service; he was soon after in Ireland:
+and in the summer of 1580, he was made Secretary to the Government. He
+shortly became one of the most important persons in the Irish
+administration. He corresponded confidentially and continually with
+Burghley and Walsingham. He had his eye on the proceedings of Deputies
+and Presidents, and reported freely their misdoings or their
+unpopularity. His letters form a considerable part of the Irish Papers.
+He became a powerful and successful public servant. He became Sir
+Geoffrey Fenton; he kept his high place for his life; he obtained grants
+and lands; and he was commemorated as a great personage, in a pompous
+monument in St. Patrick's Cathedral. This kind of success was not to be
+Spenser's.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Grey of Wilton was a man in whom his friends saw a high and heroic
+spirit. He was a statesman in whose motives and actions his religion had
+a dominant influence: and his religion&mdash;he is called by the vague name
+of Puritan&mdash;was one which combined a strong and doubtless genuine zeal
+for the truth of Christian doctrine and for purity of morals, with the
+deepest and deadliest hatred of what he held to be their natural enemy,
+the Anti-Christ of Rome. The "good Lord Grey," he was, if <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a>[<a href="./images/56.png">56</a>]</span>we believe
+his secretary, writing many years after this time, and when he was dead,
+"most gentle, affable, loving, and temperate; always known to be a most
+just, sincere, godly, and right noble man, far from sternness, far from
+unrighteousness." But the infelicity of his times bore hardly upon him,
+and Spenser admits, what is known otherwise, that he left a terrible
+name behind him. He was certainly a man of severe and unshrinking sense
+of duty, and like many great Englishmen of the time, so resolute in
+carrying it out to the end, that it reached, when he thought it
+necessary, to the point of ferocity. Naturally, he had enemies, who did
+not spare his fame; and Spenser, who came to admire and reverence him,
+had to lament deeply that "that good lord was blotted with the name of a
+bloody man," one who "regarded not the life of the queen's subjects no
+more than dogs, and had wasted and consumed all, so as now she had
+nothing almost left, but to reign in their ashes."</p>
+
+<p>Lord Grey was sent over at a moment of the utmost confusion and danger.
+In July, 1579, Drury wrote to Burghley to stand firmly to the helm, for
+"that a great storm was at hand." The South of Ireland was in fierce
+rebellion, under the Earl of Desmond and Dr. Nicolas Sanders, who was
+acting under the commission of the Pope, and promising the assistance of
+the King of Spain; and a band of Spanish and Italian adventurers,
+unauthorized, but not uncountenanced by their Government, like Drake in
+the Indies, had landed with arms and stores, and had fortified a port at
+Smerwick, on the south-western coast of Kerry. The North was deep in
+treason, restless, and threatening to strike. Round Dublin itself, the
+great Irish Lords of the Pale, under Lord Baltinglass, in the summer of
+1580, had broken into open insurrection, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a>[<a href="./images/57.png">57</a>]</span>were holding out a hand to
+the rebels of the South. The English garrisons, indeed, small as they
+were, could not only hold their own against the ill-armed and
+undisciplined Irish bands, but could inflict terrible chastisement on
+the insurgents. The native feuds were turned to account; Butlers were
+set to destroy their natural enemies the Geraldines, and the Earl of
+Ormond their head, was appointed General in Munster, to execute English
+vengeance and his own on the lands and people of his rival Desmond. But
+the English chiefs were not strong enough to put down the revolt. "The
+conspiracy throughout Ireland," wrote Lord Grey, "is so general, that
+without a main force it will not be appeased. There are cold service and
+unsound dealing generally." On the 12th of August, 1580, Lord Grey
+landed, amid a universal wreck of order, of law, of mercy, of industry;
+and among his counsellors and subordinates, the only remedy thought of
+was that of remorseless and increasing severity.</p>
+
+<p>It can hardly be doubted that Spenser must have come over with him. It
+is likely that where he went, his Secretary would accompany him. And if
+so, Spenser must soon have become acquainted with some of the scenes and
+necessities of Irish life. Within three weeks after Lord Grey's landing,
+he and those with him were present at the disaster of Glenmalure, a
+rocky defile near Wicklow, where the rebels enticed the English captains
+into a position in which an ambuscade had been prepared, after the
+manner of Red Indians in the last century, and of South African savages
+now, and where, in spite of Lord Grey's courage, "which could not have
+been bettered by Hercules," a bloody defeat was inflicted on his troops,
+and a number of distinguished officers were cut off. But Spenser was
+soon to see a still more terrible example of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a>[<a href="./images/58.png">58</a>]</span>this ruthless warfare. It
+was necessary, above all things to destroy the Spanish fort at Smerwick,
+in order to prevent the rebellion being fed from abroad: and in
+November, 1580, Lord Grey in person undertook the work. The incidents of
+this tragedy have been fully recorded, and they formed at the time a
+heavy charge against Lord Grey's humanity, and even his honour. In this
+instance Spenser must almost certainly have been on the spot. Years
+afterwards, in his <i>View of the State of Ireland</i>, he describes and
+vindicates Lord Grey's proceedings; and he does so, "being," as he
+writes, "as near them as any." And we have Lord Grey's own despatch to
+Queen Elizabeth, containing a full report of the tragical business. We
+have no means of knowing how Lord Grey employed Spenser, or whether he
+composed his own despatches. But from Spenser's position, the Secretary,
+if he had not some hand in the following vivid and forcible account of
+the taking of Smerwick,<a name="FNanchor_58-2_17" id="FNanchor_58-2_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_58-2_17" class="fnanchor">[58:2]</a> must probably have been cognizant of it;
+though there are some slight differences in the despatch, and in the
+account which Spenser himself wrote afterwards in his pamphlet on Irish
+Affairs.</p>
+
+<p>After describing the proposal of the garrison for a parley, Lord Grey
+proceeds,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There was presently sent unto me one Alexandro, their camp
+master; he told me that certain Spaniards and Italians were
+there arrived upon fair speeches and great promises, which
+altogether vain and false they found; and that it was no part
+of their intent to molest or take any government from your
+Majesty; for proof, that they were ready to depart as they
+came and deliver into my hands the fort. Mine answer was, that
+for that I perceived their people to stand of two nations,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a>[<a href="./images/59.png">59</a>]</span>Italian and Spanish, I would give no answer unless a Spaniard
+was likewise by. He presently went and returned with a Spanish
+captain. I then told the Spaniard that I knew their nation to
+have an absolute prince, one that was in good league and amity
+with your Majesty, which made me to marvell that any of his
+people should be found associate with them that went about to
+maintain rebels against you.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And taking it that it could
+not be his king's will, I was to know by whom and for what
+cause they were sent. His reply was that the king had not sent
+them, but that one John Martinez de Ricaldi, Governor for the
+king at Bilboa, had willed him to levy a band and repair with
+it to St. Andrews (Santander), and there to be directed by
+this their colonel here, whom he followed as a blind man, not
+knowing whither. The other avouched that they were all sent by
+the Pope for the defence of the <i>Catholica fede</i>. My answer
+was, that I would not greatly have marvelled if men being
+commanded by natural and absolute princes did sometimes take
+in hand wrong actions; but that men, and that of account as
+some of them made show of, should be carried into unjust,
+desperate, and wicked actions, by one that neither from God or
+man could claim any princely power or empire, but (was) indeed
+a detestable shaveling, the right Antichrist and general
+ambitious tyrant over all right principalities, and patron of
+the <i>Diabolica fede</i>&mdash;this I could not but greatly rest in
+wonder. Their fault therefore far to be aggravated by the
+vileness of their commander; and that at my hands no condition
+or composition they were to expect, other than they should
+render me the fort, and yield their selves to my will for life
+or death. With this answer he departed; after which there was
+one or two courses to and fro more, to have gotten a certainty
+for some of their lives: but finding that it would not be, the
+colonel himself about sunsetting came forth and requested
+respite with surcease of arms till the next morning, and then
+he would give a resolute answer.</p>
+
+<p>Finding that to be but a gain of time to them, and a loss of
+the same for myself, I definitely answered I would not grant
+it, and therefore presently either that he took my offer or
+else return and I would fall to my business. He then embraced
+my knees simply putting himself to my mercy, only he prayed
+that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a>[<a href="./images/60.png">60</a>]</span>for that night he might abide in the fort, and that in
+the morning all should be put into my hands. I asked hostages
+for the performance; they were given. Morning came; I
+presented my companies in battle before the fort, the colonel
+comes forth with ten or twelve of his chief gentlemen,
+trailing their ensigns rolled up, and presented them unto me
+with their lives and the fort. I sent straight certain
+gentlemen in, to see their weapons and armour laid down, and
+to guard the munition and victual there left for spoil. Then
+put I in certain bands, who straight fell to execution. There
+were six hundred slain. Munition and victual great store:
+though much wasted through the disorder of the soldier, which
+in that fury could not be helped. Those that I gave life unto,
+I have bestowed upon the captains and gentlemen whose service
+hath well deserved.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Of the six hundred slain, four hundred
+were as gallant and goodly personages as of any (soldiers) I
+ever beheld. So hath it pleased the Lord of Hosts to deliver
+your enemies into your Highnesses' hand, and so too as one
+only excepted, not one of yours is either lost or hurt.</p></div>
+
+<p>Another account adds to this that "the Irish men and women were hanged,
+with an Englishman who had served Dr. Sanders, and two others whose arms
+and legs were broken for torture."</p>
+
+<p>Such scenes as those of Glenmalure and Smerwick, terrible as they were,
+it might have been any one's lot to witness who found himself in
+presence of the atrocious warfare of those cruel days, in which the
+ordinary exasperation of combatants was made more savage and unforgiving
+by religious hatred, and by the license which religious hatred gave to
+irregular adventure and the sanguinary repression of it. They were not
+confined to Ireland. Two years later the Marquis de Santa Cruz treated
+in exactly the same fashion a band of French adventurers, some eighty
+noblemen and gentlemen and two hundred soldiers, who were taken in an
+attempt on <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a>[<a href="./images/61.png">61</a>]</span>the Azores during a time of nominal peace between the crowns
+of France and Spain. In the Low Countries, and in the religious wars of
+France, it need not be said that even the 'execution' at Smerwick was
+continually outdone; and it is what the Spaniards would of course have
+done to Drake if they had caught him. Nor did the Spanish Government
+complain of this treatment of its subjects, who had no legal commission.</p>
+
+<p>But the change of scene and life to Spenser was much more than merely
+the sight of a disastrous skirmish and a capitulation without quarter.
+He had passed to an entirely altered condition of social life; he had
+passed from pleasant and merry England, with its comparative order and
+peace, its thriving homesteads and wealthy cities, its industry and
+magnificence,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8h">Eliza's blessed field,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That still with people, peace, and plenty flows&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>to a land, beautiful indeed, and alluring, but of which the only law was
+disorder, and the only rule failure. The Cambridge student, the follower
+of country life in Lancashire or Kent, the scholar discussing with
+Philip Sidney and corresponding with Gabriel Harvey about classical
+metres and English rimes; the shepherd poet, Colin Clout, delicately
+fashioning his innocent pastorals, his love complaints, or his dexterous
+panegyrics or satires; the courtier, aspiring to shine in the train of
+Leicester before the eyes of the great queen,&mdash;found himself
+transplanted into a wild and turbulent savagery, where the elements of
+civil society hardly existed, and which had the fatal power of drawing
+into its own evil and lawless ways the English who came into contact
+with it. Ireland had the name and the framework of a Christian realm. It
+had its hierarchy of officers in Church and State, its <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a>[<a href="./images/62.png">62</a>]</span>Parliament, its
+representative of the Crown. It had its great earls and lords, with
+noble and romantic titles, its courts and councils and administration;
+the Queen's laws were there, and where they were acknowledged, which was
+not, however, everywhere, the English speech was current. But underneath
+this name and outside, all was coarse, and obstinately set against
+civilized order. There was nothing but the wreck and clashing of
+disintegrated customs, the lawlessness of fierce and ignorant
+barbarians, whose own laws had been destroyed, and who would recognize
+no other; the blood-feuds of rival septs; the ambitious and deadly
+treacheries of rival nobles, oppressing all weaker than themselves, and
+maintaining in waste and idleness their crowds of brutal retainers. In
+one thing only was there agreement, though not even in this was there
+union; and that was in deep, implacable hatred of their English masters.
+And with these English masters, too, amid their own jealousies and
+backbitings and mischief-making, their own bitter antipathies and
+chronic despair, there was only one point of agreement, and that was
+their deep scorn and loathing of the Irish.</p>
+
+<p>This is Irish dealing with Irish, in Munster at this time:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Lord Roche kept a freeholder, who had eight plowlands,
+prisoner, and hand-locked him till he had surrendered seven
+plowlands and a half, on agreement to keep the remaining
+plowland free; but when this was done, the Lord Roche extorted
+as many exactions from that half-plowland, as from any other
+half-plowland in his country.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And even the great men were
+under the same oppression from the greater: for the Earl of
+Desmond forcibly took away the Seneschal of Imokilly's corn
+from his own land, though he was one of the most considerable
+gentlemen in Munster.<a name="FNanchor_62-3_18" id="FNanchor_62-3_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_62-3_18" class="fnanchor">[62:3]</a></p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a>[<a href="./images/63.png">63</a>]</span>
+And this is English dealing with Irish:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Mr. Henry Sheffield asks Lord Burghley's interest with Sir
+George Carew, to be made his deputy at Leighlin, in place of
+Mr. Bagenall, who met his death under the following
+circumstances:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bagenall, after he had bought the barony of Odrone of Sir
+George Carew, could not be contented to let the Kavanaghs
+enjoy such lands as old Sir Peter Carew, young Sir Peter, and
+last, Sir George were content that they should have, but
+threatened to kill them wherever he could meet them. As it is
+now fallen out, about the last of November, one Henry Heron,
+Mr. Bagenall's brother-in-law, having lost four kine, making
+that his quarrel, he being accompanied with divers others to
+the number of twenty or thereabouts, by the procurement of his
+brother-in-law, went to the house of Mortagh Oge, a man
+seventy years old, the chief of the Kavanaghs, with their
+swords drawn: which the old man seeing, for fear of his life,
+sought to go into the woods, but was taken and brought before
+Mr. Heron, who charged him that his son had taken the cows.
+The old man answered that he could pay for them. Mr. Heron
+would not be contented, but bade his men kill him, he desiring
+to be brought for trial at the sessions. Further, the morrow
+after they went again into the woods, and there they found
+another old man, a servant of Mortagh Oge, and likewise killed
+him, Mr. Heron saying that it was because he would not confess
+the cows.</p>
+
+<p>On these murders, the sons of the old man laid an ambush for
+Mr. Bagenall; who, following them more upon will than with
+discretion, fell into their hands, and were slain with
+thirteen more. He had sixteen wounds above his girdle, and one
+of his legs cut off, and his tongue drawn out of his mouth and
+slit. There is not one man dwelling in all this country that
+was Sir George Carew's, but every man fled, and left the whole
+country waste; and so I fear me it will continue, now the
+deadly feud is so great between them.<a name="FNanchor_63-4_19" id="FNanchor_63-4_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_63-4_19" class="fnanchor">[63:4]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Something like this has been occasionally seen in our <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a>[<a href="./images/64.png">64</a>]</span>colonies towards
+the native races; but there it never reached the same height of
+unrestrained and frankly justified indulgence. The English officials and
+settlers knew well enough that the only thought of the native Irish was
+to restore their abolished customs, to recover their confiscated lands,
+to re-establish the crippled power of their chiefs; they knew that for
+this insurrection was ever ready, and that treachery would shrink from
+nothing. And to meet it, the English on the spot&mdash;all but a few who were
+denounced as unpractical sentimentalists for favouring an irreconcilable
+foe&mdash;could think of no way of enforcing order, except by a wholesale use
+of the sword and the gallows. They could find no means of restoring
+peace except turning the rich land into a wilderness, and rooting out by
+famine those whom the soldier or the hangman had not overtaken. "No
+governor shall do any good here," wrote an English observer in 1581,
+"except he show himself a Tamerlane."</p>
+
+<p>In a general account, even contemporary, such statements might suggest a
+violent suspicion of exaggeration. We possess the means of testing it.
+The Irish State Papers of the time contain the ample reports and
+letters, from day to day, of the energetic and resolute Englishmen
+employed in council or in the field&mdash;men of business like Sir William
+Pelham, Sir Henry Wallop, Edward Waterhouse, and Geoffrey
+Fenton;&mdash;daring and brilliant officers, like Sir William Drury, Sir
+Nicolas Malby, Sir Warham St. Leger, Sir John Norreys, and John Zouch.
+These papers are the basis of Mr. Froude's terrible chapters on the
+Desmond rebellion, and their substance in abstract or abridgment is
+easily accessible in the printed calendars of the Record Office. They
+show that from first to last, in principle and practice, in council and
+in act, the Tamerlane <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a>[<a href="./images/65.png">65</a>]</span>system was believed in, and carried out without a
+trace of remorse or question as to its morality. "If hell were open, and
+all the evil spirits were abroad," writes Walsingham's correspondent
+Andrew Trollope, who talked about Tamerlane, "they could never be worse
+than these Irish rogues&mdash;rather dogs, and worse than dogs, for dogs do
+but after their kind, and they degenerate from all humanity." There is
+but one way of dealing with wild dogs or wolves; and accordingly the
+English chiefs insisted that this was the way to deal with the Irish.
+The state of Ireland, writes one, "is like an old cloak often before
+patched, wherein is now made so great a gash that all the world doth
+know that there is no remedy but to make a new." This means, in the
+language of another, "that there is no way to daunt these people but by
+the edge of the sword, and to plant better in their place, or rather,
+let them cut one another's throats." These were no idle words. Every
+page of these papers contains some memorandum of execution and
+destruction. The progress of a Deputy, or the President of a province,
+through the country is always accompanied with its tale of hangings.
+There is sometimes a touch of the grotesque. "At Kilkenny," writes Sir
+W. Drury, "the jail being full, we caused sessions immediately to begin.
+Thirty-six persons were executed, among which some good ones; two for
+treason, a blackamoor, and two witches by natural law, for that we found
+no law to try them by in this realm." It is like the account of some
+unusual kind of game in a successful bag. "If taking of cows, and
+killing of kerne and churles had been worth advertizing," writes Lord
+Grey to the Queen, "I would have had every day to have troubled your
+Highness." Yet Lord Grey protests in the same letter that he has never
+taken the life of any, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a>[<a href="./images/66.png">66</a>]</span>however evil, who submitted. At the end of the
+Desmond outbreak, the chiefs in the different provinces send in their
+tale of death. Ormond complains of the false reports of his "slackness
+in but killing three men," whereas the number was more than 3000; and he
+sends in his "brief note" of his contribution to the slaughter, "598
+persons of quality, besides 3000 or 4000 others, and 158 slain since his
+discharge." The end was that, as one of the chief actors writes, Sir
+Warham St. Leger, "Munster is nearly unpeopled by the murders done by
+the rebels, and the killings by the soldiers; 30,000 dead of famine in
+half a year, besides numbers that are hanged and killed. The realm," he
+adds, "was never in greater danger, or in like misery." But in the
+murderous work itself there was not much danger. "Our wars," writes Sir
+Henry Wallop, in the height of the struggle, "are but like fox-hunting."
+And when the English Government remonstrates against this system of
+massacre, the Lord-Deputy writes back that "he sorrows that pity for the
+wicked and evil should be enchanted into her Majesty."</p>
+
+<p>And of this dreadful policy, involving, as the price of the extinction
+of Desmond's rebellion, the absolute desolation of the South and West of
+Ireland, Lord Grey came to be the deliberate and unfaltering champion.
+His administration lasted only two years, and in spite of his natural
+kindness of temper, which we need not doubt, it was, from the supposed
+necessities of his position, and the unwavering consent of all English
+opinions round him, a rule of extermination. No scruple ever crossed his
+mind, except that he had not been sufficiently uncompromising in putting
+first the religious aspect of the quarrel. "If Elizabeth had allowed
+him," writes Mr. Froude, "he would have now made a Mahommedan conquest
+of the whole island, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a>[<a href="./images/67.png">67</a>]</span>offered the Irish the alternative of the
+Gospel or the sword." With the terrible sincerity of a Puritan, he
+reproached himself that he had allowed even the Queen's commands to come
+before the "one article of looking to God's dear service." "I confess my
+sin," he wrote to Walsingham, "I have followed man too much," and he saw
+why his efforts had been in vain. "Baal's prophets and councillors shall
+prevail. I see it is so. I see it is just. I see it past help. I rest
+despaired." His policy of blood and devastation, breaking the neck of
+Desmond's rebellion, but failing to put an end to it, became at length
+more than the home Government could bear; and with mutual
+dissatisfaction he was recalled before his work was done. Among the
+documents relating to his explanations with the English Government, is
+one of which this is the abstract: "Declaration (Dec. 1583), by Arthur,
+Lord Grey, of Wilton, to the Queen, showing the state of Ireland when he
+was appointed Deputy, with the services of his government, and the
+plight he left it in. 1485 chief men and gentlemen slain, not accounting
+those of meaner sort, nor yet executions by law, and killing of churles,
+which were innumerable."</p>
+
+<p>This was the world into which Spenser was abruptly thrown, and in which
+he was henceforward to have his home. He first became acquainted with it
+as Lord Grey's Secretary in the Munster war. He himself in later days
+with ample experience and knowledge reviewed the whole of this dreadful
+history, its policy, its necessities, its results: and no more
+instructive document has come down to us from those times. But his
+description of the way in which the plan of extermination was carried
+out in Munster before his eyes, may fittingly form a supplement to the
+language on the spot of those responsible for it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a>[<a href="./images/68.png">68</a>]</span></p><div class="blockquot"><p><i>Eudox.</i> But what, then, shall be the conclusion of this
+war?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p><i>Iren.</i>&mdash;The end will I assure me be very short and much
+sooner than can be, in so great a trouble, as it seemeth,
+hoped for, although there should none of them fall by the
+sword nor be slain by the soldier: yet thus being kept from
+manurance and their cattle from running abroad, by this hard
+restraint they would quickly consume themselves, and devour
+one another. The proof whereof I saw sufficiently exampled in
+these late wars of Munster; for notwithstanding that the same
+was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle
+that you would have thought they should have been able to
+stand long, yet ere one year and a half they were brought to
+such wretchedness as that any stony heart would have rued the
+same. Out of every corner of the woods and glynnes they came
+creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear
+them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like
+ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead
+carrions, happy where they could find them, yea and one
+another soon after, insomuch that the very carcases they
+spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a
+plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a
+feast for a time, yet not able long to continue there withal;
+that in a short space there were none almost left, and a most
+populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and
+beast; yet sure in all that war there perished not many by the
+sword, but all by the extremity of famine which they
+themselves had wrought.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is hardly surprising that Lord Grey's Secretary should share the
+opinions and the feelings of his master and patron. Certainly in his
+company and service, Spenser learned to look upon Ireland and the Irish
+with the impatience and loathing which filled most Englishmen; and it
+must be added with the same greedy eyes. In this new atmosphere, in
+which his life was henceforth spent, amid the daily talk of ravage and
+death, the daily scramble for the spoils of rebels and traitors, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a>[<a href="./images/69.png">69</a>]</span>the
+daily alarms of treachery and insurrection, a man naturally learns
+hardness. Under Spenser's imaginative richness, and poetic delicacy of
+feeling, there appeared two features. There was a shrewd sense of the
+practical side of things: and there was a full share of that sternness
+of temper which belonged to the time. He came to Ireland for no romantic
+purpose: he came to make his fortune as well as he could: and he
+accepted the conditions of the place and scene, and entered at once into
+the game of adventure and gain which was the natural one for all English
+comers, and of which the prizes were lucrative offices and forfeited
+manors and abbeys. And in the native population and native interests, he
+saw nothing but what called forth not merely antipathy, but deep moral
+condemnation. It was not merely that the Irish were ignorant,
+thriftless, filthy, debased and loathsome in their pitiable misery and
+despair: it was that in his view, justice, truth, honesty had utterly
+perished among them, and therefore were not due to them. Of any other
+side to the picture, he like other good Englishmen, was entirely
+unconscious: he saw only on all sides of him the empire of barbarism and
+misrule which valiant and godly Englishmen were fighting to vanquish and
+destroy&mdash;fighting against apparent but not real odds. And all this was
+aggravated by the stiff adherence of the Irish to their old religion.
+Spenser came over with the common opinion of Protestant Englishmen, that
+they had at least in England the pure and undoubted religion of the
+Bible: and in Ireland, he found himself face to face with the very
+superstition in its lowest forms which he had so hated in England. He
+left it plotting in England; he found it in armed rebellion in Ireland.
+Like Lord Grey, he saw in Popery the root of all the mischiefs of
+Ireland; <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a>[<a href="./images/70.png">70</a>]</span>and his sense of true religion, as well as his convictions of
+right, conspired to recommend to him Lord Grey's pitiless government.
+The opinion was everywhere&mdash;it was undisputed and unexamined&mdash;that a
+policy of force, direct or indirect, was the natural and right way of
+reducing diverging religions to submission and uniformity: that
+religious disagreement ought as a matter of principle to be subdued by
+violence of one degree or another. All wise and good men thought so: all
+statesmen and rulers acted so. Spenser found in Ireland a state of
+things which seemed to make this doctrine the simplest dictate of common
+sense.</p>
+
+<p>In August, 1582, Lord Grey left Ireland. He had accepted his office with
+the utmost reluctance, from the known want of agreement between the
+Queen and himself as to policy. He had executed it in a way which
+greatly displeased the home Government. And he gave it up with his
+special work, the extinction of Desmond's rebellion, still
+unaccomplished. In spite of the thousands slain, and a province made a
+desert, Desmond was still at large and dangerous. Lord Grey had been
+ruthlessly severe, and yet not successful. For months there had been an
+interchange of angry letters between him and the Government. Burghley,
+he complains to Walsingham, was "so heavy against him." The Queen and
+Burghley wanted order restored, but did not like either the expense of
+war, or the responsibility before other governments for the severity
+which their agents on the spot judged necessary. Knowing that he did not
+please, he had begun to solicit his recall before he had been a year in
+Ireland; and at length he was recalled, not to receive thanks, but to
+meet a strict, if not hostile, inquiry into his administration. Besides
+what had been on the surface <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a>[<a href="./images/71.png">71</a>]</span>of his proceedings to dissatisfy the
+Queen, there had been, as in the case of every Deputy, a continued
+underground stream of backbiting and insinuation going home against him.
+Spenser did not forget this, when in the <i>Faery Queen</i> he shadowed forth
+Lord Grey's career in the adventures of Arthegal, the great Knight of
+Justice, met on his return home from his triumphs by the hags, Envy and
+Detraction, and the braying of the hundred tongues of the Blatant Beast.
+Irish lords and partisans, calling themselves loyal, when they could not
+get what they wanted, or when he threatened them for their insincerity
+or insolence, at once wrote to England. His English colleagues, civil
+and military, were his natural rivals or enemies, ever on the watch to
+spy out and report, if necessary, to misrepresent, what was questionable
+or unfortunate in his proceedings. Permanent officials like Archbishop
+Adam Loftus the Chancellor, or Treasurer Wallop, or Secretary Fenton,
+knew more than he did; they corresponded directly with the ministers;
+they knew that they were expected to keep a strict watch on his
+expenditure; and they had no scruple to send home complaints against him
+behind his back, as they did against one another. A secretary in Dublin
+like Geoffrey Fenton is described as a moth in the garment of every
+Deputy. Grey himself complains of the underhand work; he cannot prevent
+"backbiters' report:" he has found of late "very suspicious dealing
+amongst all his best esteemed associates;" he "dislikes not to be
+informed of the charges against him." In fact, they were accusing him of
+one of the gravest sins of which a Deputy could be guilty; they were
+writing home that he was lavishing the forfeited estates among his
+favourites, under pretence of rewarding service, to the great loss and
+permanent damage of her <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a>[<a href="./images/72.png">72</a>]</span>Majesty's revenue; and they were forwarding
+plans for commissions to distribute these estates, of which the Deputy
+should not be a member.</p>
+
+<p>He had the common fate of those who accepted great responsibilities
+under the Queen. He was expected to do very hard tasks with insufficient
+means, and to receive more blame where he failed than thanks where he
+succeeded. He had every one, English and Irish, against him in Ireland,
+and no one for him in England. He was driven to violence because he
+wanted strength; he took liberties with forfeitures belonging to the
+Queen because he had no other means of rewarding public services. It is
+not easy to feel much sympathy for a man who, brave and public spirited
+as he was, could think of no remedy for the miseries of Ireland but
+wholesale bloodshed. Yet, compared with the resident officials who
+caballed against him, and who got rich on these miseries, the Wallops
+and Fentons of the Irish Council, this stern Puritan, so remorseless in
+what he believed to be his duty to his Queen and his faith, stands out
+as an honest and faithful public servant of a Government which seemed
+hardly to know its own mind, which vacillated between indulgence and
+severity, and which hampered its officers by contradictory policies,
+ignorant of their difficulties, and incapable of controlling the
+supplies for a costly and wasteful war. Lord Grey's strong hand, though
+incapable of reaching the real causes of Irish evils, undoubtedly saved
+the country at a moment of serious peril, and once more taught lawless
+Geraldines, and Eustaces, and Burkes the terrible lesson of English
+power. The work which he had half done in crushing Desmond was soon
+finished by Desmond's hereditary rival, Ormond; and under the milder,
+but not more popular, rule of his successor, the proud and irritable
+Sir <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a>[<a href="./images/73.png">73</a>]</span>John Perrot, Ireland had for a few years the peace which consisted
+in the absence of a definite rebellion, till Tyrone began to stir in
+1595, and Perrot went back a disgraced man, to die a prisoner in the
+Tower.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Grey left behind him unappeasable animosities, and returned to meet
+jealous rivals and an ill-satisfied mistress. But he had left behind one
+whose admiration and reverence he had won, and who was not afraid to
+take care of his reputation. Whether Spenser went back with his patron
+or not in 1582, he was from henceforth mainly resident in Ireland. Lord
+Grey's administration, and the principles on which it had been carried
+on, had made a deep impression on Spenser's mind. His first ideal had
+been Philip Sidney, the attractive and all-accomplished gentleman,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5h">The President<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of noblesse and of chevalrie,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And to the end the pastoral Colin Clout, for he ever retained his first
+poetic name, was faithful to his ideal. But in the stern Proconsul,
+under whom he had become hardened into a keen and resolute colonist, he
+had come in contact with a new type of character; a governor under the
+sense of duty, doing the roughest of work in the roughest of ways. In
+Lord Grey, he had this character, not as he might read of it in books,
+but acting out its qualities in present life, amid the unexpected
+emergencies, the desperate alternatives, the calls for instant decision,
+the pressing necessities and the anxious hazards, of a course full of
+uncertainty and peril. He had before his eyes day by day, fearless,
+unshrinking determination, in a hateful and most unpromising task. He
+believed that he saw a living example of strength, manliness, and
+nobleness; <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a>[<a href="./images/74.png">74</a>]</span>of unsparing and unswerving zeal for order and religion, and
+good government; of single-hearted devotion to truth and right, and to
+the Queen. Lord Grey grew at last, in the poet's imagination, into the
+image and representative of perfect and masculine justice. When Spenser
+began to enshrine in a great allegory his ideas of human life and
+character, Lord Grey supplied the moral features, and almost the name,
+of one of its chief heroes. Spenser did more than embody his memory in
+poetical allegories. In Spenser's <i>View of the present State of
+Ireland</i>, written some years after Lord Grey's death, he gives his
+mature, and then at any rate, disinterested approbation of Lord Grey's
+administration, and his opinion of the causes of its failure. He kindles
+into indignation when "most untruely and maliciously, those evil tongues
+backbite and slander the sacred ashes of that most just and honourable
+personage, whose least virtue, of many most excellent, which abounded in
+his heroical spirit, they were never able to aspire unto."</p>
+
+<p>Lord Grey's patronage had brought Spenser into the public service;
+perhaps that patronage, the patronage of a man who had powerful enemies,
+was the cause that Spenser's preferments, after Lord Grey's recall, were
+on so moderate a scale. The notices which we glean from indirect sources
+about Spenser's employment in Ireland are meagre enough, but they are
+distinct. They show him as a subordinate public servant, of no great
+account, but yet, like other public servants in Ireland, profiting, in
+his degree, by the opportunities of the time. In the spring following
+Lord Grey's arrival (March 22, 1581), Spenser was appointed Clerk of
+Decrees and Recognizances in the Irish Court of Chancery, retaining his
+place as Secretary to the Lord-Deputy, in which character his signature
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a>[<a href="./images/75.png">75</a>]</span>sometimes appears in the Irish Records, certifying State documents sent
+to England. This office is said by Fuller to have been a "lucrative"
+one. In the same year he received a lease of the Abbey and Manor of
+Enniscorthy, in the County of Wexford. Enniscorthy was an important post
+in the network of English garrisons, on one of the roads from Dublin to
+the South. He held it but for a short time. It was transferred by him to
+a citizen of Wexford, Richard Synot, an agent, apparently, of the
+powerful Sir Henry Wallop, the Treasurer; and it was soon after
+transferred by Synot to his patron, an official who secured to himself a
+large share of the spoils of Desmond's rebellion. Further, Spenser's
+name appears, in a list of persons (January, 1582), among whom Lord Grey
+had distributed some of the forfeited property of the rebels&mdash;a list
+sent home by him in answer to charges of waste and damage to the Queen's
+revenue, busily urged against him in Ireland by men like Wallop and
+Fenton, and readily listened to by English ministers like Burghley, who
+complained that Ireland was a "gulf of consuming treasure." The grant
+was mostly to persons active in service, among others one to Wallop
+himself; and a certain number of smaller value to persons of Lord Grey's
+own household. There, among yeomen ushers, gentlemen ushers, gentlemen
+serving the Lord-Deputy, and Welshmen and Irishmen with uncouth names,
+to whom small gratifications had been allotted out of the spoil, we
+read&mdash;"the lease of a house in Dublin belonging to [Lord] Baltinglas for
+six years to come to Edmund Spenser, one of the Lord-Deputy's
+Secretaries, valued at 5<i>l.</i>" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. "of a 'custodiam' of John Eustace's
+[one of Baltinglas' family] land of the Newland to Edmund Spenser, one
+of the Lord-Deputy's Secretaries." In July, 1586, when every one <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a>[<a href="./images/76.png">76</a>]</span>was
+full of the project for "planting" Munster, he was still in Dublin, for
+he addresses from thence a sonnet to Gabriel Harvey. In March, 1588/9,
+we find the following, in a list of officers on the establishment of the
+province of Munster, which the government was endeavouring to colonize
+from the west of England: "Lodovick Briskett, clerk to the council (at
+20<i>l.</i> per annum), 13<i>l.</i> 6<i>s.</i> 8<i>d.</i> (this is exercised by one Spenser,
+as deputy for the said Briskett), to whom (i. e. Briskett) it was
+granted by patent 6 Nov. 25 Eliz. (1583)." (<i>Carew MSS.</i>) Bryskett was a
+man much employed in Irish business. He had been Clerk to the Irish
+Council, had been a correspondent of Burghley and Walsingham, and had
+aspired to be Secretary of State when Fenton obtained the post: possibly
+in disappointment, he had retired, with an office which he exercised by
+deputy, to his lands in Wexford. He was a poet, and a friend of
+Spenser's: and it may have been by his interest with the dispensers of
+patronage, that "one Spenser," who had been his deputy, succeeded to his
+office.</p>
+
+<p>In this position Spenser was brought into communication with the
+powerful English chiefs on the Council of Munster, and also with the
+leading men among the Undertakers as they were called, among whom more
+than half a million of acres of the escheated and desolate lands of the
+fallen Desmond were to be divided, on condition of each Undertaker
+settling on his estate a proportionate number of English gentlemen,
+yeomen, artisans and labourers with their families, who were to bring
+the ruined province into order and cultivation. The President and
+Vice-President of the Council were the two Norreys, John and Thomas, two
+of the most gallant of a gallant family. The project for the planting of
+Munster had been originally started before the rebellion, in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a>[<a href="./images/77.png">77</a>]</span>1568. It
+had been one of the causes of the rebellion; but now that Desmond was
+fallen, it was revived. It had been received in England with favour and
+hope. Men of influence and enterprise, Sir Christopher Hatton,
+Walsingham, Walter Ralegh, had embarked in it: and the government had
+made an appeal to the English country gentlemen to take advantage of
+this new opening for their younger sons, and to send them over at the
+head of colonies from the families of their tenants and dependants, to
+occupy a rich and beautiful land on easy terms of rent. In the Western
+Counties, north and south, the appeal had awakened interest. In the list
+of Undertakers are found Cheshire and Lancashire names, Stanley,
+Fleetwood, Molyneux: and a still larger number for Somerset, Devon, and
+Dorset, Popham, Rogers, Coles, Ralegh, Chudleigh, Champernown. The plan
+of settlement was carefully and methodically traced out. The province
+was surveyed as well as it could be under great difficulties. Maps were
+made which Lord Burghley annotated. "Seignories" were created of varying
+size, 12,000, 8000, 6000, 4000 acres, with corresponding obligations as
+to the number and class of farms and inhabitants in each. Legal science
+in England was to protect titles by lengthy patents and leases;
+administrative watchfulness and firmness were to secure them in Ireland.
+Privileges of trade were granted to the Undertakers: they were even
+allowed to transport coin out of England to Ireland: and a long respite
+was granted them before the Crown was to claim its rents. Strict rules
+were laid down to keep the native Irish out of the English lands and
+from intermarrying with the English families. In this partition,
+Seignories were distributed by the Undertakers among themselves with the
+free carelessness <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a>[<a href="./images/78.png">78</a>]</span>of men dividing the spoil. The great people, like
+Hatton and Ralegh, were to have their two or three Seignories: the
+county of Cork with its nineteen Seignories is assigned to the gentleman
+undertakers from Somersetshire. The plan was an ambitious and tempting
+one. But difficulties soon arose. The gentleman undertakers were not in
+a hurry to leave England even on a visit to their desolate and dangerous
+seignories in Munster. The "planting" did not thrive. The Irish were
+inexhaustible in raising legal obstacles and in giving practical
+annoyance. Claims and titles were hard to discover or to extinguish.
+Even the very attainted and escheated lands were challenged by virtue of
+settlements made before the attainders. The result was that a certain
+number of Irish estates were added to the possessions of a certain
+number of English families. But Munster was not planted. Burghley's
+policy, and Walsingham's resolution, and Ralegh's daring inventiveness
+were alike baffled by the conditions of a problem harder than the
+peopling of America or the conquest of India. Munster could not be made
+English. After all its desolation, it reverted in the main to its Irish
+possessors.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the schemes and efforts which accompanied the attempt, and the
+records of which fill the Irish State papers of those years, Spenser was
+the near and close spectator. He was in Dublin and on the spot, as Clerk
+of the Council of Munster. And he had become acquainted, perhaps, by
+this time, had formed a friendship, with Walter Ralegh, one of the most
+active men in Irish business, whose influence was rising wherever he was
+becoming known. Most of the knowledge which Spenser thus gathered, and
+of the impressions which a practical handling <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a>[<a href="./images/79.png">79</a>]</span>of Irish affairs had left
+on him, was embodied in his interesting work, written several years
+later&mdash;<i>A View of the present State of Ireland</i>. But his connexion with
+Munster not unnaturally brought him also an accession of fortune. When
+Ralegh and the "Somersetshire men" were dividing among them the County
+of Cork, the Clerk of the Council was remembered by some of his friends.
+He was admitted among the Undertakers. His name appears in the list,
+among great statesmen and captains with their seignories of 12,000
+acres, as holding a grant of some 3000. It was the manor and castle of
+Kilcolman, a ruined house of the Desmonds, under the Galtee Hills. It
+appears to have been first assigned to another person.<a name="FNanchor_79-5_20" id="FNanchor_79-5_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_79-5_20" class="fnanchor">[79:5]</a> But it came
+at last into Spenser's hands, probably in 1586; and henceforward, this
+was his abode and his home.</p>
+
+<p>Kilcolman Castle was near the high road between Mallow and Limerick,
+about three miles from Buttevant and Doneraile, in a plain at the foot
+of the last western falls of the Galtee range, watered by a stream now
+called the Awbeg, but which he celebrates under the name of the Mulla.
+In Spenser's time it was probably surrounded with woods. The earlier
+writers describe it as a pleasant abode with fine views, and so Spenser
+celebrated its natural beauties. The more recent accounts are not so
+favourable. "Kilcolman," says the writer in Murray's Handbook, "is a
+small peel tower, with cramped and dark rooms, a form which every
+gentleman's house assumed in turbulent times. It is situated on the
+margin of a small lake, and, it must be confessed, overlooking an
+extremely dreary tract of country." It was in the immediate
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a>[<a href="./images/80.png">80</a>]</span>neighbourhood of the wild country to the north, half forest, half bog,
+the wood and hill of Aharlo, or Arlo, as Spenser writes it, which was
+the refuge and the "great fastness" of the Desmond rebellion. It was
+amid such scenes, amid such occupations, in such society and
+companionship, that the poet of the <i>Faery Queen</i> accomplished as much
+of his work as was given him to do. In one of his later poems, he thus
+contrasts the peace of England with his own home:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">No wayling there nor wretchednesse is heard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No nightly bordrags [= border ravage], nor no hue and cries;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The shepheards there abroad may safely lie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No ravenous wolves the good mans hope destroy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54-1_16" id="Footnote_54-1_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54-1_16"><span class="label">[54:1]</span></a> Froude, x. 158.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58-2_17" id="Footnote_58-2_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58-2_17"><span class="label">[58:2]</span></a> Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1574-1585. Mr. H. C.
+Hamilton's Pref. p. lxxi-lxxiii. Nov. 12, 1580.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62-3_18" id="Footnote_62-3_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62-3_18"><span class="label">[62:3]</span></a> Cox, Hist. of Ireland, 354.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63-4_19" id="Footnote_63-4_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63-4_19"><span class="label">[63:4]</span></a> Irish Papers, March 29, 1587.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79-5_20" id="Footnote_79-5_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79-5_20"><span class="label">[79:5]</span></a> Carew MSS. Calendar, 1587, p. 449. Cf. Irish Papers;
+Calendar, 1587, p. 309, 450.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a>[<a href="./images/81.png">81</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE FAERY QUEEN&mdash;THE FIRST PART.</h3>
+
+<h4>[1580-1590.]</h4>
+
+
+<p>The <i>Faery Queen</i> is heard of very early in Spenser's literary course.
+We know that in the beginning of 1580, the year in which Spenser went to
+Ireland, something under that title had been already begun and submitted
+to Gabriel Harvey's judgment; and that among other literary projects,
+Spenser was intending to proceed with it. But beyond the mere name, we
+know nothing, at this time, of Spenser's proposed <i>Faery Queen</i>.
+Harvey's criticisms on it tell us nothing of its general plan or its
+numbers. Whether the first sketch had been decided upon, whether the new
+stanza, Spenser's original creation, and its peculiar beauty and
+instrument, had yet been invented by him, while he had been trying
+experiments in metre in the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>, we have no means of
+determining. But he took the idea with him to Ireland; and in Ireland he
+pursued it and carried it out.</p>
+
+<p>The first authentic account which we have of the composition of the
+<i>Faery Queen</i>, is in a pamphlet written by Spenser's friend and
+predecessor in the service of the Council of Munster, Ludowick Bryskett,
+and inscribed to Lord Grey of Wilton: a <i>Discourse of Civil Life</i>,
+published in 1606. He describes a meeting of friends at his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a>[<a href="./images/82.png">82</a>]</span>cottage
+near Dublin, and a conversation that took place on the "ethical" part of
+moral philosophy. The company consisted of some of the principal
+Englishmen employed in Irish affairs, men whose names occur continually
+in the copious correspondence in the Rolls and at Lambeth. There was
+Long, the Primate of Armagh; there were Sir Robert Dillon, the Chief
+Justice of the Common Pleas, and Dormer, the Queen's Solicitor; and
+there were soldiers, like Thomas Norreys, then Vice-President of
+Munster, under his brother John Norreys; Sir Warham Sentleger, on whom
+had fallen so much of the work in the South of Ireland, and who at last,
+like Thomas Norreys, fell in Tyrone's rebellion; Captain Christopher
+Carleil, Walsingham's son-in-law, a man who had gained great distinction
+on land and sea, not only in Ireland, but in the Low Countries, in
+France, and at Carthagena and San Domingo; and Captain Nicholas Dawtry,
+the Seneschal of Clandeboy, in the troublesome Ulster country,
+afterwards "Captain" of Hampshire at the time of the Armada. It was a
+remarkable party. The date of this meeting must have been after the
+summer of 1584, at which time Long was made Primate, and before the
+beginning of 1588, when Dawtry was in Hampshire. The extract is so
+curious, as a picture of the intellectual and literary wants and efforts
+of the times, especially amid the disorders of Ireland, and as a
+statement of Spenser's purpose in his poem, that an extract from it
+deserves to be inserted, as it is given in Mr. Todd's <i>Life of Spenser</i>,
+and repeated in that by Mr. Hales.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Herein do I greatly envie," writes Bryskett, "the happiness
+of the Italians, who have in their mother-tongue late writers
+that have, with a singular easie method taught all that Plato
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a>[<a href="./images/83.png">83</a>]</span>and Aristotle have confusedly or obscurely left written. Of
+which, some I have begun to reade with no small delight; as
+Alexander Piccolomini, Gio. Baptista Giraldi, and Guazzo; all
+three having written upon the Ethick part of Morall
+Philosophie both exactly and perspicuously. And would God that
+some of our countrimen would shew themselves so wel affected
+to the good of their countrie (whereof one principall and most
+important part consisteth in the instructing men to vertue),
+as to set downe in English the precepts of those parts of
+Morall Philosophy, whereby our youth might, without spending
+so much time as the learning of those other languages require,
+speedily enter into the right course of vertuous life.</p>
+
+<p>In the meane while I must struggle with those bookes which I
+vnderstand and content myselfe to plod upon them, in hope that
+God (who knoweth the sincerenesse of my desire) will be
+pleased to open my vnderstanding, so as I may reape that
+profit of my reading, which I trauell for. Yet is there <i>a
+gentleman in this company</i>, whom I have had often a purpose to
+intreate, that as his liesure might serue him, he would
+vouchsafe to spend some time with me to instruct me in some
+hard points which I cannot of myselfe understand; <i>knowing him
+to be not onely perfect in the Greek tongue, but also very
+well read in Philosophie, both morall and naturall</i>.
+Neuertheless such is my bashfulness, as I neuer yet durst open
+my mouth to disclose this my desire unto him, though I have
+not wanted some hartning thereunto from himselfe. For of loue
+and kindnes to me, <i>he encouraged me long sithens to follow
+the reading of the Greeke tongue, and offered me his helpe to
+make me vnderstand it</i>. But now that so good an opportunitie
+is offered vnto me, to satisfie in some sort my desire; I
+thinke I should commit a great fault, not to myselfe alone,
+but to all this company, if I should not enter my request thus
+farre, as to moue him to spend this time which we have now
+destined to familiar discourse and conuersation, in declaring
+unto us the great benefits which men obtaine by the knowledge
+of Morall Philosophie, and in making us to know what the same
+is, what be the parts thereof, whereby vertues are to be
+distinguished from vices; and finally that he will be pleased
+to run ouer in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a>[<a href="./images/84.png">84</a>]</span>such order as he shall thinke good, such and
+so many principles and rules thereof, as shall serue not only
+for my better instruction, but also for the contentment and
+satisfaction of you al. For I nothing doubt, but that euery
+one of you will be glad to heare so profitable a discourse and
+thinke the time very wel spent wherin so excellent a knowledge
+shal be reuealed unto you, from which euery one may be assured
+to gather some fruit as wel as myselfe.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore (said I), turning myselfe to <i>M. Spenser</i>, It is you
+sir, to whom it pertaineth to shew yourselfe courteous now
+unto vs all and to make vs all beholding unto you for the
+pleasure and profit which we shall gather from your speeches,
+if you shall vouchsafe to open unto vs the goodly cabinet, in
+which this excellent treasure of vertues lieth locked up from
+the vulgar sort. And thereof in the behalfe of all as for
+myselfe, I do most earnestly intreate you not to say vs nay.
+Vnto which wordes of mine euery man applauding most with like
+words of request and the rest with gesture and countenances
+expressing as much, <i>M. Spenser</i> answered in this maner:</p>
+
+<p>Though it may seeme hard for me, to refuse the request made by
+you all, whom euery one alone, I should for many respects be
+willing to gratifie; yet as the case standeth, I doubt not but
+with the consent of the most part of you, I shall be excused
+at this time of this taske which would be laid vpon me; for
+sure I am, that it is not vnknowne unto you, that I haue
+alreedy vndertaken a work tending to the same effect, which is
+in <i>heroical verse</i> under the title of a <i>Faerie Queene</i> to
+represent all the moral vertues, assigning to euery vertue a
+Knight to be the patron and defender of the same, in whose
+actions and feates of arms and chiualry the operations of that
+vertue, whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed, and
+the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against
+the same, to be beaten down and ouercome. Which work, <i>as I
+haue already well entred into</i>, if God shall please to spare
+me life that I may finish it according to my mind, your wish
+(<i>M. Bryskett</i>) will be in some sort accomplished, though
+perhaps not so effectually as you could desire. And the same
+may very well serue for my excuse, if at this time I craue to
+be forborne <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a>[<a href="./images/85.png">85</a>]</span>in this your request, since any discourse, that I
+might make thus on the sudden in such a subject would be but
+simple, and little to your satisfactions. For it would require
+good aduisement and premeditation for any man to vndertake the
+declaration of these points that you have proposed, containing
+in effect the Ethicke part of Morall Philosophie. Whereof
+since I haue taken in hand to discourse at large in my poeme
+before spoken, I hope the expectation of that work may serue
+to free me at this time from speaking in that matter,
+notwithstanding your motion and all your intreaties. But I
+will tell you how I thinke by himselfe he may very well excuse
+my speech, and yet satisfie all you in this matter. I haue
+seene (as he knoweth) a translation made by himselfe out of
+the Italian tongue of a dialogue comprehending all the Ethick
+part of Moral Philosophy written by one of those three he
+formerly mentioned, and that is by <i>Giraldi</i> vnder the title
+of a Dialogue of Ciuil life. If it please him to bring us
+forth that translation to be here read among vs, or otherwise
+to deliuer to us, as his memory may serue him, the contents of
+the same; he shal (I warrant you) satisfie you all at the ful,
+and himselfe wil haue no cause but to thinke the time well
+spent in reuiewing his labors, especially in the company of so
+many his friends, who may thereby reape much profit, and the
+translation happily fare the better by some mending it may
+receiue in the perusing, as all writings else may do by the
+often examination of the same. Neither let it trouble him that
+I so turne ouer to him againe the taske he wold haue put me
+to; for it falleth out fit for him to verifie the principall
+of all this Apologie, euen now made for himselfe; because
+thereby it will appeare that he hath not withdrawne himselfe
+from seruice of the state to liue idle or wholly priuate to
+himselfe, but hath spent some time in doing that which may
+greatly benefit others, and hath serued not a little to the
+bettering of his owne mind, and increasing of his knowledge;
+though he for modesty pretend much ignorance, and pleade want
+in wealth, much like some rich beggars, who either of custom,
+or for couetousnes, go to begge of others those things whereof
+they haue no want at home.</p>
+
+<p>With this answer of <i>M. Spensers</i> it seemed that all the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a>[<a href="./images/86.png">86</a>]</span>company were wel satisfied, for after some few speeches
+whereby they had shewed an extreme longing after his worke of
+the <i>Fairie Queene</i>, <i>whereof some parcels had been by some of
+them seene</i>, they all began to presse me to produce my
+translation mentioned by <i>M. Spenser</i> that it might be perused
+among them; or else that I should (as near as I could) deliuer
+unto them the contents of the same, supposing that my memory
+would not much faile me in a thing so studied and advisedly
+set downe in writing as a translation must be."</p></div>
+
+<p>A poet at this time still had to justify his employment by presenting
+himself in the character of a professed teacher of morality, with a
+purpose as definite and formal, though with a different method, as the
+preacher in the pulpit. Even with this profession, he had to encounter
+many prejudices, and men of gravity and wisdom shook their heads at what
+they thought his idle trifling. But if he wished to be counted
+respectable, and to separate himself from the crowd of foolish or
+licentious rimers, he must intend distinctly, not merely to interest,
+but to instruct, by his new and deep conceits. It was under the
+influence of this persuasion that Spenser laid down the plan of the
+<i>Faery Queen</i>. It was, so he proposed to himself, to be a work on moral,
+and if time were given him, political philosophy, composed with as
+serious a didactic aim, as any treatise or sermon in prose. He deems it
+necessary to explain and excuse his work by claiming for it this design.
+He did not venture to send the <i>Faery Queen</i> into the world without also
+telling the world its moral meaning and bearing. He cannot trust it to
+tell its own story or suggest its real drift. In the letter to Sir W.
+Ralegh, accompanying the first portion of it, he unfolds elaborately the
+sense of his allegory, as he expounded it to his friends in Dublin. "To
+some," he says, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a>[<a href="./images/87.png">87</a>]</span>"I know this method will seem displeasant, which had
+rather have good discipline delivered plainly by way of precept, or
+sermoned at large, as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in
+allegorical devises." He thought that Homer and Virgil and Ariosto had
+thus written poetry, to teach the world moral virtue and political
+wisdom. He attempted to propitiate Lord Burghley, who hated him and his
+verses, by setting before him in a dedication sonnet, the true intent of
+his&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">Idle rimes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The labour of lost time and wit unstaid;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet if their deeper sense he inly weighed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the dim veil, with which from common view<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their fairer parts are hid, aside be laid,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Perhaps not vain they may appear to you.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In earlier and in later times, men do not apologize for being poets; and
+Spenser himself was deceived in giving himself credit for this direct
+purpose to instruct, when he was really following the course marked out
+by his genius. But he only conformed to the curious utilitarian spirit
+which pervaded the literature of the time. Readers were supposed to look
+everywhere for a moral to be drawn, or a lesson to be inculcated, or
+some practical rules to be avowedly and definitely deduced; and they
+could not yet take in the idea that the exercise of the speculative and
+imaginative faculties may be its own end, and may have indirect
+influences and utilities even greater than if it was guided by a
+conscious intention to be edifying and instructive.</p>
+
+<p>The first great English poem of modern times, the first creation of
+English imaginative power since Chaucer, and like Chaucer so thoroughly
+and characteristically English, was not written in England. Whatever
+Spenser may have <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a>[<a href="./images/88.png">88</a>]</span>done to it before he left England with Lord Grey, and
+whatever portions of earlier composition may have been used and worked
+up into the poem as it went on, the bulk of the <i>Faery Queen</i>, as we
+have it, was composed in what to Spenser and his friends was almost a
+foreign land&mdash;in the conquered and desolated wastes of wild and
+barbarous Ireland. It is a feature of his work on which Spenser himself
+dwells. In the verses which usher in his poem, addressed to the great
+men of Elizabeth's court, he presents his work to the Earl of Ormond, as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The wild fruit which salvage soil hath bred;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which being through long wars left almost waste,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With brutish barbarism is overspread;&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and in the same strain to Lord Grey, he speaks of his "rude rimes, the
+which a rustic muse did weave, in salvage soil." It is idle to speculate
+what difference of form the <i>Faery Queen</i> might have received, if the
+design had been carried out in the peace of England and in the society
+of London. But it is certain that the scene of trouble and danger in
+which it grew up greatly affected it. This may possibly account, though
+it is questionable, for the looseness of texture, and the want of
+accuracy and finish which is sometimes to be seen in it. Spenser was a
+learned poet; and his poem has the character of the work of a man of
+wide reading, but without books to verify or correct. It cannot be
+doubted that his life in Ireland added to the force and vividness with
+which Spenser wrote. In Ireland, he had before his eyes continually, the
+dreary world which the poet of knight errantry imagines. There men might
+in good truth travel long through wildernesses and "great woods" given
+over to the outlaw and the ruffian. There the avenger <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a>[<a href="./images/89.png">89</a>]</span>of wrong need
+seldom want for perilous adventure and the occasion for quelling the
+oppressor. There the armed and unrelenting hand of right was but too
+truly the only substitute for law. There might be found in most certain
+and prosaic reality, the ambushes, the disguises, the treacheries, the
+deceits and temptations, even the supposed witchcrafts and enchantments,
+against which the fairy champions of the virtues have to be on their
+guard. In Ireland, Englishmen saw, or at any rate thought they saw, a
+universal conspiracy of fraud against righteousness, a universal battle
+going on between error and religion, between justice and the most
+insolent selfishness. They found there every type of what was cruel,
+brutal, loathsome. They saw everywhere men whose business it was to
+betray and destroy, women whose business it was to tempt and ensnare and
+corrupt. They thought that they saw too, in those who waged the Queen's
+wars, all forms of manly and devoted gallantry, of noble generosity, of
+gentle strength, of knightly sweetness and courtesy. There were those,
+too, who failed in the hour of trial; who were the victims of temptation
+or of the victorious strength of evil. Besides the open or concealed
+traitors, the Desmonds, and Kildares, and O'Neales, there were the men
+who were entrapped and overcome, and the men who disappointed hopes, and
+became recreants to their faith and loyalty; like Sir William Stanley,
+who, after a brilliant career in Ireland, turned traitor and apostate,
+and gave up Deventer and his Irish bands to the King of Spain.</p>
+
+<p>The realities of the Irish wars and of Irish social and political life
+gave a real subject, gave body and form to the allegory. There in actual
+flesh and blood were enemies to be fought with by the good and true.
+There <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a>[<a href="./images/90.png">90</a>]</span>in visible fact were the vices and falsehoods, which Arthur and
+his companions were to quell and punish. There in living truth were
+<i>Sansfoy</i>, and <i>Sansloy</i>, and <i>Sansjoy</i>; there were <i>Orgoglio</i> and
+<i>Grantorto</i>, the witcheries of <i>Acrasia</i> and <i>Ph&aelig;dria</i>, the insolence of
+<i>Briana</i> and <i>Crudor</i>. And there, too, were real Knights of goodness and
+the Gospel&mdash;Grey, and Ormond, and Ralegh, the Norreyses, St. Leger, and
+Maltby&mdash;on a real mission from Gloriana's noble realm to destroy the
+enemies of truth and virtue.</p>
+
+<p>The allegory bodies forth the trials which beset the life of man in all
+conditions and at all times. But Spenser could never have seen in
+England such a strong and perfect image of the allegory itself&mdash;with the
+wild wanderings of its personages, its daily chances of battle and
+danger, its hairbreadth escapes, its strange encounters, its prevailing
+anarchy and violence, its normal absence of order and law&mdash;as he had
+continually and customarily before him in Ireland. "The curse of God was
+so great," writes John Hooker, a contemporary, "and the land so barren
+both of man and beast, that whosoever did travel from one end to the
+other of all Munster, even from Waterford to Smerwick, about six score
+miles, he should not meet man, woman, or child, saving in cities or
+towns, nor yet see any beast, save foxes, wolves or other ravening
+beasts." It is the desolation through which Spenser's knights pursue
+their solitary way, or join company as they can. Indeed to read the same
+writer's account, for instance, of Ralegh's adventures with the Irish
+chieftains, his challenges and single combats, his escapes at fords and
+woods, is like reading bits of the <i>Faery Queen</i> in prose. As Spenser
+chose to write of knight errantry, his picture of it has doubtless
+gained in truth and strength by his very practical experience of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a>[<a href="./images/91.png">91</a>]</span>what
+such life as he describes must be. The <i>Faery Queen</i> might almost be
+called the Epic of the English wars in Ireland under Elizabeth, as much
+as the Epic of English virtue and valour at the same period.</p>
+
+<p>At the Dublin meeting described by Bryskett, some time later than 1584,
+Spenser had already "well entered into" his work. In 1589, he came to
+England, bringing with him the first three books; and early in 1590,
+they were published. Spenser himself has told us the story of this first
+appearance of the <i>Faery Queen</i>. The person who discovered the
+extraordinary work of genius which was growing up amid the turbulence
+and misery and despair of Ireland, and who once more brought its author
+into the centre of English life, was Walter Ralegh. Ralegh had served
+through much of the Munster war. He had shown in Ireland some of the
+characteristic points of his nature, which made him at once the glory
+and shame of English manhood. He had begun to take a prominent place in
+any business in which he engaged. He had shown his audacity, his
+self-reliance, his resource, and some signs of that boundless but
+prudent ambition which marked his career. He had shown that freedom of
+tongue, that restless and high-reaching inventiveness, and that tenacity
+of opinion, which made him a difficult person for others to work with.
+Like so many of the English captains, he hated Ormond, and saw in his
+feud with the Desmonds the real cause of the hopeless disorder of
+Munster. But also he incurred the displeasure and suspicion of Lord
+Grey, who equally disliked the great Irish Chief, but who saw in the
+"plot" which Ralegh sent to Burghley for the pacification of Munster, an
+adventurer's impracticable and self-seeking scheme. "I must be plain,"
+he writes, "I like neither his carriage <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a>[<a href="./images/92.png">92</a>]</span>nor his company." Ralegh had
+been at Smerwick: he had been in command of one of the bands put in by
+Lord Grey to do the execution. On Lord Grey's departure he had become
+one of the leading persons among the undertakers for the planting of
+Munster. He had secured for himself a large share of the Desmond lands.
+In 1587, an agreement among the undertakers assigned to Sir Walter
+Ralegh, his associates and tenants, three seignories of 12,000 acres
+a-piece, and one of 6000, in Cork and Waterford. But before Lord Grey's
+departure, Ralegh had left Ireland, and had found the true field for his
+ambition, in the English court. From 1582 to 1589, he had shared with
+Leicester and Hatton and afterwards with Essex, the special favour of
+the Queen. He had become Warden of the Stannaries and Captain of the
+Guard. He had undertaken the adventure of founding a new realm in
+America under the name of Virginia. He had obtained grants of
+monopolies, farms of wines, Babington's forfeited estates. His own great
+ship, which he had built, the Ark Ralegh, had carried the flag of the
+High Admiral of England in the glorious but terrible summer of 1588. He
+joined in that tremendous sea-chase from Plymouth to the North Sea,
+when, as Spenser wrote to Lord Howard of Effingham&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">Those huge castles of Castilian King,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That vainly threatened kingdoms to displace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like flying doves, ye did before you chase.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In the summer of 1589, Ralegh had been busy, as men of the sea were
+then, half Queen's servants, half buccaneers, in gathering the abundant
+spoils to be found on the high seas; and he had been with Sir John
+Norreys and Sir Francis Drake in a bootless but not unprofitable
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a>[<a href="./images/93.png">93</a>]</span>expedition to Lisbon. On his return from the Portugal voyage his court
+fortunes underwent a change. Essex, who had long scorned "that knave
+Ralegh," was in the ascendant. Ralegh found the Queen, for some reason
+or another, and reasons were not hard to find, offended and dangerous.
+He bent before the storm. In the end of the summer of 1589, he was in
+Ireland, looking after his large seignories, his law-suits with the old
+proprietors, his castle at Lismore, and his schemes for turning to
+account his woods for the manufacture of pipe staves for the French and
+Spanish wine trade.</p>
+
+<p>He visited Spenser, who was his neighbour, at Kilcolman, and the visit
+led to important consequences. The record of it and of the events which
+followed, is preserved in a curious poem of Spenser's written two or
+three years later, and of much interest in regard to Spenser's personal
+history. Taking up the old pastoral form of the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>,
+with the familiar rustic names of the swains who figured in its
+dialogues,&mdash;Hobbinol, Cuddie, Rosalind, and his own Colin Clout,&mdash;he
+described under the usual poetical disguise, the circumstances which
+once more took him back from Ireland to the court. The court was the
+place to which all persons wishing to push their way in the world were
+attracted. It was not only the centre of all power, the source of
+favours and honours, the seat of all that swayed the destiny of the
+nation. It was the home of refinement, and wit, and cultivation, the
+place where eminence of all kinds was supposed to be collected, and to
+which all ambitions, literary as much as political, aspired. It was not
+only a royal court; it was also a great club. Spenser's poem shows us
+how he had sped there, and the impressions made on his mind by a closer
+view of the persons and the ways <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a>[<a href="./images/94.png">94</a>]</span>of that awful and dazzling scene,
+which exercised such a spell upon Englishmen, and which seemed to
+combine or concentrate in itself the glory and the goodness of heaven,
+and all the baseness and malignity of earth. The occasion deserved a
+full celebration; it was indeed a turning-point in his life, for it led
+to the publication of the <i>Faery Queen</i>, and to the immediate and
+enthusiastic recognition by the Englishmen of the time of his unrivalled
+pre-eminence as a poet. In this poetical record, <i>Colin Clout's come
+home again</i>, containing in it history, criticism, satire, personal
+recollections, love passages, we have the picture of his recollections
+of the flush and excitement of those months which saw the first
+appearance of the <i>Faery Queen</i>. He describes the interruption of his
+retired and, as he paints it, peaceful and pastoral life in his Irish
+home, by the appearance of Ralegh, the "Shepherd of the Ocean," from
+"the main sea deep." They may have been thrown together before. Both had
+been patronized by Leicester. Both had been together at Smerwick, and
+probably in other passages of the Munster war; both had served under
+Lord Grey, Spenser's master, though he had been no lover of Ralegh. In
+their different degrees, Ralegh with his two or three Seignories of half
+a county, and Spenser with his more modest estate, they were embarked in
+the same enterprise, the plantation of Munster. But Ralegh now appeared
+before Spenser in all the glory of a brilliant favourite, the soldier,
+the explorer, the daring sea-captain, the founder of plantations across
+the ocean, and withal, the poet, the ready and eloquent discourser, the
+true judge and measurer of what was great or beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>The time, too, was one at once of excitement and repose. Men felt as
+they feel after a great peril, a great effort, a great relief; as the
+Greeks did after Salamis and Plat&aelig;a, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a>[<a href="./images/95.png">95</a>]</span>as our fathers did after Waterloo.
+In the struggle in the Channel with the might of Spain, England had
+recognized its force and its prospects. One of those solemn moments had
+just passed when men see before them the course of the world turned one
+way, when it might have been turned another. All the world had been
+looking out to see what would come to pass; and nowhere more eagerly
+than in Ireland. Every one, English and Irish alike, stood agaze to "see
+how the game would be played." The great fleet, as it drew near, "worked
+wonderfully uncertain yet calm humours in the people, not daring to
+disclose their real intention." When all was decided, and the distressed
+ships were cast away on the western coast, the Irish showed as much zeal
+as the English in fulfilling the orders of the Irish council, to
+"apprehend and execute all Spaniards found there of what quality
+soever." These were the impressions under which the two men met. Ralegh,
+at the moment, was under a cloud. In the poetical fancy picture set
+before us&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">His song was all a lamentable lay<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of great unkindnesse, and of usage hard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Cynthia the Ladie of the Sea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which from her presence faultlesse him debard.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ever and anon, with singults rife,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He cryed out, to make his undersong;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah! my loves queene, and goddesse of my life,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who shall me pittie, when thou doest me wrong?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>At Kilcolman, Ralegh became acquainted with what Spenser had done of the
+<i>Faery Queen</i>. His rapid and clear judgment showed him how immeasurably
+it rose above all that had yet been produced under the name of poetry in
+England. That alone is sufficient to account for his eager desire that
+it should be known in England. But Ralegh always had an eye to his own
+affairs, marred <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a>[<a href="./images/96.png">96</a>]</span>as they so often were by ill-fortune and his own
+mistakes; and he may have thought of making his peace with Cynthia, by
+reintroducing at Court the friend of Philip Sidney, now ripened into a
+poet not unworthy of Gloriana's greatness. This is Colin Clout's
+account:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When thus our pipes we both had wearied well,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(Quoth he) and each an end of singing made,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He gan to cast great lyking to my lore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And great dislyking to my lucklesse lot,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That banisht had my selfe, like wight forlore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into that waste, where I was quite forgot.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The which to leave, thenceforth he counseld mee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unmeet for man, in whom was ought regardfull,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And wend with him, his Cynthia to see:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose grace was great, and bounty most rewardfull;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Besides her peerlesse skill in making well,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all the ornaments of wondrous wit,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such as all womankynd did far excell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such as the world admyr'd, and praised it.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So what with hope of good, and hate of ill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He me perswaded forth with him to fare.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nought tooke I with me, but mine oaten quill:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Small needments else need shepheard to prepare.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So to the sea we came; the sea, that is<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A world of waters heaped up on hie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rolling like mountaines in wide wildernesse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Horrible, hideous, roaring with hoarse crie.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is followed by a spirited description of a sea-voyage, and of that
+empire of the seas in which, since the overthrow of the Armada, England
+and England's mistress were now claiming to be supreme, and of which
+Ralegh was one of the most active and distinguished officers:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And yet as ghastly dreadfull, as it seemes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bold men, presuming life for gaine to sell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dare tempt that gulf, and in those wandring stremes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Seek waies unknowne, waies leading down to hell.<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a>[<a href="./images/97.png">97</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">For, as we stood there waiting on the strond,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Behold! an huge great vessell to us came,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dauncing upon the waters back to lond,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As if it scornd the daunger of the same;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet was it but a wooden frame and fraile,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Glewed togither with some subtile matter.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet had it armes and wings, and head and taile,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And life to move it selfe upon the water.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Strange thing! how bold and swift the monster was,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That neither car'd for wind, nor haile, nor raine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor swelling waves, but thorough them did passe<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So proudly, that she made them roare againe.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The same aboord us gently did receave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And without harme us farre away did beare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So farre that land, our mother, us did leave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And nought but sea and heaven to us appeare.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then hartlesse quite, and full of inward feare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That shepheard I besought to me to tell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Under what skie, or in what world we were,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In which I saw no living people dwell.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who, me recomforting all that he might,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Told me that that same was the Regiment<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of a great Shepheardesse, that Cynthia hight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His liege, his Ladie, and his lifes Regent.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is the poetical version of Ralegh's appreciation of the treasure
+which he had lighted on in Ireland, and of what he did to make it known
+to the admiration and delight of England. He returned to the Court, and
+Spenser with him. Again, for what reason we know not, he was received
+into favour. The poet, who accompanied him, was brought to the presence
+of the lady, who saw herself in "various mirrors,"&mdash;Cynthia, Gloriana,
+Belph&oelig;be, as she heard him read portions of the great poem which was
+to add a new glory to her reign.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">"The Shepheard of the Ocean (quoth he)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unto that Goddesse grace me first enhanced,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And to mine oaten pipe enclin'd her eare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That she thenceforth therein gan take delight;<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a>[<a href="./images/98.png">98</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">And it desir'd at timely houres to heare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All were my notes but rude and roughly dight;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For not by measure of her owne great mynde,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And wondrous worth, she mott my simple song,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But joyd that country shepheard ought could fynd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Worth harkening to, emongst the learned throng."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He had already too well caught the trick of flattery&mdash;flattery in a
+degree almost inconceivable to us&mdash;which the fashions of the time, and
+the Queen's strange self-deceit, exacted from the loyalty and enthusiasm
+of Englishmen. In that art Ralegh was only too apt a teacher. Colin
+Clout, in his story of his recollections of the Court, lets us see how
+he was taught to think and to speak there:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But if I her like ought on earth might read,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I would her lyken to a crowne of lillies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon a virgin brydes adorned head,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With Roses dight and Goolds and Daffadillies;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or like the circlet of a Turtle true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In which all colours of the rainbow bee;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or like faire Phebes garlond shining new,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In which all pure perfection one may see.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But vaine it is to thinke, by paragone<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of earthly things, to judge of things divine:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her power, her mercy, her wisdome, none<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Can deeme, but who the Godhead can define.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why then do I, base shepheard, bold and blind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Presume the things so sacred to prophane?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">More fit it is t' adore, with humble mind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The image of the heavens in shape humane.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Queen, who heard herself thus celebrated, celebrated not only as a
+semi-divine person, but as herself unrivalled in the art of "making" or
+poetry,&mdash;"her peerless skill in making well,"&mdash;granted Spenser a pension
+of 50<i>l.</i> a year, which, it is said, the prosaic and frugal Lord
+Treasurer, always hard-driven for money and not caring much for poets,
+made difficulties about paying. But the new <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a>[<a href="./images/99.png">99</a>]</span>poem was not for the
+Queen's ear only. In the registers of the Stationers' Company occurs the
+following entry:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="right" style="padding-right: 1.5em;">Primo die Decembris [1589].</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ponsonbye&mdash;Entered for his Copye, a book intytuled the
+<i>fayrye Queene</i> dysposed into xij bookes &amp;c., authorysed under
+thandes of the Archbishop of Canterbery and bothe the Wardens.</p>
+
+<p class="right" style="padding-right: 1.5em;">vj<sup>d.</sup></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Thus, between pamphlets of the hour,&mdash;an account of the Arms of the City
+Companies on one side, and the last news from France on the other,&mdash;the
+first of our great modern English poems was licensed to make its
+appearance. It appeared soon after, with the date of 1590. It was not
+the twelve books, but only the first three. It was accompanied and
+introduced, as usual, by a great host of commendatory and laudatory
+sonnets and poems. All the leading personages at Elizabeth's court were
+appealed to; according to their several tastes or their relations to the
+poet, they are humbly asked to befriend, or excuse, or welcome his
+poetical venture. The list itself is worth quoting:&mdash;Sir Christopher
+Hatton, then Lord Chancellor, the Earls of Essex, Oxford,
+Northumberland, Ormond, Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord Grey of Wilton,
+Sir Walter Ralegh, Lord Burleigh, the Earl of Cumberland, Lord Hunsdon,
+Lord Buckhurst, Walsingham, Sir John Norris, President of Munster. He
+addresses Lady Pembroke, in remembrance of her brother, that "heroic
+spirit," "the glory of our days,"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Who first my Muse did lift out of the floor,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To sing his sweet delights in lowly lays.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And he finishes with a sonnet to Lady Carew, one of Sir John Spencer's
+daughters, and another to "all the gracious and beautiful ladies of the
+Court," in which "the world's <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a>[<a href="./images/100.png">100</a>]</span>pride seems to be gathered." There come
+also congratulations and praises for himself. Ralegh addressed to him a
+fine but extravagant sonnet, in which he imagined Petrarch weeping for
+envy at the approval of the <i>Faery Queen</i>, while "Oblivion laid him down
+on Laura's hearse," and even Homer trembled for his fame. Gabriel Harvey
+revoked his judgment on the <i>Elvish Queen</i>, and not without some regret
+for less ambitious days in the past, cheered on his friend in his noble
+enterprise. Gabriel Harvey has been so much, and not without reason,
+laughed at, and yet his verses welcoming the <i>Faery Queen</i> are so full
+of true and warm friendship, and of unexpected refinement and grace,
+that it is but just to cite them. In the eyes of the world he was an
+absurd personage: but Spenser saw in him perhaps his worthiest and
+trustiest friend. A generous and simple affection has almost got the
+better in them of pedantry and false taste.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Collyn, I see, by thy new taken taske,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Some sacred fury hath enricht thy braynes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That leades thy muse in haughty verse to maske,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And loath the layes that longs to lowly swaynes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That lifts thy notes from Shepheardes unto kinges:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So like the lively Larke that mounting singes.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Thy lovely Rosolinde seemes now forlorne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And all thy gentle flockes forgotten quight:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy chaunged hart now holdes thy pypes in scorne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Those prety pypes that did thy mates delight;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Those trusty mates, that loved thee so well;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whom thou gav'st mirth, as they gave thee the bell.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yet, as thou earst with thy sweete roundelayes<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Didst stirre to glee our laddes in homely bowers;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So moughtst thou now in these refyned layes<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Delight the daintie eares of higher powers:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And so mought they, in their deepe skanning skill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Alow and grace our Collyns flowing quyll.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a>[<a href="./images/101.png">101</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">And faire befall that <i>Faery Queene</i> of thine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In whose faire eyes love linckt with vertue sittes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Enfusing, by those bewties fyers devyne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Such high conceites into thy humble wittes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As raised hath poore pastors oaten reedes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From rustick tunes, to chaunt heroique deedes.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So mought thy <i>Redcrosse Knight</i> with happy hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Victorious be in that faire Ilands right,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which thou dost vayle in Type of Faery land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Elizas blessed field, that <i>Albion</i> hight:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That shieldes her friendes, and warres her mightie foes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet still with people, peace, and plentie flowes.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But (jolly shepheard) though with pleasing style<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou feast the humour of the Courtly trayne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let not conceipt thy setled sence beguile,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ne daunted be through envy or disdaine.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Subject thy dome to her Empyring spright,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From whence thy Muse, and all the world, takes light.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="authorscpoem">Hobynoll.</p>
+
+<p>And to the Queen herself Spenser presented his work, in one of the
+boldest dedications perhaps ever penned:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="center">To<br />
+The Most High, Mightie, and Magnificent<br />
+Empresse,<br />
+Renowmed for piety, vertve, and all gratiovs government,<br />
+ELIZABETH,<br />
+By the Grace of God,<br />
+Qveene of England, Fravnce, and Ireland, and of Virginia,<br />
+Defendovr of the Faith, &amp;c.<br />
+Her most hvmble Servavnt<br />
+<span class="smcap">Edmvnd Spenser</span>,<br />
+Doth, in all hvmilitie,<br />
+Dedicate, present, and consecrate<br />
+These his labovrs,<br />
+To live with the eternitie of her fame.</p>
+
+<p>"To live with the eternity of her fame,"&mdash;the claim was a proud one, but
+it has proved a prophecy. The <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a>[<a href="./images/102.png">102</a>]</span>publication of the <i>Faery Queen</i> placed
+him at once and for his lifetime at the head of all living English
+poets. The world of his day immediately acknowledged the charm and
+perfection of the new work of art which had taken it by surprise. As far
+as appears, it was welcomed heartily and generously. Spenser speaks in
+places of envy and detraction, and he, like others, had no doubt his
+rivals and enemies. But little trace of censure appears, except in the
+stories about Burghley's dislike of him, as an idle rimer, and perhaps
+as a friend of his opponents. But his brother poets, men like Lodge and
+Drayton, paid honour, though in quaint phrases, to the learned Colin,
+the reverend Colin, the excellent and cunning Colin. A greater than
+they, if we may trust his editors, takes him as the representative of
+poetry, which is so dear to him.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">If music and sweet poetry agree,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As they must needs, the sister and the brother,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Because thou lov'st the one, and I the other.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Dowland</i> to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Spenser</i> to me, whose deep conceit is such<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As passing all conceit, needs no defence.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou lov'st to hear the sweet melodious sound<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That Ph&oelig;bus' lute, the queen of music, makes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I in deep delight am chiefly drown'd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whenas himself to singing he betakes.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One god is god of both, as poets feign;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="authorpoem">(<i>Shakespere</i>, in the <i>Passionate Pilgrim</i>, 1599.)</p>
+
+<p>Even the fierce pamphleteer, Thomas Nash, the scourge and torment of
+poor Gabriel Harvey, addresses Harvey's friend as heavenly Spenser, and
+extols "the Faery Singers' stately tuned verse." Spenser's title to be
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a>[<a href="./images/103.png">103</a>]</span>"Poet of poets," was at once acknowledged as by acclamation. And he
+himself has no difficulty in accepting his position. In some lines on
+the death of a friend's wife, whom he laments and praises, the idea
+presents itself that the great queen may not approve of her Shepherd
+wasting his lays on meaner persons; and he puts into his friend's mouth
+a deprecation of her possible jealousy. The lines are characteristic,
+both in their beauty and music, and in the strangeness, in our eyes, of
+the excuse made for the poet.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ne let Eliza, royall Shepheardesse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The praises of my parted love envy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For she hath praises in all plenteousnesse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Powr'd upon her, like showers of Castaly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By her own Shepheard, Colin, her owne Shepheard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That her with heavenly hymnes doth deifie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of rustick muse full hardly to be betterd.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She is the Rose, the glorie of the day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And mine the Primrose in the lowly shade:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mine, ah! not mine; amisse I mine did say:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not mine, but His, which mine awhile her made;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mine to be His, with him to live for ay.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O that so faire a flower so soone should fade,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And through untimely tempest fall away!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She fell away in her first ages spring,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whil'st yet her leafe was greene, and fresh her rinde,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And whilst her braunch faire blossomes foorth did bring,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She fell away against all course of kinde.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For age to dye is right, but youth is wrong;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She fel away like fruit blowne downe with winde.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Weepe, Shepheard! weepe, to make my undersong.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Thus in both his literary enterprises, Spenser had been signally
+successful. The <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i> in 1580 had immediately raised
+high hopes of his powers. The <i>Faery Queen</i> in 1590 had more than
+fulfilled them. In the interval a considerable change had happened in
+English <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a>[<a href="./images/104.png">104</a>]</span>cultivation. Shakespere had come to London, though the world
+did not yet know all that he was. Sidney had published his <i>Defense of
+Poesie</i>, and had written the <i>Arcadia</i>, though it was not yet published.
+Marlowe had begun to write, and others beside him were preparing the
+change which was to come on the English Drama. Two scholars who had
+shared with Spenser in the bounty of Robert Newell were beginning, in
+different lines, to raise the level of thought and style. Hooker was
+beginning to give dignity to controversy, and to show what English prose
+might rise to. Lancelot Andrewes, Spenser's junior at school and
+college, was training himself at St. Paul's, to lead the way to a larger
+and higher kind of preaching than the English clergy had yet reached.
+The change of scene from Ireland to the centre of English interests,
+must have been, as Spenser describes it, very impressive. England was
+alive with aspiration and effort; imaginations were inflamed and hearts
+stirred by the deeds of men who described with the same energy with
+which they acted. Amid such influences, and with such a friend as
+Ralegh, Spenser may naturally have been tempted by some of the dreams of
+advancement of which Ralegh's soul was full. There is strong
+probability, from the language of his later poems, that he indulged such
+hopes, and that they were disappointed. A year after the entry in the
+Stationers' Register of the <i>Faery Queen</i> (29 Dec., 1590), Ponsonby, his
+publisher, entered a volume of "<i>Complaints, containing sundry small
+poems of the World's Vanity</i>," to which he prefixed the following
+notice.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="ctrsc">The Printer to the Gentle Reader.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Since</span> my late setting foorth of the <i>Faerie Queene</i>, finding
+that it hath found a favourable passage amongst you, I have
+sithence <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a>[<a href="./images/105.png">105</a>]</span>endevoured by all good meanes (for the better
+encrease and accomplishment of your delights,) to get into my
+handes such smale Poemes of the same Authors, as I heard were
+disperst abroad in sundrie hands, and not easie to bee come
+by, by himselfe; some of them having bene diverslie imbeziled
+and purloyned from him since his departure over Sea. Of the
+which I have, by good meanes, gathered togeather these fewe
+parcels present, which I have caused to bee imprinted
+altogeather, for that they al seeme to containe like matter of
+argument in them; being all complaints and meditations of the
+worlds vanitie, verie grave and profitable. To which effect I
+understand that he besides wrote sundrie others, namelie
+<i>Ecclesiastes</i> and <i>Canticum canticorum</i> translated, <i>A
+senights slumber</i>, <i>The hell of lovers</i>, <i>his Purgatorie</i>,
+being all dedicated to Ladies; so as it may seeme he ment them
+all to one volume. Besides some other Pamphlets looselie
+scattered abroad, as <i>The dying Pellican</i>, <i>The howers of the
+Lord</i>, <i>The sacrifice of a sinner</i>, <i>The seven Psalmes</i>, &amp;c.,
+which when I can, either by himselfe or otherwise, attaine
+too, I meane likewise for your favour sake to set foorth. In
+the meane time, praying you gentlie to accept of these, and
+graciouslie to entertaine the new Poet, <i>I take leave</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>The collection is a miscellaneous one, both as to subjects and date: it
+contains among other things, the translations from Petrarch and Du
+Bellay, which had appeared in Vander Noodt's <i>Theatre of Worldlings</i>, in
+1569. But there are also some pieces of later date; and they disclose
+not only personal sorrows and griefs, but also an experience which had
+ended in disgust and disappointment. In spite of Ralegh's friendship, he
+had found that in the Court he was not likely to thrive. The two
+powerful men who had been his earliest friends had disappeared. Philip
+Sidney had died in 1586; Leicester, soon after the destruction of the
+Armada, in 1588. And they had been followed (April, 1590) by Sidney's
+powerful father-in-law, Francis Walsingham. The death of Leicester,
+untended, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a>[<a href="./images/106.png">106</a>]</span>unlamented, powerfully impressed Spenser, always keenly alive
+to the pathetic vicissitudes of human greatness. In one of these pieces,
+<i>The Ruins of Time</i>, addressed to Sidney's sister, the Countess of
+Pembroke, Spenser thus imagines the death of Leicester,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It is not long, since these two eyes beheld<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A mightie Prince, of most renowmed race,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whom England high in count of honour held,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And greatest ones did sue to gaine his grace;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of greatest ones he, greatest in his place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sate in the bosome of his Soveraine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And <i>Right and loyall</i> did his word maintaine.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I saw him die, I saw him die, as one<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the meane people, and brought foorth on beare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I saw him die, and no man left to mone<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His dolefull fate, that late him loved deare:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Scarse anie left to close his eylids neare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Scarse anie left upon his lips to laie<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sacred sod, or Requiem to saie.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O! trustless state of miserable men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That builde your blis on hope of earthly thing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And vainlie thinke your selves halfe happie then,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When painted faces with smooth flattering<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Doo fawne on you, and your wide praises sing;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, when the courting masker louteth lowe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Him true in heart and trustie to you trow.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For Sidney, the darling of the time, who had been to him not merely a
+cordial friend, but the realized type of all that was glorious in
+manhood, and beautiful in character and gifts, his mourning was more
+than that of a looker-on at a moving instance of the frailty of
+greatness. It was the poet's sorrow for the poet, who had almost been to
+him what the elder brother is to the younger. Both now, and in later
+years, his affection for one who was become to him a glorified saint,
+showed itself in deep and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a>[<a href="./images/107.png">107</a>]</span>genuine expression, through the affectations
+which crowned the "herse" of Astrophel and Philisides. He was persuaded
+that Sidney's death had been a grave blow to literature and learning.
+The <i>Ruins of Time</i>, and still more the <i>Tears of the Muses</i>, are full
+of lamentations over returning barbarism and ignorance, and the slight
+account made by those in power of the gifts and the arts of the writer,
+the poet, and the dramatist. Under what was popularly thought the
+crabbed and parsimonious administration of Burghley, and with the
+churlishness of the Puritans, whom he was supposed to foster, it seemed
+as if the poetry of the time was passing away in chill discouragement.
+The effect is described in lines which, as we now naturally suppose, and
+Dryden also thought, can refer to no one but Shakespere. But it seems
+doubtful whether all this could have been said of Shakespere in 1590. It
+seems more likely that this also is an extravagant compliment to Philip
+Sidney, and his masking performances. He was lamented elsewhere under
+the poetical name of <i>Willy</i>. If it refers to him, it was probably
+written before his death, though not published till after it; for the
+lines imply, not that he is literally dead, but that he is in
+retirement. The expression that he is "dead of late," is explained in
+four lines below, as "choosing to sit in idle cell," and is one of
+Spenser's common figures for inactivity or sorrow.<a name="FNanchor_107-1_21" id="FNanchor_107-1_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_107-1_21" class="fnanchor">[107:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>The verses are the lamentations of the Muse of Comedy.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6"><span class="smcap">Thalia.</span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where be the sweete delights of learning's treasure<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That wont with Comick sock to beautefie<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The painted Theaters, and fill with pleasure<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The listners eyes and eares with melodie;<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a>[<a href="./images/108.png">108</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">In which I late was wont to raine as Queene,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And maske in mirth with Graces well bescene?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O! all is gone; and all that goodly glee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which wont to be the glorie of gay wits,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is layed abed, and no where now to see;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in her roome unseemly Sorrow sits,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With hollow browes and greisly countenaunce,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Marring my joyous gentle dalliaunce.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And him beside sits ugly Barbarisme,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And brutish Ignorance, ycrept of late<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Out of dredd darknes of the deepe Abysme,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where being bredd, he light and heaven does hate:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They in the mindes of men now tyrannize,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the faire Scene with rudenes foule disguize.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All places they with follie have possest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And with vaine toyes the vulgare entertaine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But me have banished, with all the rest<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That whilome wont to wait upon my traine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fine Counterfesaunce, and unhurtfull Sport,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Delight, and Laughter, deckt in seemly sort.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All these, and all that els the Comick Stage<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By which mans life in his likest image<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And those sweete wits, which wont the like to frame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are now despizd, and made a laughing game.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To mock her selfe, and truth to imitate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With kindly counter under Mimick shade,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our pleasant Willy, ah! <i>is dead of late</i>;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With whom all joy and jolly merriment<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is also deaded, and in dolour drent.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But that same gentle Spirit, from whose pen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Large streames of honnie and sweete Nectar flowe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Doth rather choose to sit in idle Cell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a>[<a href="./images/109.png">109</a>]</span>
+But the most remarkable of these pieces is a satirical fable, <i>Mother
+Hubberd's Tale of the Ape and Fox</i>, which may take rank with the
+satirical writings of Chaucer and Dryden for keenness of touch, for
+breadth of treatment, for swing and fiery scorn, and sustained strength
+of sarcasm. By his visit to the Court, Spenser had increased his
+knowledge of the realities of life. That brilliant Court, with a goddess
+at its head, and full of charming swains and divine nymphs, had also
+another side. It was still his poetical heaven. But with that odd
+insensibility to anomaly and glaring contrasts, which is seen in his
+time, and perhaps exists at all times, he passed from the celebration of
+the dazzling glories of Cynthia's Court, into a fierce vein of invective
+against its treacheries, its vain shows, its unceasing and mean
+intrigues, its savage jealousies, its fatal rivalries, the scramble
+there for preferment in Church and State. When it is considered what
+great persons might easily and naturally have been identified at the
+time with the <i>Ape and the Fox</i>, the confederate impostors, charlatans,
+and bullying swindlers, who had stolen the lion's skin, and by it
+mounted to the high places of the State, it seems to be a proof of the
+indifference of the Court to the power of mere literature, that it
+should have been safe to write and publish so freely, and so cleverly.
+Dull Catholic lampoons and Puritan scurrilities did not pass thus
+unnoticed. They were viewed as dangerous to the State, and dealt with
+accordingly. The fable contains what we can scarcely doubt to be some of
+that wisdom which Spenser learnt by his experience of the Court.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So pitifull a thing is Suters state!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Most miserable man, whom wicked fate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hath brought to Court, to sue for <i>had-ywist</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That few have found, and manie one hath mist!<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a>[<a href="./images/110.png">110</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">Full little knowest thou, that hast not tride,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What hell it is in suing long to bide:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To wast long nights in pensive discontent;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To speed to day, to be put back to morrow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To have thy Princes grace, yet want her Peeres;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To have thy asking, yet waite manie yeeres;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unhappie wight, borne to disastrous end,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That doth his life in so long tendance spend!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who ever leaves sweete home, where meane estate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In safe assurance, without strife or hate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Findes all things needfull for contentment meeke,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And will to Court for shadowes vaine to seeke,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or hope to gaine, himselfe will a daw trie:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That curse God send unto mine enemie!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Spenser probably did not mean his characters to fit too closely to
+living persons. That might have been dangerous. But it is difficult to
+believe that he had not distinctly in his eye a very great personage,
+the greatest in England next to the Queen, in the following picture of
+the doings of the Fox installed at Court.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">But the false Foxe most kindly plaid his part;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For whatsoever mother-wit or arte<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Could worke, he put in proofe: no practise slie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No counterpoint of cunning policie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No reach, no breach, that might him profit bring,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But he the same did to his purpose wring.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nought suffered he the Ape to give or graunt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But through his hand must passe the Fiaunt.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He chaffred Chayres in which Churchmen were set,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And breach of lawes to privie ferme did let:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No statute so established might bee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor ordinaunce so needfull, but that hee<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a>[<a href="./images/111.png">111</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">Would violate, though not with violence,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet under colour of the confidence<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The which the Ape repos'd in him alone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And reckned him the kingdomes corner stone.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ever, when he ought would bring to pas,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His long experience the platforme was:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, when he ought not pleasing would put by<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cloke was care of thrift, and husbandry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For to encrease the common treasures store;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But his owne treasure he encreased more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And lifted up his loftie towres thereby,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That they began to threat the neighbour sky;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The whiles the Princes pallaces fell fast<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To ruine (for what thing can ever last?)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And whilest the other Peeres, for povertie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Were forst their auncient houses to let lie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And their olde Castles to the ground to fall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which their forefathers, famous over-all,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had founded for the Kingdome's ornament,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And for their memories long moniment:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But he no count made of Nobilitie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor the wilde beasts whom armes did glorifie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Realmes chiefe strength and girlond of the crowne.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All these through fained crimes he thrust adowne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or made them dwell in darknes of disgrace;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For none, but whom he list, might come in place.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of men of armes he had but small regard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But kept them lowe, and streigned verie hard.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For men of learning little he esteemed;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His wisdome he above their learning deemed.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As for the rascall Commons, least he cared,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For not so common was his bountie shared.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let God, (said he) if please, care for the manie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I for my selfe must care before els anie.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So did he good to none, to manie ill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So did he all the kingdome rob and pill;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet none durst speake, ne none durst of him plaine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So groat he was in grace, and rich through gaine.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne would he anie let to have accesse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unto the Prince, but by his owne addresse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For all that els did come were sure to faile.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a>[<a href="./images/112.png">112</a>]</span>
+Even at Court, however, the poet finds a contrast to all this: he had
+known Philip Sidney, and Ralegh was his friend.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yet the brave Courtier, in whose beauteous thought<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Regard of honour harbours more than ought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Doth loath such base condition, to backbite<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Anies good name for envie or despite:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He stands on tearmes of honourable minde,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne will be carried with the common winde<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Courts inconstant mutabilitie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne after everie tattling fable flie;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But heares and sees the follies of the rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thereof gathers for himselfe the best.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He will not creepe, nor crouche with fained face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But walkes upright with comely stedfast pace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And unto all doth yeeld due curtesie;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But not with kissed hand belowe the knee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As that same Apish crue is wont to doo:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For he disdaines himselfe t' embase theretoo.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He hates fowle leasings, and vile flatterie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Two filthie blots in noble gentrie;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And lothefull idlenes he doth detest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The canker worme of everie gentle brest.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Or lastly, when the bodie list to pause,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His minde unto the Muses he withdrawes:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweete Ladie Muses, Ladies of delight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Delights of life, and ornaments of light!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With whom he close confers with wise discourse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Natures workes, of heavens continuall course,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of forreine lands, of people different,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of kingdomes change, of divers gouvernment,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of dreadfull battailes of renowned Knights;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With which he kindleth his ambitious sprights<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To like desire and praise of noble fame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The onely upshot whereto he doth ayme:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For all his minde on honour fixed is,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To which he levels all his purposis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in his Princes service spends his dayes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not so much for to gaine, or for to raise<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a>[<a href="./images/113.png">113</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">Himselfe to high degree, as for his grace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in his liking to winne worthie place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through due deserts and comely carriage.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The fable also throws light on the way in which Spenser regarded the
+religious parties, whose strife was becoming loud and threatening.
+Spenser is often spoken of as a Puritan. He certainly had the Puritan
+hatred of Rome; and in the Church system as it existed in England he saw
+many instances of ignorance, laziness, and corruption; and he agreed
+with the Puritans in denouncing them. His pictures of the "formal
+priest," with his excuses for doing nothing, his new-fashioned and
+improved substitutes for the ornate and also too lengthy ancient
+service, and his general ideas of self-complacent comfort, has in it an
+odd mixture of Roman Catholic irony with Puritan censure. Indeed, though
+Spenser hated with an Englishman's hatred all that he considered Roman
+superstition and tyranny, he had a sense of the poetical impressiveness
+of the old ceremonial, and the ideas which clung to it, its pomp, its
+beauty, its suggestiveness, very far removed from the iconoclastic
+temper of the Puritans. In his <i>View of the State of Ireland</i>, he notes
+as a sign of its evil condition the state of the churches, "most of them
+ruined and even with the ground," and the rest "so unhandsomely patched
+and thatched, that men do even shun the places, for the uncomeliness
+thereof." "The outward form (assure yourself)," he adds, "doth greatly
+draw the rude people to the reverencing and frequenting thereof,
+<i>whatever some of our late too nice fools may say</i>, that there is
+nothing in the seemly form and comely order of the church."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ah! but (said th' Ape) the charge is wondrous great,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To feede mens soules, and hath an heavie threat."<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"To feed mens soules (quoth he) is not in man;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For they must feed themselves, doo what we can.<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a>[<a href="./images/114.png">114</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">We are but charged to lay the meate before:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Eate they that list, we need to doo no more.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But God it is that feeds them with his grace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The bread of life powr'd downe from heavenly place.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Therefore said he, that with the budding rod<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Did rule the Jewes, <i>All shalbe taught of God</i>.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That same hath Jesus Christ now to him raught,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By whom the flock is rightly fed, and taught:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He is the Shepheard, and the Priest is hee;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We but his shepheard swaines ordain'd to bee.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Therefore herewith doo not your selfe dismay;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne is the paines so great, but beare ye may,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For not so great, as it was wont of yore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It's now a dayes, ne halfe so streight and sore.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They whilome used duly everie day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their service and their holie things to say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At morne and even, besides their Anthemes sweete,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their penie Masses, and their Complynes meete,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their Diriges, their Trentals, and their shrifts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their memories, their singings, and their gifts.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now all those needlesse works are laid away;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now once a weeke, upon the Sabbath day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It is enough to doo our small devotion,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And then to follow any merrie motion.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne are we tyde to fast, but when we list;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne to weare garments base of wollen twist,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But with the finest silkes us to aray,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That before God we may appeare more gay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Resembling Aarons glorie in his place:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For farre unfit it is, that person bace<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Should with vile cloaths approach Gods majestie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whom no uncleannes may approachen nie;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or that all men, which anie master serve,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Good garments for their service should deserve;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But he that serves the Lord of hoasts most high,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And that in highest place, t' approach him nigh,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all the peoples prayers to present<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Before his throne, as on ambassage sent<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Both too and fro, should not deserve to weare<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A garment better than of wooll or heare.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beside, we may have lying by our sides<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our lovely Lasses, or bright shining Brides:<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a>[<a href="./images/115.png">115</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">We be not tyde to wilfull chastitie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But have the Gospell of free libertie."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But his weapon is double-edged, and he had not much more love for</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">That ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The first prescription which the Priest gives to the Fox who desires to
+rise to preferment in the Church is to win the favour of some great
+Puritan noble.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">First, therefore, when ye have in handsome wise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your selfe attyred, as you can devise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then to some Noble-man your selfe applye,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or other great one in the world&euml;s eye,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That hath a zealous disposition<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To God, and so to his religion.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There must thou fashion eke a godly zeale,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such as no carpers may contrayre reveale;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For each thing fained ought more warie bee.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There thou must walke in sober gravitee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And seeme as Saintlike as Sainte Radegund:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fast much, pray oft, looke lowly on the ground,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And unto everie one doo curtesie meeke:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These lookes (nought saying) doo a benefice seeke,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And be thou sure one not to lack or long.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But he is impartial, and points out that there are other ways of
+rising&mdash;by adopting the fashions of the Court, "facing, and forging, and
+scoffing, and crouching to please," and so to "mock out a benefice;" or
+else, by compounding with a patron to give him half the profits, and in
+the case of a bishopric, to submit to the alienation of its manors to
+some powerful favourite, as the Bishop of Salisbury had to surrender
+Sherborn to Sir Walter Ralegh. Spenser, in his dedication of <i>Mother
+Hubberd's Tale</i> to one of the daughters of Sir John Spencer, Lady
+Compton and Monteagle, speaks of it as "long <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a>[<a href="./images/116.png">116</a>]</span>sithence composed in the
+raw conceit of youth." But, whatever this may mean, and it was his way
+thus to deprecate severe judgments, his allowing the publication of it
+at this time, shows, if the work itself did not show it, that he was in
+very serious earnest in his bitter sarcasms on the base and evil arts
+which brought success at the Court.</p>
+
+<p>He stayed in England about a year and a half [1590-91], long enough
+apparently to make up his mind that he had not much to hope for from his
+great friends, Ralegh and perhaps Essex, who were busy on their own
+schemes. Ralegh, from whom Spenser might hope most, was just beginning
+to plunge into that extraordinary career, in the thread of which, glory
+and disgrace, far-sighted and princely public spirit and insatiate
+private greed, were to be so strangely intertwined. In 1592 he planned
+the great adventure which astonished London by the fabulous plunder of
+the Spanish treasure-ships; in the same year he was in the Tower, under
+the Queen's displeasure for his secret marriage, affecting the most
+ridiculous despair at her going away from the neighbourhood, and pouring
+forth his flatteries on this old woman of sixty as if he had no bride of
+his own to love:&mdash;"I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander,
+hunting like Diana, walking like Venus; the gentle wind blowing her fair
+hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph; sometimes, sitting in the shade
+like a goddess; sometimes, singing like an angel; sometimes, playing
+like Orpheus&mdash;behold the sorrow of this world&mdash;once amiss, hath bereaved
+me of all." Then came the exploration of Guiana, the expedition to
+Cadiz, the Island voyage [1595-1597]. Ralegh had something else to do
+than to think of Spenser's fortunes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a>[<a href="./images/117.png">117</a>]</span>
+Spenser turned back once more to Ireland, to his clerkship of the
+Council of Munster, which he soon resigned; to be worried with law-suits
+about "lands in Shanballymore and Ballingrath," by his time-serving and
+oppressive Irish neighbour, Maurice Roche, Lord Fermoy; to brood still
+over his lost ideal and hero, Sidney; to write the story of his visit in
+the pastoral supplement to the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>, <i>Colin Clout's
+come home again</i>; to pursue the story of Gloriana's knights; and to find
+among the Irish maidens another Elizabeth, a wife instead of a queen,
+whose wooing and winning were to give new themes to his imagination.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_107-1_21" id="Footnote_107-1_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_107-1_21"><span class="label">[107:1]</span></a> <i>v. Colin Clout</i>, l. 31. <i>Astrophel</i>, l. 175.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a>[<a href="./images/118.png">118</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE FAERY QUEEN.</h3>
+
+<p>"<i>Uncouth</i> [= unknown], <i>unkist</i>," are the words from Chaucer,<a name="FNanchor_118-1_22" id="FNanchor_118-1_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_118-1_22" class="fnanchor">[118:1]</a>
+with which the friend, who introduced Spenser's earliest poetry to the
+world, bespeaks forbearance, and promises matter for admiration and
+delight in the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>. "You have to know my new poet, he
+says in effect: and when you have learned his ways, you will find how
+much you have to honour and love him." "I doubt not," he says, with a
+boldness of prediction, manifestly sincere, which is remarkable about an
+unknown man, "that so soon as his name shall come into the knowledge of
+men, and his worthiness be sounded in the trump of fame, but that he
+shall be not only kissed, but also beloved of all, embraced of the most,
+and wondered at of the best." Never was prophecy more rapidly and more
+signally verified, probably beyond the prophet's largest expectation.
+But he goes on to explain and indeed apologize for certain features of
+the new poet's work, which even to readers of that day might seem open
+to exception. And to readers of to-day, the phrase, <i>uncouth, unkist</i>,
+certainly expresses what many have to confess, if they are honest, as to
+their first acquaintance with the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a>[<a href="./images/119.png">119</a>]</span><i>Faery Queen</i>. Its place in
+literature is established beyond controversy. Yet its first and
+unfamiliar aspect inspires respect, perhaps interest, rather than
+attracts and satisfies. It is not the remoteness of the subject alone,
+nor the distance of three centuries which raises a bar between it and
+those to whom it is new. Shakespere becomes familiar to us from the
+first moment. The impossible legends of Arthur have been made in the
+language of to-day once more to touch our sympathies, and have lent
+themselves to express our thoughts. But at first acquaintance the <i>Faery
+Queen</i> to many of us has been disappointing. It has seemed not only
+antique, but artificial. It has seemed fantastic. It has seemed, we
+cannot help avowing, tiresome. It is not till the early appearances have
+worn off, and we have learned to make many allowances and to surrender
+ourselves to the feelings and the standards by which it claims to affect
+and govern us, that we really find under what noble guidance we are
+proceeding, and what subtle and varied spells are ever round us.</p>
+
+<p>I. The <i>Faery Queen</i> is the work of an unformed literature, the product
+of an unperfected art. English poetry, English language, in Spenser's,
+nay in Shakespere's day, had much to learn, much to unlearn. They never,
+perhaps, have been stronger or richer, than in that marvellous burst of
+youth, with all its freedom of invention, of observation, of reflection.
+But they had not that which only the experience and practice of eventful
+centuries could give them. Even genius must wait for the gifts of time.
+It cannot forerun the limitations of its day, nor anticipate the
+conquests and common possessions of the future. Things are impossible to
+the first great masters of art which are easy to their second-rate
+successors. The possibility, or the necessity of breaking <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a>[<a href="./images/120.png">120</a>]</span>through some
+convention, of attempting some unattempted effort, had not, among other
+great enterprises, occurred to them. They were laying the steps in a
+magnificent fashion on which those after them were to rise. But we ought
+not to shut our eyes to mistakes or faults to which attention had not
+yet been awakened, or for avoiding which no reasonable means had been
+found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognize, both what is
+still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is
+no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon,
+which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the
+scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But
+all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, is always
+limited and imperfect.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Faery Queen</i>, as a whole, bears on its face a great fault of
+construction. It carries with it no adequate account of its own story;
+it does not explain itself, or contain in its own structure what would
+enable a reader to understand how it arose. It has to be accounted for
+by a prose explanation and key outside of itself. The poet intended to
+reserve the central event, which was the occasion of all the adventures
+of the poem, till they had all been related, leaving them as it were in
+the air, till at the end of twelve long books the reader should at last
+be told how the whole thing had originated, and what it was all about.
+He made the mistake of confounding the answer to a riddle with the
+crisis which unties the tangle of a plot and satisfies the suspended
+interest of a tale. None of the great model poems before him, however
+full of digression and episode, had failed to arrange their story with
+clearness. They needed no commentary outside themselves to say why they
+began as they did, and out of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a>[<a href="./images/121.png">121</a>]</span>what antecedents they arose. If they
+started at once from the middle of things, they made their story, as it
+unfolded itself, explain, by more or less skilful devices, all that
+needed to be known about their beginnings. They did not think of rules
+of art. They did of themselves naturally what a good story-teller does,
+to make himself intelligible and interesting; and it is not easy to be
+interesting, unless the parts of the story are in their place.</p>
+
+<p>The defect seems to have come upon Spenser when it was too late to
+remedy it in the construction of his poem; and he adopted the somewhat
+clumsy expedient of telling us what the poem itself ought to have told
+us of its general story, in a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. Ralegh
+himself, indeed, suggested the letter: apparently (from the date, Jan.
+23, 1590), after the first part had gone through the press. And without
+this after-thought, as the twelfth book was never reached, we should
+have been left to gather the outline and plan of the story, from
+imperfect glimpses and allusions, as we have to fill up from hints and
+assumptions the gaps of an unskilful narrator, who leaves out what is
+essential to the understanding of his tale.</p>
+
+<p>Incidentally, however, this letter is an advantage: for we have in it
+the poet's own statement of his purpose in writing, as well as a
+necessary sketch of his story. His allegory, as he had explained to
+Bryskett and his friends, had a moral purpose. He meant to shadow forth,
+under the figures of twelve knights, and in their various exploits, the
+characteristics of "a gentleman or noble person," "fashioned in virtuous
+and gentle discipline." He took his machinery from the popular legends
+about King Arthur, and his heads of moral philosophy from the current
+Aristotelian catalogue of the Schools.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122"></a>[<a href="./images/122.png">122</a>]</span></p><div class="blockquot"><p>Sir, knowing how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed,
+and this booke of mine, which I have entituled the Faery
+Queene, being a continued Allegory, or darke conceit, I haue
+thought good, as well for avoyding of gealous opinions and
+misconstructions, as also for your better light in reading
+thereof, (being so by you commanded,) to discover unto you the
+general intention and meaning, which in the whole course
+thereof I have fashioned, without expressing of any particular
+purposes, or by accidents, therein occasioned. The generall
+end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or
+noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline: Which for that
+I conceived shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being
+coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part
+of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter then for
+profite of the ensample, I chose the historye of King Arthure,
+as most fitte for the excellency of his person, being made
+famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the
+daunger of envy, and suspition of present time. In which I
+have followed all the antique Poets historicall; first Homere,
+who in the Persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a
+good governour and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the
+other in his Odysseis: then Virgil, whose like intention was
+to doe in the person of Aeneas: after him Ariosto comprised
+them both in his Orlando: and lately Tasso dissevered them
+againe, and formed both parts in two persons, namely that part
+which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a private
+man, coloured in his Rinaldo; the other named Politice in his
+Godfredo. By ensample of which excellente Poets, I labour to
+pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a
+brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues,
+as Aristotle hath devised; the which is the purpose of these
+first twelve bookes: which if I finde to be well accepted, I
+may be perhaps encoraged to frame the other part of polliticke
+vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king.</p></div>
+
+<p>Then, after explaining that he meant the <i>Faery Queen</i> "for glory in
+general intention, but in particular" for Elizabeth, and his Faery Land
+for her kingdom, he <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123"></a>[<a href="./images/123.png">123</a>]</span>proceeds to explain, what the first three books
+hardly explain, what the Faery Queen had to do with the structure of the
+poem.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>But, because the beginning of the whole worke seemeth abrupte,
+and as depending upon other antecedents, it needs that ye know
+the occasion of these three knights seuerall adventures. For
+the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an
+Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of
+affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the
+times as the actions; but a Poet thrusteth into the middest,
+even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the
+thinges forepaste, and divining of thinges to come, maketh a
+pleasing Analysis of all.</p>
+
+<p>The beginning therefore of my history, if it were to be told
+by an Historiographer should be the twelfth booke, which is
+the last; where I devise that the Faery Queene kept her
+Annuall feaste xii. dayes; uppon which xii. severall dayes,
+the occasions of the xii. severall adventures hapned, which,
+being undertaken by xii. severall knights, are in these xii.
+books severally handled and discoursed. The first was this. In
+the beginning of the feast, there presented him selfe a tall
+clownishe younge man, who falling before the Queene of Faries
+desired a boone (as the manner then was) which during that
+feast she might not refuse; which was that hee might have the
+atchievement of any adventure, which during that feaste should
+happen: that being graunted, he rested him on the floore,
+unfitte through his rusticity for a better place. Soone after
+entred a faire Ladye in mourning weedes, riding on a white
+Asse, with a dwarfe behinde her leading a warlike steed, that
+bore the Armes of a knight, and his speare in the dwarfes
+hand. Shee, falling before the Queene of Faeries, complayned
+that her father and mother, an ancient King and Queene, had
+beene by an huge dragon many years shut up in a brasen Castle,
+who thence suffred them not to yssew; and therefore besought
+the Faery Queene to assygne her some one of her knights to
+take on him that exployt. Presently that clownish person,
+upstarting, desired that adventure: whereat the Queene much
+wondering, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124"></a>[<a href="./images/124.png">124</a>]</span>and the Lady much gainesaying, yet he earnestly
+importuned his desire. In the end the Lady told him, that
+unlesse that armour which she brought would serve him (that
+is, the armour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul, vi.
+Ephes.) that he could not succeed in that enterprise; which
+being forthwith put upon him, with dewe furnitures thereunto,
+he seemed the goodliest man in al that company, and was well
+liked of the Lady. And eftesoones taking on him knighthood,
+and mounting on that straunge courser, he went forth with her
+on that adventure: where beginneth the first booke, viz.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A gentle knight was pricking on the playne, &amp;c.<br /></span>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>That it was not without reason that this explanatory key was prefixed to
+the work, and that either Spenser or Ralegh felt it to be almost
+indispensable, appear from the concluding paragraph.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Thus much, Sir, I have briefly overronne to direct your
+understanding to the wel-head of the History; that from thence
+gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as in a
+handfull gripe al the discourse, which otherwise may happily
+seeme tedious and confused.</p></div>
+
+<p>According to the plan thus sketched out, we have but a fragment of the
+work. It was published in two parcels, each of three books, in 1590 and
+1596; and after his death two cantos, with two stray stanzas, of a
+seventh book were found and printed. Each perfect book consists of
+twelve cantos of from thirty-five to sixty of his nine-line stanzas. The
+books published in 1590 contain, as he states in his prefatory letter,
+the legends of <i>Holiness</i>, of <i>Temperance</i>, and of <i>Chastity</i>. Those
+published in 1596, contain the legends of <i>Friendship</i>, of <i>Justice</i>,
+and of <i>Courtesy</i>. The posthumous cantos are entitled, <i>Of Mutability</i>,
+and are said to be apparently parcel of a legend of <i>Constancy</i>. The
+poem which was to treat of the "politic" virtues was never <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125"></a>[<a href="./images/125.png">125</a>]</span>approached.
+Thus we have but a fourth part of the whole of the projected work. It is
+very doubtful whether the remaining six books were completed. But it is
+probable that a portion of them was written, which, except the cantos
+<i>On Mutability</i>, has perished. And the intended titles or legends of the
+later books have not been preserved.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the poem was to be an allegorical story; a story branching out into
+twelve separate stories, which themselves would branch out again and
+involve endless other stories. It is a complex scheme to keep well in
+hand, and Spenser's art in doing so has been praised by some of his
+critics. But the art, if there is any, is so subtle that it fails to
+save the reader from perplexity. The truth is that the power of ordering
+and connecting a long and complicated plan was not one of Spenser's
+gifts. In the first two books, the allegorical story proceeds from point
+to point with fair coherence and consecutiveness. After them the attempt
+to hold the scheme together, except in the loosest and most general way,
+is given up as too troublesome or too confined. The poet prefixes indeed
+the name of a particular virtue to each book, but, with slender
+reference to it, he surrenders himself freely to his abundant flow of
+ideas, and to whatever fancy or invention tempts him, and ranges
+unrestrained over the whole field of knowledge and imagination. In the
+first two books, the allegory is transparent and the story connected.
+The allegory is of the nature of the <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>. It starts
+from the belief that religion, purified from falsehood, superstition,
+and sin, is the foundation of all nobleness in man; and it portrays,
+under images and with names, for the most part easily understood, and
+easily applied to real counterparts, the struggle which every one at
+that time supposed to be going on, between absolute truth <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126"></a>[<a href="./images/126.png">126</a>]</span>and
+righteousness on one side, and fatal error and bottomless wickedness on
+the other. Una, the Truth, the one and only Bride of man's spirit,
+marked out by the tokens of humility and innocence, and by her power
+over wild and untamed natures&mdash;the single Truth, in contrast to the
+counterfeit Duessa, false religion, and its actual embodiment in the
+false rival Queen of Scots&mdash;Truth, the object of passionate homage, real
+with many, professed with all, which after the impostures and scandals
+of the preceding age, had now become characteristic of that of
+Elizabeth&mdash;Truth, its claims, its dangers, and its champions, are the
+subject of the first book: and it is represented as leading the manhood
+of England, in spite, not only of terrible conflict, but of defeat and
+falls, through the discipline of repentance, to holiness and the
+blessedness which comes with it. The Red Cross Knight, St. George of
+England, whose name Georgos, the Ploughman, is dwelt upon, apparently to
+suggest that from the commonalty, the "tall clownish young men," were
+raised up the great champions of the Truth,&mdash;though sorely troubled by
+the wiles of Duessa, by the craft of the arch-sorcerer, by the force and
+pride of the great powers of the Apocalyptic Beast and Dragon, finally
+overcomes them, and wins the deliverance of Una and her love.</p>
+
+<p>The second book, <i>Of Temperance</i>, pursues the subject, and represents
+the internal conquests of self-mastery, the conquests of a man over his
+passions, his violence, his covetousness, his ambition, his despair, his
+sensuality. Sir Guyon, after conquering many foes of goodness, is the
+destroyer of the most perilous of them all, Acrasia, licentiousness, and
+her ensnaring Bower of Bliss. But after this, the thread at once of
+story and allegory, slender henceforth at the best, is neglected and
+often entirely <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127"></a>[<a href="./images/127.png">127</a>]</span>lost. The third book, the <i>Legend of Chastity</i>, is a
+repetition of the ideas of the latter part of the second, with a
+heroine, Britomart, in place of the Knight of the previous book, Sir
+Guyon, and with a special glorification of the high-flown and romantic
+sentiments about purity, which wore the poetic creed of the courtiers of
+Elizabeth, in flagrant and sometimes in tragic contrast to their
+practical conduct of life. The loose and ill-compacted nature of the
+plan becomes still more evident in the second instalment of the work.
+Even the special note of each particular virtue becomes more faint and
+indistinct. The one law to which the poet feels bound is to have twelve
+cantos in each book; and to do this he is sometimes driven to what in
+later times has been called padding. One of the cantos of the third book
+is a genealogy of British kings from Geoffrey of Monmouth; one of the
+cantos of the <i>Legend of Friendship</i> is made up of an episode,
+describing the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, with an elaborate
+catalogue of the English and Irish rivers, and the names of the
+sea-nymphs. In truth, he had exhausted his proper allegory, or he got
+tired of it. His poem became an elastic framework, into which he could
+fit whatever interested him and tempted him to composition. The gravity
+of the first books disappears. He passes into satire and caricature. We
+meet with Braggadochio and Trompart, with the discomfiture of Malecasta,
+with the conjugal troubles of Malbecco and Helenore, with the imitation
+from Ariosto of the Squire of Dames. He puts into verse a poetical
+physiology of the human body; he translates Lucretius, and speculates on
+the origin of human souls; he speculates, too, on social justice, and
+composes an argumentative refutation of the Anabaptist theories of right
+and equality <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128"></a>[<a href="./images/128.png">128</a>]</span>among men. As the poem proceeds, he seems to feel himself
+more free to introduce what he pleases. Allusions to real men and events
+are sometimes clear, at other times evident, though they have now ceased
+to be intelligible to us. His disgust and resentment breaks out at the
+ways of the Court in sarcastic moralizing, or in pictures of dark and
+repulsive imagery. The characters and pictures of his friends furnish
+material for his poem; he does not mind touching on the misadventures of
+Ralegh, and even of Lord Grey, with sly humour or a word of candid
+advice. He becomes bolder in the distinct introduction of contemporary
+history. The defeat of Duessa was only figuratively shown in the first
+portion; in the second the subject is resumed. As Elizabeth is the "one
+form of many names," Gloriana, Belph&oelig;be, Britomart, Mercilla, so
+"under feigned colours shading a true case" he deals with her rival.
+Mary seems at one time the false Florimel, the creature of enchantment,
+stirring up strife, and fought for by the foolish knights whom she
+deceives, Blandamour and Paridell, the counterparts of Norfolk and the
+intriguers of 1571. At another, she is the fierce Amazonian queen,
+Radegund, by whom for a moment, even Arthegal is brought into
+disgraceful thraldom, till Britomart, whom he has once fought against,
+delivers him. And finally the fate of the typical Duessa is that of the
+real Mary Queen of Scots described in great detail&mdash;a liberty in dealing
+with great affairs of state for which James of Scotland actually desired
+that he should be tried and punished.<a name="FNanchor_128-2_23" id="FNanchor_128-2_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_128-2_23" class="fnanchor">[128:2]</a> So Philip II. is at one
+time the Soldan, at another the Spanish monster Geryoneo, at another the
+fosterer of Catholic intrigues in France and Ireland, Grantorto. But
+real names are also introduced <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129"></a>[<a href="./images/129.png">129</a>]</span>with scarcely any disguise: Guizor, and
+Burbon, the Knight who throws away his shield, Henry IV., and his Lady
+Flourdelis, the Lady Beige, and her seventeen sons: the Lady Irena, whom
+Arthegal delivers. The overthrow of the Armada, the English war in the
+Low Countries, the apostasy of Henry IV., the deliverance of Ireland
+from the "great wrong" of Desmond's rebellion, the giant Grantorto,
+form, under more or less transparent allegory, great part of the <i>Legend
+of Justice</i>. Nay, Spenser's long fostered revenge on the lady who had
+once scorned him, the <i>Rosalind</i> of the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>, the
+<i>Mirabella</i> of the <i>Faery Queen</i>, and his own late and happy marriage in
+Ireland, are also brought in to supply materials for the <i>Legend of
+Courtesy</i>. So multifarious is the poem, full of all that he thought, or
+observed, or felt; a receptacle, without much care to avoid repetition,
+or to prune, correct, and condense, for all the abundance of his ideas,
+as they welled forth in his mind day by day. It is really a collection
+of separate tales and allegories, as much as the <i>Arabian Nights</i>, or,
+as its counterpart and rival of our own century, the <i>Idylls of the
+King</i>. As a whole it is confusing: but we need not treat it as a whole.
+Its continued interest soon breaks down. But it is probably best that
+Spenser gave his mind the vague freedom which suited it, and that he did
+not make efforts to tie himself down to his pre-arranged but too
+ambitious plan. We can hardly lose our way in it, for there is no way to
+lose. It is a wilderness in which we are left to wander. But there may
+be interest and pleasure in a wilderness, if we are prepared for the
+wandering.</p>
+
+<p>Still, the complexity, or rather, the uncared-for and clumsy arrangement
+of the poem is matter which <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130"></a>[<a href="./images/130.png">130</a>]</span>disturbs a reader's satisfaction, till he
+gets accustomed to the poet's way, and resigns himself to it. It is a
+heroic poem, in which the heroine, who gives her name to it, never
+appears: a story, of which the basis and starting-point is whimsically
+withheld for disclosure in the last book, which was never written. If
+Ariosto's jumps and transitions are more audacious, Spenser's intricacy
+is more puzzling. Adventures begin which have no finish. Actors in them
+drop from the clouds, claim an interest, and we ask in vain what has
+become of them. A vein of what are manifestly contemporary allusions
+breaks across the moral drift of the allegory, with an apparently
+distinct yet obscured meaning, and one of which it is the work of
+dissertations to find the key. The passion of the age was for ingenious
+riddling in morality as in love. And in Spenser's allegories we are not
+seldom at a loss to make out what and how much was really intended, amid
+a maze of overstrained analogies and over-subtle conceits, and attempts
+to hinder a too close and dangerous identification.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed Spenser's mode of allegory, which was historical as well as
+moral, and contains a good deal of history, if we knew it, often seems
+devised to throw curious readers off the scent. It was purposely
+baffling and hazy. A characteristic trait was singled out. A name was
+transposed in anagram, like Irena, or distorted, as if by imperfect
+pronunciation, like Burbon and Arthegal, or invented to express a
+quality, like Una, or Gloriana, or Corceca, or Fradubio, or adopted with
+no particular reason from the <i>Morte d'Arthur</i>, or any other old
+literature. The personage is introduced with some feature, or amid
+circumstances which seem for a moment to fix the meaning. But when we
+look to the sequence of history being kept <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131"></a>[<a href="./images/131.png">131</a>]</span>up in the sequence of the
+story, we find ourselves thrown out. A character which fits one person
+puts on the marks of another: a likeness which we identify with one real
+person passes into the likeness of some one else. The real, in person,
+incident, institution, shades off into the ideal; after showing itself
+by plain tokens, it turns aside out of its actual path of fact, and
+ends, as the poet thinks it ought to end, in victory or defeat, glory or
+failure. Prince Arthur passes from Leicester to Sidney, and then back
+again to Leicester. There are double or treble allegories; Elizabeth is
+Gloriana, Belph&oelig;be, Britomart, Mercilla, perhaps Amoret; her rival is
+Duessa, the false Florimel, probably the fierce temptress, the Amazon
+Radegund. Thus, what for a moment was clear and definite, fades like the
+changing fringe of a dispersing cloud. The character which we identified
+disappears in other scenes and adventures, where we lose sight of all
+that identified it. A complete transformation destroys the likeness
+which was begun. There is an intentional dislocation of the parts of the
+story, when they might make it imprudently close in its reflection of
+facts or resemblance in portraiture. A feature is shown, a manifest
+allusion made, and then the poet starts off in other directions, to
+confuse and perplex all attempts at interpretation, which might be too
+particular and too certain. This was no doubt merely according to the
+fashion of the time, and the habits of mind into which the poet had
+grown. But there were often reasons for it, in an age so suspicious, and
+so dangerous to those who meddled with high matters of state.</p>
+
+<p>2. Another feature which is on the surface of the <i>Faery Queen</i>, and
+which will displease a reader who has been trained to value what is
+natural and genuine, is its <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132"></a>[<a href="./images/132.png">132</a>]</span>affectation of the language and the customs
+of life belonging to an age which is not its own. It is indeed redolent
+of the present: but it is almost avowedly an imitation of what was
+current in the days of Chaucer: of what were supposed to be the words,
+and the social ideas and conditions, of the age of chivalry. He looked
+back to the fashions and ideas of the Middle Ages, as Pindar sought his
+materials in the legends and customs of the Homeric times, and created a
+revival of the spirit of the age of the Heroes in an age of tyrants and
+incipient democracies.<a name="FNanchor_132-3_24" id="FNanchor_132-3_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_132-3_24" class="fnanchor">[132:3]</a> The age of chivalry, in Spenser's day far
+distant, had yet left two survivals, one real, the other formal. The
+real survival was the spirit of armed adventure, which was never
+stronger or more stirring than in the gallants and discoverers of
+Elizabeth's reign, the captains of the English companies in the Low
+Countries, the audacious sailors who explored unknown oceans and
+plundered the Spaniards, the scholars and gentlemen equally ready for
+work on sea and land, like Ralegh and Sir Richard Grenville, of the
+"Revenge." The formal survival was the fashion of keeping up the
+trappings of knightly times, as we keep up Judge's wigs, court dresses,
+and Lord Mayor's shows. In actual life it was seen in pageants and
+ceremonies, in the yet lingering parade of jousts and tournaments, in
+the knightly accoutrements still worn in the days of the bullet and the
+cannon-ball. In the apparatus of the poet, as all were shepherds, when
+he wanted to represent the life of peace and letters, so all were
+knights or the foes and victims of knights, when his theme was action
+and enterprise. It was the custom that the Muse masked, to use Spenser's
+word, under these <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133"></a>[<a href="./images/133.png">133</a>]</span>disguises; and this conventional masquerade of
+pastoral poetry or knight errantry was the form under which the poetical
+school that preceded the dramatists naturally expressed their ideas. It
+seems to us odd that peaceful sheepcotes and love-sick swains should
+stand for the world of the Tudors and Guises, or that its cunning
+statecraft and relentless cruelty should be represented by the generous
+follies of an imaginary chivalry. But it was the fashion which Spenser
+found, and he accepted it. His genius was not of that sort which breaks
+out from trammels, but of that which makes the best of what it finds.
+And whatever we may think of the fashion, at least he gave it new
+interest and splendour by the spirit with which he threw himself into
+it.</p>
+
+<p>The condition which he took as the groundwork of his poetical fabric
+suggested the character of his language. Chaucer was then the "God of
+English poetry;" his was the one name which filled a place apart in the
+history of English verse. Spenser was a student of Chaucer, and borrowed
+as he judged fit, not only from his vocabulary, but from his grammatical
+precedents and analogies, with the object of giving an appropriate
+colouring to what was to be raised as far as possible above familiar
+life. Besides this, the language was still in such an unsettled state
+that from a man with resources like Spenser's, it naturally invited
+attempts to enrich and colour it, to increase its flexibility and power.
+The liberty of reviving old forms, of adopting from the language of the
+street and market homely but expressive words or combinations, of
+following in the track of convenient constructions, of venturing on new
+and bold phrases, was rightly greater in his time than at a later stage
+of the language. Many of his words, either invented or preserved, are
+happy additions; some <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134"></a>[<a href="./images/134.png">134</a>]</span>which have not taken root in the language, we may
+regret. But it was a liberty which he abused. He was extravagant and
+unrestrained in his experiments on language. And they were made not
+merely to preserve or to invent a good expression. On his own authority,
+he cuts down, or he alters a word, or he adopts a mere corrupt
+pronunciation, to suit a place in his metre, or because he wants a rime.
+Precedents, as Mr. Guest has said, may no doubt be found for each one of
+these sacrifices to the necessities of metre or rime, in some one or
+other living dialectic usage, or even in printed books&mdash;"<i>blend</i>" for
+"<i>blind</i>," "<i>misleeke</i>" for "<i>mislike</i>," "<i>kest</i>" for "<i>cast</i>,"
+"<i>cherry</i>" for "<i>cherish</i>," "<i>vilde</i>" for "<i>vile</i>," or even "<i>wawes</i>"
+for "<i>waves</i>," because it has to rime to "<i>jaws</i>." But when they are
+profusely used as they are in Spenser, they argue, as critics of his own
+age such as Puttenham, remarked,&mdash;either want of trouble, or want of
+resource. In his impatience he is reckless in making a word which he
+wants&mdash;"fortunize," "mercified," "unblindfold," "relive"&mdash;he is reckless
+in making one word do the duty of another, interchanging actives and
+passives, transferring epithets from their proper subjects. The "humbled
+grass," is the grass on which a man lies humbled: the "lamentable eye,"
+is the eye which laments. "His treatment of words," says Mr. Craik, "on
+such occasions"&mdash;occasions of difficulty to his verse&mdash;"is like nothing
+that ever was seen, unless it might be Hercules breaking the back of the
+Nemean lion. He gives them any sense and any shape that the case may
+demand. Sometimes he merely alters a letter or two; sometimes he twists
+off the head or the tail of the unfortunate vocable altogether. But this
+fearless, lordly, truly royal style makes one only feel the more how
+easily, if he chose, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135"></a>[<a href="./images/135.png">135</a>]</span>he could avoid the necessity of having recourse to
+such outrages."</p>
+
+<p>His own generation felt his licence to be extreme. "In affecting the
+ancients," said Ben Jonson, "he writ no language." Daniel writes
+sarcastically, soon after the <i>Faery Queen</i> appeared, of those who</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sing of knights and Palladines,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In aged accents and untimely words.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And to us, though students of the language must always find interest in
+the storehouse of ancient or invented language to be found in Spenser,
+this mixture of what is obsolete or capriciously new is a bar, and not
+an unreasonable one, to a frank welcome at first acquaintance. Fuller
+remarks with some slyness, that "the many Chaucerisms used (for I will
+not say, affected) by him, are thought by the ignorant to be blemishes,
+known by the learned to be beauties, in his book; which notwithstanding
+had been more saleable, if more conformed to our modern language." The
+grotesque, though it has its place as one of the instruments of poetical
+effect, is a dangerous element to handle. Spenser's age was very
+insensible to the presence and the dangers of the grotesque, and he was
+not before his time in feeling what was unpleasing in incongruous
+mixtures. Strong in the abundant but unsifted learning of his day, a
+style of learning, which in his case was strangely inaccurate, he not
+only mixed the past with the present, fairyland with politics, mythology
+with the most serious Christian ideas, but he often mixed together the
+very features which are most discordant, in the colours, forms, and
+methods by which he sought to produce the effect of his pictures.</p>
+
+<p>3. Another source of annoyance and disappointment is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136"></a>[<a href="./images/136.png">136</a>]</span>found in the
+imperfections and inconsistencies of the poet's standard of what is
+becoming to say and to write about. Exaggeration, diffuseness,
+prolixity, were the literary diseases of the age; an age of great
+excitement and hope, which had suddenly discovered its wealth and its
+powers, but not the rules of true economy in using them. With the
+classics open before it, and alive to much of the grandeur of their
+teaching, it was almost blind to the spirit of self-restraint,
+proportion, and simplicity which governed the great models. It was left
+to a later age to discern these and appreciate them. This unresisted
+proneness to exaggeration produced the extravagance and the horrors of
+the Elizabethan Drama, full, as it was, nevertheless, of insight and
+originality. It only too naturally led the earlier Spenser astray. What
+Dryden, in one of his interesting critical prefaces says of himself, is
+true of Spenser; "Thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast
+upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject; to run them
+into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose." There was in
+Spenser a facility for turning to account all material, original or
+borrowed, an incontinence of the descriptive faculty, which was ever
+ready to exercise itself on any object, the most unfitting and
+loathsome, as on the noblest, the purest, or the most beautiful. There
+are pictures in him which seem meant to turn our stomach. Worse than
+that there are pictures which for a time rank the poet of <i>Holiness</i> or
+<i>Temperance</i>, with the painters who used their great art to represent at
+once the most sacred and holiest forms, and also scenes which few people
+now like to look upon in company&mdash;scenes and descriptions which may
+perhaps from the habits of the time may have been playfully and
+innocently produced, but which it is certainly not easy to dwell upon
+innocently <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137"></a>[<a href="./images/137.png">137</a>]</span>now. And apart from these serious faults, there is
+continually haunting us, amid incontestable richness, vigour, and
+beauty, a sense that the work is over-done. Spenser certainly did not
+want for humour and an eye for the ridiculous. There is no want in him,
+either, of that power of epigrammatic terseness, which, in spite of its
+diffuseness, his age valued and cultivated. But when he gets on a story
+or a scene, he never knows where to stop. His duels go on stanza after
+stanza till there is no sound part left in either champion. His palaces,
+landscapes, pageants, feasts, are taken to pieces in all their parts,
+and all these parts are likened to some other things. "His abundance,"
+says Mr. Craik, "is often oppressive; <i>it is like wading among unmown
+grass</i>." And he drowns us in words. His abundant and incongruous
+adjectives may sometimes, perhaps, startle us unfairly, because their
+associations and suggestions have quite altered; but very often they are
+the idle outpouring of an unrestrained affluence of language. The
+impression remains that he wants a due perception of the absurd, the
+unnatural, the unnecessary; that he does not care if he makes us smile,
+or does not know how to help it, when he tries to make us admire or
+sympathize.</p>
+
+<p>Under this head comes a feature which the "charity of history" may lead
+us to treat as simple exaggeration, but which often suggests something
+less pardonable, in the great characters, political or literary, of
+Elizabeth's reign. This was the gross, shameless, lying flattery paid to
+the Queen. There is really nothing like it in history. It is unique as a
+phenomenon that proud, able, free-spoken men, with all their high
+instincts of what was noble and true, with all their admiration of the
+Queen's high qualities, should have offered it, even as an unmeaning
+custom; and that a proud and free-spoken people should not, in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138"></a>[<a href="./images/138.png">138</a>]</span>very
+genuineness of their pride in her and their loyalty, have received it
+with shouts of derision and disgust. The flattery of Roman emperors and
+Roman Popes, if as extravagant, was not so personal. Even Louis XIV. was
+not celebrated in his dreary old age, as a model of ideal beauty and a
+paragon of romantic perfection. It was no worship of a secluded and
+distant object of loyalty: the men who thus flattered knew perfectly
+well, often by painful experience, what Elizabeth was: able, indeed,
+high-spirited, successful, but ungrateful to her servants, capricious,
+vain, ill-tempered, unjust, and in her old age, ugly. And yet the
+Gloriana of the <i>Faery Queen</i>, the Empress of all
+nobleness,&mdash;Belph&oelig;be, the Princess of all sweetness and
+beauty,&mdash;Britomart, the armed votaress of all purity,&mdash;Mercilla, the
+lady of all compassion and grace,&mdash;were but the reflections of the
+language in which it was then agreed upon by some of the greatest of
+Englishmen to speak, and to be supposed to think, of the Queen.</p>
+
+<p>II. But when all these faults have been admitted, faults of design and
+faults of execution&mdash;and when it is admitted, further, that there is a
+general want of reality, substance, distinctness, and strength in the
+personages of the poem&mdash;that, compared with the contemporary drama,
+Spenser's knights and ladies and villains are thin and ghostlike, and
+that, as Daniel says, he</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Paints shadows in imaginary lines&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>it yet remains that our greatest poets since his day have loved him and
+delighted in him. He had Shakespere's praise. Cowley was made a poet by
+reading him. Dryden calls Milton "the poetical son of Spenser:"
+"Milton," he writes, "has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his
+original." Dryden's own homage to him is frequent and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139"></a>[<a href="./images/139.png">139</a>]</span>generous. Pope
+found as much pleasure in the <i>Faery Queen</i> in his later years as he had
+found in reading it when he was twelve years old: and what Milton,
+Dryden, and Pope admired, Wordsworth too found full of nobleness,
+purity, and sweetness. What is it that gives the <i>Faery Queen</i> its hold
+on those who appreciate the richness and music of English language, and
+who in temper and moral standard are quick to respond to English
+manliness and tenderness? The spell is to be found mainly in three
+things&mdash;(1) in the quaint stateliness of Spenser's imaginary world and
+its representatives; (2) in the beauty and melody of his numbers, the
+abundance and grace of his poetic ornaments, in the recurring and
+haunting rhythm of numberless passages, in which thought and imagery and
+language and melody are interwoven in one perfect and satisfying
+harmony; and (3) in the intrinsic nobleness of his general aim, his
+conception of human life, at once so exacting and so indulgent, his high
+ethical principles and ideals, his unfeigned honour for all that is pure
+and brave and unselfish and tender, his generous estimate of what is due
+from man to man of service, affection, and fidelity. His fictions
+embodied truths of character which with all their shadowy incompleteness
+were too real and too beautiful to lose their charm with time.</p>
+
+<p>1. Spenser accepted from his age the quaint stateliness which is
+characteristic of his poem. His poetry is not simple and direct like
+that of the Greeks. It has not the exquisite finish and felicity of the
+best of the Latins. It has not the massive grandeur, the depth, the
+freedom, the shades and subtle complexities of feeling and motive, which
+the English dramatists found by going straight to nature. It has the
+stateliness of highly artificial conditions of society, of the Court,
+the pageant, the tournament, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140"></a>[<a href="./images/140.png">140</a>]</span>as opposed to the majesty of the great
+events in human life and history, its real vicissitudes, its
+catastrophes, its tragedies, its revolutions, its sins. Throughout the
+prolonged crisis of Elizabeth's reign, her gay and dashing courtiers,
+and even her serious masters of affairs, persisted in pretending to look
+on the world in which they lived, as if through the side-scenes of a
+masque, and relieved against the background of a stage-curtain. Human
+life, in those days, counted for little; fortune, honour, national
+existence hung in the balance; the game was one in which the heads of
+kings and queens and great statesmen were the stakes,&mdash;yet the players
+could not get out of their stiff and constrained costume, out of their
+artificial and fantastic figments of thought, out of their conceits and
+affectations of language. They carried it, with all their sagacity, with
+all their intensity of purpose, to the council-board, and the
+judgment-seat. They carried it to the scaffold. The conventional
+supposition was that at the Court, though every one knew better, all was
+perpetual sunshine, perpetual holiday, perpetual triumph, perpetual
+love-making. It was the happy reign of the good and wise and lovely. It
+was the discomfiture of the base, the faithless, the wicked, the
+traitors. This is what is reflected in Spenser's poem; at once, its
+stateliness, for there was no want of grandeur and magnificence in the
+public scene ever before Spenser's imagination; and its quaintness,
+because the whole outward apparatus of representation was borrowed from
+what was past, or from what did not exist, and implied surrounding
+circumstances in ludicrous contrast with fact, and men taught themselves
+to speak in character, and prided themselves on keeping it up by
+substituting for the ordinary language of life and emotion a cumbrous
+and involved indirectness of speech.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141"></a>[<a href="./images/141.png">141</a>]</span>
+And yet that quaint stateliness is not without its attractions. We have
+indeed to fit ourselves for it. But when we have submitted to its
+demands on our imagination, it carries us along as much as the fictions
+of the stage. The splendours of the artificial are not the splendours of
+the natural; yet the artificial has its splendours, which impress and
+captivate and repay. The grandeur of Spenser's poem is a grandeur like
+that of a great spectacle, a great array of the forces of a nation, a
+great series of military effects, a great ceremonial assemblage of all
+that is highest and most eminent in a country, a coronation, a royal
+marriage, a triumph, a funeral. So, though Spenser's knights and ladies
+do what no men ever could do, and speak what no man ever spoke, the
+procession rolls forward with a pomp which never forgets itself, and
+with an inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and incident.
+Nor is it always solemn and high-pitched. Its gravity is relieved from
+time to time with the ridiculous figure or character, the ludicrous
+incident, the jests and antics of the buffoon. It has been said that
+Spenser never smiles. He not only smiles, with amusement or sly irony;
+he wrote what he must have laughed at as he wrote, and meant us to laugh
+at. He did not describe with a grave face the terrors and misadventures
+of the boaster Braggadochio and his Squire, whether or not a caricature
+of the Duke of Alen&ccedil;on and his "gentleman," the "petit singe," Simier.
+He did not write with a grave face the Irish row about the false
+Florimel (IV. 5),&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Then unto Satyran she was adjudged,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who was right glad to gaine so goodly meed:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But Blandamour thereat full greatly grudged,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And litle prays'd his labours evill speed,<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142"></a>[<a href="./images/142.png">142</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">That for to winne the saddle lost the steed.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne lesse thereat did Paridell complaine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thought t'appeale from that which was decreed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To single combat with Sir Satyrane:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thereto him At&egrave; stird, new discord to maintaine.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">And eke, with these, full many other Knights<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She through her wicked working did incense<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her to demaund and chalenge as their rights,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Deserved for their perils recompense.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Amongst the rest, with boastfull vaine pretense,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stept Braggadochio forth, and as his thrall<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her claym'd, by him in battell wonne long sens:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whereto her selfe he did to witnesse call:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who, being askt, accordingly confessed all.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Thereat exceeding wroth was Satyran;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And wroth with Satyran was Blandamour;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And wroth with Blandamour was Erivan;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And at them both Sir Paridell did loure.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So all together stird up strifull stoure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And readie were new battell to darraine.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Each one profest to be her paramoure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And vow'd with speare and shield it to maintaine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne Judges powre, ne reasons rule, mote them restraine.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Nor the behaviour of the "rascal many" at the sight of the dead Dragon
+(I. 12),&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">And after all the raskall many ran,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heaped together in rude rablement,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To see the face of that victorious man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whom all admired as from heaven sent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And gazd upon with gaping wonderment;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But when they came where that dead Dragon lay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stretcht on the ground in monstrous large extent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sight with ydle feare did them dismay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne durst approch him nigh to touch, or once assay.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Some feard, and fledd; some feard, and well it fayned;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One, that would wiser seeme then all the rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Warnd him not touch, for yet perhaps remaynd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some lingring life within his hollow brest,<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143"></a>[<a href="./images/143.png">143</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">Or in his wombe might lurke some hidden nest<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of many Dragonettes, his fruitfull seede:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Another saide, that in his eyes did rest<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet sparckling fyre, and badd thereof take heed;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Another said, he saw him move his eyes indeed.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">One mother, whenas her foolehardy chyld<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Did come too neare, and with his talants play,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Halfe dead through feare, her litle babe revyld,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And to her gossibs gan in counsell say;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'How can I tell, but that his talants may<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet scratch my sonne, or rend his tender hand?'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So diversly them selves in vaine they fray;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whiles some more bold to measure him nigh stand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To prove how many acres he did spred of land.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And his humour is not the less real that it affects serious argument, in
+the excuse which he urges for his fairy tales (II. 1).</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Right well I wote, most mighty Soveraine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That all this famous antique history<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of some th' aboundance of an ydle braine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will judged be, and painted forgery,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rather then matter of just memory;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sith none that breatheth living aire dees know<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where is that happy land of Faery,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which I so much doe vaunt, yet no where show,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But vouch antiquities, which no body can know.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">But let that man with better sence advize,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That of the world least part to us is red;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And daily how through hardy enterprize<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Many great Regions are discovered,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which to late age were never mentioned<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who ever heard of th' Indian Peru?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or who in venturous vessell measured<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Amazon huge river, now found trew<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Yet all these were, when no man did them know,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet have from wisest ages hidden beene;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And later times thinges more unknowne shall show.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why then should witlesse man so much misweene,<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144"></a>[<a href="./images/144.png">144</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">That nothing is but that which he hath seene?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What if within the Moones fayre shining spheare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What if in every other starre unseene<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of other worldes he happily should heare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He wonder would much more; yet such to some appeare.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The general effect is almost always lively and rich: all is buoyant and
+full of movement. That it is also odd, that we see strange costumes and
+hear a language often formal and obsolete, that we are asked to take for
+granted some very unaccustomed supposition and extravagant assumption,
+does not trouble us more than the usages and sights, so strange to
+ordinary civil life, of a camp, or a royal lev&eacute;e. All is in keeping,
+whatever may be the details of the pageant; they harmonize with the
+effect of the whole, like the gargoyles and quaint groups in a Gothic
+building harmonize with its general tone of majesty and subtle
+beauty;&mdash;nay, as ornaments, in themselves of bad taste, like much of the
+ornamentation of the Renaissance styles, yet find a not unpleasing place
+in compositions grandly and nobly designed:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So discord oft in music makes the sweeter lay.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Indeed, it is curious how much of real variety is got out of a limited
+number of elements and situations. The spectacle, though consisting only
+of knights, ladies, dwarfs, pagans, "salvage men," enchanters, and
+monsters, and other well-worn machinery of the books of chivalry, is
+ever new, full of vigour and fresh images, even if, as sometimes
+happens, it repeats itself. There is a majestic unconsciousness of all
+violations of probability, and of the strangeness of the combinations
+which it unrolls before us.</p>
+
+<p>2. But there is not only stateliness: there is sweetness <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145"></a>[<a href="./images/145.png">145</a>]</span>and beauty.
+Spenser's perception of beauty of all kinds was singularly and
+characteristically quick and sympathetic. It was one of his great gifts;
+perhaps the most special and unstinted. Except Shakespere, who had it
+with other and greater gifts, no one in that time approached to Spenser,
+in feeling the presence of that commanding and mysterious idea,
+compounded of so many things, yet of which, the true secret escapes us
+still, to which we give the name of beauty. A beautiful scene, a
+beautiful person, a beautiful poem, a mind and character with that
+combination of charms, which, for want of another word, we call by that
+half-spiritual, half-material word "beautiful," at once set his
+imagination at work to respond to it and reflect it. His means of
+reflecting it were as abundant as his sense of it was keen. They were
+only too abundant. They often betrayed him by their affluence and
+wonderful readiness to meet his call. Say what we will, and a great deal
+may be said, of his lavish profusion, his heady and uncontrolled excess,
+in the richness of picture and imagery in which he indulges,&mdash;still
+there it lies before us, like the most gorgeous of summer gardens, in
+the glory and brilliancy of its varied blooms, in the wonder of its
+strange forms of life, in the changefulness of its exquisite and
+delicious scents. No one who cares for poetic beauty can be insensible
+to it. He may criticize it. He may have too much of it. He may prefer
+something more severe and chastened. He may observe on the waste of
+wealth and power. He may blame the prodigal expense of language, and the
+long spaces which the poet takes up to produce his effect. He may often
+dislike or distrust the moral aspect of the poet's impartial
+sensitiveness to all outward beauty,&mdash;the impartiality which makes him
+throw all his strength into <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146"></a>[<a href="./images/146.png">146</a>]</span>his pictures of Acrasia's Bower of Bliss,
+the Garden of Adonis, and Busirane's Masque of Cupid. But there is no
+gainsaying the beauty which never fails and disappoints, open the poem
+where you will. There is no gainsaying its variety, often so unexpected
+and novel. Face to face with the Epicurean idea of beauty and pleasure
+is the counter-charm of purity, truth, and duty. Many poets have done
+justice to each one separately. Few have shown, with such equal power,
+why it is that both have their roots in man's divided nature, and
+struggle, as it were, for the mastery. Which can be said to be the most
+exquisite in all beauty of imagination, of refined language, of
+faultless and matchless melody, of these two passages, in which the same
+image is used for the most opposite purposes;&mdash;first, in that song of
+temptation, the sweetest note in that description of Acrasia's Bower of
+Bliss, which, as a picture of the spells of pleasure, has never been
+surpassed; and next, to represent that stainless and glorious purity
+which is the professed object of his admiration and homage. In both the
+beauty of the rose furnishes the theme of the poet's treatment. In the
+first, it is the "lovely lay" which meets the knight of Temperance amid
+the voluptuousness which he is come to assail and punish.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah! see, whoso fayre thing doest faine to see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In springing flowre the image of thy day.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah! see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That fairer seemes the lesse ye see her may.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lo! see soone after how more bold and free<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her bared bosome she doth broad display;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lo! see soone after how she fades and falls away.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">So passeth, in the passing of a day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre;<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147"></a>[<a href="./images/147.png">147</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">Ne more doth florish after first decay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gather the Rose of love whilest yet is time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whilest loving thou mayst loved be with equall crime.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In the other, it images the power of the will&mdash;that power over
+circumstance and the storms of passion, to command obedience to reason
+and the moral law, which Milton sung so magnificently in <i>Comus</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">That daintie Rose, the daughter of her Morne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">More deare then life she tendered, whose flowre<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The girlond of her honour did adorne:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne suffred she the Middayes scorching powre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne the sharp Northerne wind thereon to showre;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But lapped up her silken leaves most chayre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When so the froward skye began to lowre;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But, soone as calmed was the christall ayre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She did it fayre dispred and let to florish fayre.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Eternall God, in his almightie powre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To make ensample of his heavenly grace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In Paradize whylome did plant this flowre;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whence he it fetcht out of her native place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And did in stocke of earthly flesh enrace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That mortall men her glory should admyre.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In gentle Ladies breste, and bounteous race<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of woman kind, it fayrest Flowre doth spyre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And beareth fruit of honour and all chast desyre.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Fayre ympes of beautie, whose bright shining beames<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Adorne the worlde with like to heavenly light,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And to your willes both royalties and Reames<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Subdew, through conquest of your wondrous might,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With this fayre flowre your goodly girlonds dight<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of chastity and vertue virginall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That shall embellish more your beautie bright,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And crowne your heades with heavenly coronall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such as the Angels weare before Gods tribunall!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148"></a>[<a href="./images/148.png">148</a>]</span>
+This sense of beauty, and command of beautiful expression is not seen
+only in the sweetness of which both these passages are examples. Its
+range is wide. Spenser had in his nature besides sweetness, his full
+proportion of the stern and high manliness of his generation; indeed, he
+was not without its severity, its hardness, its unconsidering and cruel
+harshness, its contemptuous indifference to suffering and misery when on
+the wrong side. Noble and heroic ideals captivate him by their
+attractions. He kindles naturally and genuinely at what proves and draws
+out men's courage, their self-command, their self-sacrifice. He
+sympathizes as profoundly with the strangeness of their condition, with
+the sad surprises in their history and fate, as he gives himself up with
+little restraint to what is charming and even intoxicating in it. He can
+moralize with the best in terse and deep-reaching apophthegms of
+melancholy or even despairing experience. He can appreciate the
+mysterious depths and awful outlines of theology&mdash;of what our own age
+can see nothing in, but a dry and scholastic dogmatism. His great
+contemporaries were, more perhaps than the men of any age, many-sided.
+He shared their nature; and he used all that he had of sensitiveness and
+of imaginative and creative power, in bringing out its manifold aspects,
+and sometimes contradictory feelings and aims. Not that beauty, even
+varied beauty, is the uninterrupted attribute of his work. It alternates
+with much that no indulgence can call beautiful. It passes but too
+easily into what is commonplace, or forced, or unnatural, or
+extravagant, or careless and poor, or really coarse and bad. He was a
+negligent corrector. He only at times gave himself the trouble to
+condense and concentrate. But for all this, the <i>Faery Queen</i> glows and
+is ablaze with beauty; and that beauty is so rich, so <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149"></a>[<a href="./images/149.png">149</a>]</span>real, and so
+uncommon, that for its sake the severest readers of Spenser have
+pardoned much that is discordant with it, much that in the reading has
+wasted their time and disappointed them.</p>
+
+<p>There is one portion of the beauty of the <i>Faery Queen</i>, which in its
+perfection and fulness had never yet been reached in English poetry.
+This was the music and melody of his verse. It was this wonderful,
+almost unfailing sweetness of numbers which probably as much as anything
+set the <i>Faery Queen</i> at once above all contemporary poetry. The English
+language is really a musical one, and say what people will, the English
+ear is very susceptible to the infinite delicacy and suggestiveness of
+musical rhythm and cadence. Spenser found the secret of it. The art has
+had many and consummate masters since, as different in their melody as
+in their thoughts from Spenser. And others at the time, Shakespere
+pre-eminently, heard, only a little later, the same grandeur, and the
+same subtle beauty in the sounds of their mother-tongue, only waiting
+the artist's skill to be combined and harmonized into strains of
+mysterious fascination. But Spenser was the first to show that he had
+acquired a command over what had hitherto been heard only in exquisite
+fragments, passing too soon into roughness and confusion. It would be
+too much to say that his cunning never fails, that his ear is never dull
+or off its guard. But when the length and magnitude of the composition
+are considered, with the restraints imposed by the new nine-line stanza,
+however convenient it may have been, the vigour, the invention, the
+volume and rush of language, and the keenness and truth of ear amid its
+diversified tasks are indeed admirable, which could keep up so prolonged
+and so majestic a stream of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a>[<a href="./images/150.png">150</a>]</span>original and varied poetical melody. If his
+stanzas are monotonous, it is with the grand monotony of the seashore,
+where billow follows billow, each swelling diversely, and broken into
+different curves and waves upon its mounting surface, till at last it
+falls over, and spreads and rushes up in a last long line of foam upon
+the beach.</p>
+
+<p>3. But all this is but the outside shell and the fancy framework in
+which the substance of the poem is enclosed. Its substance is the poet's
+philosophy of life. It shadows forth, in type and parable, his ideal of
+the perfection of the human character, with its special features, its
+trials, its achievements. There were two accepted forms in poetry in
+which this had been done by poets. One was under the image of warfare.
+The other was under the image of a journey or voyage. Spenser chose the
+former, as Dante and Bunyan chose the latter. Spenser looks on the scene
+of the world as a continual battle-field. It was such in fact to his
+experience in Ireland, testing the mettle of character, its loyalty, its
+sincerity, its endurance. His picture of character is by no means
+painted with sentimental tenderness. He portrays it in the rough work of
+the struggle and the toil, always hardly tested by trial, often
+overmatched, deceived, defeated, and even delivered by its own default
+to disgrace and captivity. He had full before his eyes what abounded in
+the society of his day, often in its noblest representatives&mdash;the
+strange perplexing mixture of the purer with the baser elements, in the
+high-tempered and aspiring activity of his time. But it was an ideal of
+character which had in it high aims and serious purposes, which was
+armed with fortitude and strength, which could recover itself after
+failure and defeat.</p>
+
+<p>The unity of a story, or an allegory&mdash;that chain and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151"></a>[<a href="./images/151.png">151</a>]</span>backbone of
+continuous interest, implying a progress and leading up to a climax,
+which holds together the great poems of the world, the <i>Iliad</i> and
+<i>Odyssey</i>, the <i>&AElig;neid</i>, the <i>Commedia</i>, the <i>Paradise Lost</i>, the
+<i>Jerusalem Delivered</i>&mdash;this is wanting in the <i>Faery Queen</i>. The unity
+is one of character and its ideal. That character of the completed man,
+raised above what is poor and low, and governed by noble tempers and
+pure principles, has in Spenser two conspicuous elements. In the first
+place, it is based on manliness. In the personages which illustrate the
+different virtues, Holiness, Justice, Courtesy, and the rest, the
+distinction is not in nicely discriminated features or shades of
+expression, but in the trials and the occasions which call forth a
+particular action or effort: yet the manliness which is at the
+foundation of all that is good in them is a universal quality common to
+them all, rooted and imbedded in the governing idea or standard of moral
+character in the poem. It is not merely courage, it is not merely
+energy, it is not merely strength. It is the quality of soul which
+frankly accepts the conditions in human life, of labour, of obedience,
+of effort, of unequal success, which does not quarrel with them or evade
+them, but takes for granted with unquestioning alacrity that man is
+called&mdash;by his call to high aims and destiny&mdash;to a continual struggle
+with difficulty, with pain, with evil, and makes it the point of honour
+not to be dismayed or wearied out by them. It is a cheerful and serious
+willingness for hard work and endurance, as being inevitable and very
+bearable necessities, together with even a pleasure in encountering
+trials which put a man on his mettle, an enjoyment of the contest and
+the risk, even in play. It is the quality which seizes on the paramount
+idea of duty, as something which leaves a man no choice; which <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152"></a>[<a href="./images/152.png">152</a>]</span>despises
+and breaks through the inferior considerations and motives&mdash;trouble,
+uncertainty, doubt, curiosity&mdash;which hang about and impede duty; which
+is impatient with the idleness and childishness of a life of mere
+amusement, or mere looking on, of continued and self-satisfied levity,
+of vacillation, of clever and ingenious trifling. Spenser's manliness is
+quite consistent with long pauses of rest, with intervals of change,
+with great craving for enjoyment&mdash;nay, with great lapses from its ideal,
+with great mixtures of selfishness, with coarseness, with
+licentiousness, with injustice and inhumanity. It may be fatally
+diverted into bad channels; it may degenerate into a curse and scourge
+to the world. But it stands essentially distinct from the nature which
+shrinks from difficulty, which is appalled at effort, which has no
+thought of making an impression on things around it, which is content
+with passively receiving influences and distinguishing between emotions,
+which feels no call to exert itself, because it recognizes no aim
+valuable enough to rouse it, and no obligation strong enough to command
+it. In the character of his countrymen round him, in its highest and in
+its worst features, in its noble ambition, its daring enterprise, its
+self-devotion, as well as in its pride, its intolerance, its fierce
+self-will, its arrogant claims of superiority, moral, political,
+religious, Spenser saw the example of that strong and resolute
+manliness, which, once set on great things, feared nothing&mdash;neither toil
+nor disaster nor danger, in their pursuit. Naturally and unconsciously,
+he laid it at the bottom of all his portraitures of noble and virtuous
+achievement in the <i>Faery Queen</i>.</p>
+
+<p>All Spenser's "virtues" spring from a root of manliness. Strength,
+simplicity of aim, elevation of spirit, courage are presupposed as their
+necessary conditions. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153"></a>[<a href="./images/153.png">153</a>]</span>But they have with him another condition as
+universal. They all grow and are nourished from the soil of love; the
+love of beauty, the love and service of fair women. This of course, is a
+survival from the ages of chivalry, an inheritance bequeathed from the
+minstrels of France, Italy, and Germany to the rising poetry of Europe.
+Spenser's types of manhood are imperfect without the idea of an
+absorbing and overmastering passion of love; without a devotion, as to
+the principal and most worthy object of life, to the service of a
+beautiful lady, and to winning her affection and grace. The influence of
+this view of life comes out in numberless ways. Love comes on the scene
+in shapes which are exquisitely beautiful, in all its purity, its
+tenderness, its unselfishness. But the claims of its all-ruling and
+irresistible might are also only too readily verified in the passions of
+men; in the follies of love, its entanglements, its mischiefs, its
+foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never
+absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the
+poem. The picture of life held up before us is the literal rendering of
+Coleridge's lines:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All thoughts, all passions, all delights,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whatever stirs this mortal frame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are all but ministers of Love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2h">And feed his sacred flame.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We still think with Spenser about the paramount place of manliness, as
+the foundation of all worth in human character. We have ceased to think
+with him about the rightful supremacy of love, even in the imaginative
+conception of human life. We have ceased to recognize in it the public
+claims of almost a religion, which it has in Spenser. Love will ever
+play a great part in human life <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154"></a>[<a href="./images/154.png">154</a>]</span>to the end of time. It will be an
+immense element in its happiness, perhaps a still greater one in its
+sorrows, its disasters, its tragedies. It is still an immense power in
+shaping and colouring it, both in fiction and reality; in the family, in
+the romance, in the fatalities and the prosaic ruin of vulgar fact. But
+the place given to it by Spenser is to our thoughts and feelings even
+ludicrously extravagant. An enormous change has taken place in the ideas
+of society on this point: it is one of the things which make a wide
+chasm between centuries and generations which yet are of "the same
+passions," and have in temper, tradition and language, so much in
+common. The ages of the Courts of Love, whom Chaucer reflected and whose
+ideas passed on through him to Spenser, are to us simply strange and
+abnormal states through which society has passed, to us beyond
+understanding and almost belief. The perpetual love-making, as one of
+the first duties and necessities of a noble life, the space which it
+must fill in the cares and thoughts of all gentle and high-reaching
+spirits, the unrestrained language of admiration and worship, the
+unrestrained yielding to the impulses, the anxieties, the pitiable
+despair and agonies of love, the subordination to it of all other
+pursuits and aims, the weeping and wailing and self-torturing which it
+involves, all this is so far apart from what we know of actual life, the
+life not merely of work and business, but the life of affection, and
+even of passion, that it makes the picture of which it is so necessary a
+part, seem to us in the last degree, unreal, unimaginable, grotesquely
+ridiculous. The quaint love sometimes found among children, so quickly
+kindled, so superficial, so violent in its language and absurd in its
+plans, is transferred with the utmost gravity to the serious proceedings
+of the wise <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155"></a>[<a href="./images/155.png">155</a>]</span>and good. In the highest characters it is chastened,
+refined, purified: it appropriates, indeed, language due only to the
+divine, it almost simulates idolatry; yet it belongs to the best part of
+man's nature. But in the lower and average characters, it is not so
+respectable; it is apt to pass into mere toying pastime and frivolous
+love of pleasure: it astonishes us often by the readiness with which it
+displays an affinity for the sensual and impure, the corrupting and
+debasing sides of the relations between the sexes. But however it
+appears, it is throughout a very great affair, not merely with certain
+persons, or under certain circumstances, but with every one: it obtrudes
+itself in public, as the natural and recognized motive of plans of life
+and trials of strength; it is the great spur of enterprise, and its
+highest and most glorious reward. A world of which this is the law, is
+not even in fiction a world which we can conceive possible, or with
+which experience enables us to sympathize.</p>
+
+<p>It is, of course, a purely artificial and conventional reading of the
+facts of human life and feeling. Such conventional readings and
+renderings belong in a measure to all art; but in its highest forms they
+are corrected, interpreted, supplemented by the presence of interspersed
+realities which every one recognizes. But it was one of Spenser's
+disadvantages, that two strong influences combined to entangle him in
+this fantastic and grotesque way of exhibiting the play and action of
+the emotions of love. This all-absorbing, all-embracing passion of love,
+at least, this way of talking about it, was the fashion of the Court.
+Further, it was the fashion of poetry, which he inherited; and he was
+not the man to break through the strong bands of custom and authority.
+In very much he was an imitator. He took what he found; what was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156"></a>[<a href="./images/156.png">156</a>]</span>his
+own was his treatment of it. He did not trouble himself with
+inconsistencies, or see absurdities and incongruities. Habit and
+familiar language made it not strange that in the Court of Elizabeth,
+the most high-flown sentiments should be in every one's mouth about the
+sublimities and refinements of love, while every one was busy with keen
+ambition, and unscrupulous intrigue. The same blinding power kept him
+from seeing the monstrous contrast between the claims of the queen to be
+the ideal of womanly purity&mdash;claims recognized and echoed in ten
+thousand extravagant compliments&mdash;and the real licentiousness common all
+round her among her favourites. All these strange contradictions, which
+surprise and shock us, Spenser assumed as natural. He built up his
+fictions on them, as the dramatist built on a basis, which, though more
+nearly approaching to real life, yet differed widely from it in many of
+its preliminary and collateral suppositions; or as the novelist builds
+up his on a still closer adherence to facts and experience. In this
+matter Spenser appears with a kind of double self. At one time he speaks
+as one penetrated and inspired by the highest and purest ideas of love,
+and filled with aversion and scorn for the coarser forms of passion&mdash;for
+what is ensnaring and treacherous, as well as for what is odious and
+foul. At another, he puts forth all his power to bring out its most
+dangerous and even debasing aspects in highly coloured pictures, which
+none could paint without keen sympathy with what he takes such pains to
+make vivid and fascinating. The combination is not like anything modern,
+for both the elements are in Spenser so unquestionably and simply
+genuine. Our modern poets are, with all their variations in this
+respect, more homogeneous; and where one conception of love and beauty
+has taken hold of a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157"></a>[<a href="./images/157.png">157</a>]</span>man, the other does not easily come in. It is
+impossible to imagine Wordsworth dwelling with zest on visions and
+imagery, on which Spenser has lavished all his riches. There can be no
+doubt of Byron's real habits of thought and feeling on subjects of this
+kind, even when his language for the occasion is the chastest; we detect
+in it the mood of the moment, perhaps spontaneous, perhaps put on, but
+in contradiction to the whole movement of the man's true nature. But
+Spenser's words do not ring hollow. With a kind of unconsciousness and
+innocence, which we now find hard to understand, and which perhaps
+belongs to the early childhood or boyhood of a literature, he passes
+abruptly from one standard of thought and feeling to another; and is
+quite as much in earnest when he is singing the pure joys of chastened
+affections, as he is when he is writing with almost riotous luxuriance
+what we are at this day ashamed to read. Tardily, indeed, he appears to
+have acknowledged the contradiction. At the instance of two noble ladies
+of the Court, he composed two Hymns of Heavenly Love and Heavenly
+Beauty, to "retract" and "reform" two earlier ones composed in praise of
+earthly love and beauty. But, characteristically, he published the two
+pieces together, side by side in the same volume.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Faery Queen</i>, Spenser has brought out, not the image of the
+great Gloriana, but in its various aspects, a form of character which
+was then just coming on the stage of the world, and which has played a
+great part in it since. As he has told us, he aimed at presenting before
+us, in the largest sense of the word, the English gentleman. It was as a
+whole a new character in the world. It had not really existed in the
+days of feudalism and chivalry, though features of it had appeared, and
+its <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158"></a>[<a href="./images/158.png">158</a>]</span>descent was traced from those times: but they were too wild and
+coarse, too turbulent and disorderly, for a character which, however
+ready for adventure and battle, looked to peace, refinement, order, and
+law as the true conditions of its perfection. In the days of Elizabeth
+it was beginning to fill a large place in English life. It was formed
+amid the increasing cultivation of the nation, the increasing varieties
+of public service, the awakening responsibilities to duty and calls to
+self-command. Still making much of the prerogative of noble blood and
+family honours, it was something independent of nobility and beyond it.
+A nobleman might have in him the making of a gentleman: but it was the
+man himself of whom the gentleman was made. Great birth, even great
+capacity, were not enough; there must be added a new delicacy of
+conscience, a new appreciation of what is beautiful and worthy of
+honour, a new measure of the strength and nobleness of self-control, of
+devotion to unselfish interests. This idea of manhood, based not only on
+force and courage, but on truth, on refinement, on public spirit, on
+soberness and modesty, on consideration for others, was taking
+possession of the younger generation of Elizabeth's middle years. Of
+course the idea was very imperfectly apprehended, still more imperfectly
+realized. But it was something which on the same scale had not been yet,
+and which was to be the seed of something greater. It was to grow into
+those strong, simple, noble characters, pure in aim and devoted to duty,
+the Falklands, the Hampdens, who amid so much evil form such a
+remarkable feature in the Civil Wars, both on the Royalist and the
+Parliamentary sides. It was to grow into that high type of cultivated
+English nature, in the present and the last century, common both <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159"></a>[<a href="./images/159.png">159</a>]</span>to its
+monarchical and its democratic embodiments, than which, with all its
+faults and defects, our western civilization has produced few things
+more admirable.</p>
+
+<p>There were three distinguished men of that time, who one after another
+were Spenser's friends and patrons, and who were men in whom he saw
+realized his conceptions of human excellence and nobleness. They were
+Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Grey of Wilton, and Sir Walter Ralegh: and the
+<i>Faery Queen</i> reflects, as in a variety of separate mirrors and
+spiritualized forms, the characteristics of these men and of such as
+they. It reflects their conflicts, their temptations, their weaknesses,
+the evils they fought with, the superiority with which they towered over
+meaner and poorer natures. Sir Philip Sidney may be said to have been
+the first typical example in English society of the true gentleman. The
+charm which attracted men to him in life, the fame which he left behind
+him, are not to be accounted for simply by his accomplishments as a
+courtier, a poet, a lover of literature, a gallant soldier; above all
+this there was something not found in the strong or brilliant men about
+him, a union and harmony of all high qualities differing from any of
+them separately, which gave a fire of its own to his literary
+enthusiasm, and a sweetness of its own to his courtesy. Spenser's
+admiration for that bright but short career was strong and lasting.
+Sidney was to him a verification of what he aspired to and imagined; a
+pledge that he was not dreaming, in portraying Prince Arthur's greatness
+of soul, the religious chivalry of the Red Cross Knight of Holiness, the
+manly purity and self-control of Sir Guyon. It is too much to say that
+in Prince Arthur, the hero of the poem, he always intended Sidney. In
+the first place, it is clear that under that character Spenser in places
+pays compliments <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160"></a>[<a href="./images/160.png">160</a>]</span>to Leicester, in whose service he began life, and
+whose claims on his homage he ever recognized. Prince Arthur is
+certainly Leicester, in the historical passages in the Fifth Book
+relating to the war in the Low Countries in 1576: and no one can be
+meant but Leicester in the bold allusion in the First Book (ix. 17) to
+Elizabeth's supposed thoughts of marrying him. In the next place,
+allegory, like caricature, is not bound to make the same person and the
+same image always or perfectly coincide; and Spenser makes full use of
+this liberty. But when he was painting the picture of the Kingly
+Warrior, in whom was to be summed up in a magnificent unity the
+diversified graces of other men, and who was to be ever ready to help
+and support his fellows in their hour of need, and in their conflict
+with evil, he certainly had before his mind the well-remembered
+lineaments of Sidney's high and generous nature. And he further
+dedicated a separate book, the last that he completed, to the
+celebration of Sidney's special "virtue" of Courtesy. The martial strain
+of the poem changes once more to the pastoral of the <i>Shepherd's
+Calendar</i> to describe Sidney's wooing of Frances Walsingham, the fair
+Pastorella; his conquests by his sweetness and grace over the
+churlishness of rivals; and his triumphant war against the monster
+spirit of ignorant and loud-tongued insolence, the "Blatant Beast" of
+religious, political, and social slander.</p>
+
+<p>Again, in Lord Grey of Wilton, gentle by nature, but so stern in the
+hour of trial, called reluctantly to cope not only with anarchy, but
+with intrigue and disloyalty, finding selfishness and thanklessness
+everywhere, but facing all and doing his best with a heavy heart, and
+ending his days prematurely under detraction and disgrace, Spenser had
+before him a less complete character <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161"></a>[<a href="./images/161.png">161</a>]</span>than Sidney, but yet one of grand
+and severe manliness, in which were conspicuous a religious hatred of
+disorder, and an unflinching sense of public duty. Spenser's admiration
+of him was sincere and earnest. In his case the allegory almost becomes
+history. Arthur, Lord Grey, is Sir Arthegal, the Knight of Justice. The
+story touches apparently on some passages of his career, when his
+dislike of the French marriage placed him in opposition to the Queen,
+and even for a time threw him with the supporters of Mary. But the
+adventures of Arthegal mainly preserve the memory of Lord Grey's
+terrible exploits against wrong and rebellion in Ireland. These exploits
+are represented in the doings of the iron man Talus, his squire, with
+his destroying flail, swift, irresistible, inexorable; a figure,
+borrowed and altered, after Spenser's wont, from a Greek legend. His
+overthrow of insolent giants, his annihilation of swarming "rascal
+routs," idealize and glorify that unrelenting policy, of which, though
+condemned in England, Spenser continued to be the advocate. In the story
+of Arthegal, long separated by undeserved misfortunes from the favour of
+the armed lady, Britomart, the virgin champion of right, of whom he was
+so worthy, doomed in spite of his honours to an early death, and
+assailed on his return from his victorious service by the furious
+insults of envy and malice, Spenser portrays almost without a veil, the
+hard fate of the unpopular patron whom he to the last defended and
+honoured.</p>
+
+<p>Ralegh, his last protector, the Shepherd of the Ocean, to whose judgment
+he referred the work of his life, and under whose guidance he once more
+tried the quicksands of the Court, belonged to a different class from
+Sidney or Lord Grey; but of his own class he <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162"></a>[<a href="./images/162.png">162</a>]</span>was the consummate and
+matchless example. He had not Sidney's fine enthusiasm and nobleness; he
+had not either Sidney's affectations. He had not Lord Grey's
+single-minded hatred of wrong. He was a man to whom his own interests
+were much; he was unscrupulous; he was ostentatious; he was not above
+stooping to mean, unmanly compliances with the humours of the Queen. But
+he was a man with a higher ideal than he attempted to follow. He saw,
+not without cynical scorn, through the shows and hollowness of the
+world. His intellect was of that clear and unembarrassed power which
+takes in as wholes things which other men take in part by part. And he
+was in its highest form a representative of that spirit of adventure
+into the unknown and the wonderful of which Drake was the coarser and
+rougher example, realizing in serious earnest, on the sea and in the New
+World, the life of knight-errantry feigned in romances. With Ralegh, as
+with Lord Grey, Spenser comes to history; and he even seems to have been
+moved, as the poem went on, partly by pity, partly by amusement, to
+shadow forth in his imaginary world, not merely Ralegh's brilliant
+qualities, but also his frequent misadventures and mischances in his
+career at Court. Of all her favourites Ralegh was the one whom his
+wayward mistress seemed to find most delight in tormenting. The offence
+which he gave by his secret marriage suggested the scenes describing the
+utter desolation of Prince Arthur's squire, Timias, at the jealous wrath
+of the Virgin Huntress, Belph&oelig;be,&mdash;scenes, which extravagant as they
+are, can hardly be called a caricature of Ralegh's real behaviour in the
+Tower in 1593. But Spenser is not satisfied with this one picture. In
+the last Book Timias appears again, the victim of slander and ill-usage,
+even after he had <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163"></a>[<a href="./images/163.png">163</a>]</span>recovered Belph&oelig;be's favour; he is baited like a
+wild bull, by mighty powers of malice, falsehood, and calumny; he is
+wounded by the tooth of the Blatant Beast; and after having been cured,
+not without difficulty, and not without significant indications on the
+part of the poet that his friend had need to restrain and chasten his
+unruly spirit, he is again delivered over to an ignominious captivity,
+and the insults of Disdain and Scorn.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Then up he made him rise, and forward fare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Led in a rope which both his hands did bynd;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne ought that foole for pity did him spare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But with his whip, him following behynd,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Him often scourg'd, and forst his feete to fynd:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And other-whiles with bitter mockes and mowes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He would him scorne, that to his gentle mynd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was much more grievous then the others blowes:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Words sharpely wound, but greatest griefe of scorning growes.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Spenser knew Ralegh only in the promise of his adventurous prime&mdash;so
+buoyant and fearless, so inexhaustible in project and resource, so
+unconquerable by checks and reverses. The gloomier portion of Ralegh's
+career was yet to come: its intrigues, its grand yet really gambling and
+unscrupulous enterprises, the long years of prison and authorship, and
+its not unfitting close, in the English statesman's death by the
+headsman&mdash;so tranquil though violent, so ceremoniously solemn, so
+composed, so dignified;&mdash;such a contrast to all other forms of capital
+punishment, then or since.</p>
+
+<p>Spenser has been compared to Pindar, and contrasted with Cervantes. The
+contrast, in point of humour, and the truth that humour implies, is
+favourable to the Spaniard: in point of moral earnestness and sense of
+poetic beauty, to the Englishman. What Cervantes only <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164"></a>[<a href="./images/164.png">164</a>]</span>thought
+ridiculous Spenser used, and not in vain, for a high purpose. The ideas
+of knight-errantry were really more absurd than Spenser allowed himself
+to see. But that idea of the gentleman which they suggested, that
+picture of human life as a scene of danger, trial, effort, defeat,
+recovery, which they lent themselves to image forth, was more worth
+insisting on, than the exposure of their folly and extravagance. There
+was nothing to be made of them, Cervantes thought; and nothing to be
+done, but to laugh off what they had left, among living Spaniards, of
+pompous imbecility or mistaken pretensions. Spenser, knowing that they
+must die, yet believed that out of them might be raised something nobler
+and more real, enterprise, duty, resistance to evil, refinement, hatred
+of the mean and base. The energetic and high-reaching manhood which he
+saw in the remarkable personages round him he shadowed forth in the
+<i>Faery Queen</i>. He idealized the excellences and the trials of this first
+generation of English gentlemen, as Bunyan afterwards idealized the
+piety, the conflicts, and the hopes of Puritan religion. Neither were
+universal types; neither were perfect. The manhood in which Spenser
+delights, with all that was admirable and attractive in it, had still
+much of boyish incompleteness and roughness: it had noble aims, it had
+generosity, it had loyalty, it had a very real reverence for purity and
+religion; but it was young in experience of a new world, it was wanting
+in self-mastery, it was often pedantic and self-conceited; it was an
+easier prey than it ought to have been to discreditable temptations. And
+there is a long interval between any of Spenser's superficial and thin
+conceptions of character, and such deep and subtle creations as Hamlet
+or Othello, just as Bunyan's strong but narrow ideals of religion, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165"></a>[<a href="./images/165.png">165</a>]</span>true
+as they are up to a certain point, fall short of the length and breadth
+and depth of what Christianity has made of man, and may yet make of him.
+But in the ways which Spenser chose, he will always delight and teach
+us. The spectacle of what is heroic and self-devoted, of honour for
+principle and truth, set before us with so much insight and sympathy,
+and combined with so much just and broad observation on those accidents
+and conditions of our mortal state which touch us all, will never appeal
+to English readers in vain, till we have learned a new language, and
+adopted new canons of art, of taste, and of morals. It is not merely
+that he has left imperishable images which have taken their place among
+the consecrated memorials of poetry and the household thoughts of all
+cultivated men. But he has permanently lifted the level of English
+poetry by a great and sustained effort of rich and varied art, in which
+one main purpose rules, loyalty to what is noble and pure, and in which
+this main purpose subordinates to itself every feature and every detail,
+and harmonizes some that by themselves seem least in keeping with it.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_118-1_22" id="Footnote_118-1_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_118-1_22"><span class="label">[118:1]</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Unknow, unkyst; and lost, that is unsoght."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="authorpoem"><i>Troylus and Cryseide</i>, lib. i.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_128-2_23" id="Footnote_128-2_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_128-2_23"><span class="label">[128:2]</span></a> Hales' <i>Life</i>, Globe Edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_132-3_24" id="Footnote_132-3_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_132-3_24"><span class="label">[132:3]</span></a> <i>Vid.</i> Keble, <i>Pr&aelig;lect. Acad.</i>, xxiv. p. 479, 480.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166"></a>[<a href="./images/166.png">166</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+<h3>SECOND PART OF THE FAERY QUEEN.&mdash;SPENSER'S LAST YEARS (1590-1599).</h3>
+
+<p>The publication of the <i>Faery Queen</i> in 1590 had made the new poet of
+the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i> a famous man. He was no longer merely the
+favourite of a knot of enthusiastic friends, and outside of them only
+recognized and valued at his true measure by such judges as Sidney and
+Ralegh. By the common voice of all the poets of his time he was now
+acknowledged as the first of living English poets. It is not easy for
+us, who live in these late times and are familiar with so many literary
+masterpieces, to realize the surprise of a first and novel achievement
+in literature; the effect on an age, long and eagerly seeking after
+poetical expression, of the appearance at last of a work of such power,
+richness, and finished art.</p>
+
+<p>It can scarcely be doubted, I think, from the bitter sarcasms
+interspersed in his later poems, that Spenser expected more from his
+triumph than it brought him. It opened no way of advancement for him in
+England. He continued for a while in that most ungrateful and
+unsatisfactory employment, the service of the State in Ireland; and that
+he relinquished in 1593.<a name="FNanchor_166-1_25" id="FNanchor_166-1_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_166-1_25" class="fnanchor">[166:1]</a> At the end <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167"></a>[<a href="./images/167.png">167</a>]</span>of 1591 he was again at
+Kilcolman. He had written and probably sent to Ralegh, though he did not
+publish it till 1595, the record already quoted of the last two year's
+events, <i>Colin Clout's come home again</i>,&mdash;his visit, under Ralegh's
+guidance, to the Court, his thoughts and recollections of its great
+ladies, his generous criticisms on poets, the people and courtiers whom
+he had seen and heard of; how he had been dazzled, how he had been
+disenchanted, and how he was come home to his Irish mountains and
+streams and lakes, to enjoy their beauty, though in a "salvage" and
+"foreign" land; to find in this peaceful and tranquil retirement
+something far better than the heat of ambition and the intrigues of
+envious rivalries; and to contrast with the profanations of the name of
+love which had disgusted him in a dissolute society, the higher and
+purer ideal of it which he could honour and pursue in the simplicity of
+his country life.</p>
+
+<p>And in Ireland, the rejected adorer of the Rosalind of the <i>Shepherd's
+Calendar</i> found another and still more perfect Rosalind, who, though she
+was at first inclined to repeat the cruelty of the earlier one, in time
+relented, and received such a dower of poetic glory as few poets have
+bestowed upon their brides. It has always appeared strange that
+Spenser's passion for the first Rosalind should have been so lasting,
+that in his last pastoral, <i>Colin Clout's come home again</i>, written so
+late as 1591, and published after he was married, he should end his poem
+by reverting to this long-past love passage, defending her on the ground
+of her incomparable excellence <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168"></a>[<a href="./images/168.png">168</a>]</span>and his own unworthiness, against the
+blame of friendly "shepherds," witnesses of the "languors of his too
+long dying," and angry with her hard-heartedness. It may be that,
+according to Spenser's way of making his masks and figures suggest but
+not fully express their antitypes,<a name="FNanchor_168-2_26" id="FNanchor_168-2_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_168-2_26" class="fnanchor">[168:2]</a> Rosalind here bears the image
+of the real mistress of this time, the "country lass," the Elizabeth of
+the sonnets, who was, in fact, for a while as unkind as the earlier
+Rosalind. The history of this later wooing, its hopes and anguish, its
+varying currents, its final unexpected success, is the subject of a
+collection of Sonnets, which have the disadvantage of provoking
+comparison with the Sonnets of Shakespere. There is no want in them of
+grace and sweetness, and they ring true with genuine feeling and warm
+affection, though they have of course their share of the conceits then
+held proper for love poems. But they want the power and fire, as well as
+the perplexing mystery, of those of the greater master. His bride was
+also immortalized as a fourth among the three Graces, in a
+richly-painted passage in the last book of the <i>Faery Queen</i>. But the
+most magnificent tribute to her is the great Wedding Ode, the
+<i>Epithalamion</i>, the finest composition of its kind, probably, in any
+language: so impetuous and unflagging, so orderly and yet so rapid in
+the onward march of its stately and varied stanzas; so passionate, so
+flashing with imaginative wealth, yet so refined and self-restrained. It
+was always easy for Spenser to open the floodgates of his inexhaustible
+fancy. With him,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The numbers flow as fast as spring doth rise.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"></a>[<a href="./images/169.png">169</a>]</span>
+But here he has thrown into his composition all his power of
+concentration, of arrangement, of strong and harmonious government over
+thought and image, over language and measure and rhythm; and the result
+is unquestionably one of the grandest lyrics in English poetry. We have
+learned to think the subject unfit for such free poetical treatment;
+Spenser's age did not.</p>
+
+<p>Of the lady of whom all this was said, and for whom all this was
+written, the family name has not been thought worth preserving. We know
+that by her Christian name she was a namesake of the great queen, and of
+Spenser's mother. She is called a country lass, which may mean anything;
+and the marriage appears to have been solemnized in Cork, on what was
+then Midsummer Day, "Barnaby the Bright," the day when "the sun is in
+his cheerful height," June 11/22, 1594. Except that she survived
+Spenser, that she married again, and had some legal quarrels with one of
+her own sons about his lands, we know nothing more about her. Of two of
+the children whom she brought him, the names have been preserved, and
+they indicate that in spite of love and poetry, and the charms of
+Kilcolman, Spenser felt as Englishmen feel in Australia or in India. To
+call one of them <i>Sylvanus</i>, and the other <i>Peregrine</i>, reveals to us
+that Ireland was still to him a "salvage land," and he a pilgrim and
+stranger in it; as Moses called his firstborn Gershom, a stranger
+here&mdash;"for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land."</p>
+
+<p>In the year after his marriage, he sent over these memorials of it to be
+published in London, and they were entered at Stationers' Hall in
+November, 1595. The same year he came over himself, bringing with him
+the second instalment of the <i>Faery Queen</i>, which was entered for
+publication the following January, 1595/6. Thus the half <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"></a>[<a href="./images/170.png">170</a>]</span>of the
+projected work was finished; and finished, as we know from one of the
+Sonnets (80), before his marriage. After his long "race through Fairy
+land," he asks leave to rest, and solace himself with his "love's sweet
+praise;" and then "as a steed refreshed after toil," he will "stoutly
+that second worke assoyle." The first six books were published together
+in 1596. He remained most of the year in London, during which <i>The Four
+Hymns on Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly</i>, were published; and
+also a Dirge (<i>Daphnaida</i>) on Douglas Howard, the wife of Arthur Gorges,
+the spirited narrator of the Island Voyage of Essex and Ralegh, written
+in 1591; and a "spousal verse" (<i>Prothalamion</i>), on the marriage of the
+two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, late in 1596. But he was only a
+visitor in London. The <i>Prothalamion</i> contains a final record of his
+disappointments in England.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">I, (whom sullein care,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In Princes Court, and expectation vayne<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like empty shaddowes, did afflict my brayne,)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Walkt forth to ease my payne<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Along the shoare of silver streaming Themmes&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>His marriage ought to have made him happy. He professed to find the
+highest enjoyment in the quiet and retirement of country life. He was in
+the prime of life, successful beyond all his fellows in his special
+work, and apparently with unabated interest in what remained to be done
+of it. And though he could not but feel himself at a distance from the
+"sweet civility" of England, and socially at disadvantage compared to
+those whose lines had fallen to them in its pleasant places, yet
+nature, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"></a>[<a href="./images/171.png">171</a>]</span>which he loved so well, was still friendly to him, if men were
+wild and dangerous. He is never weary of praising the natural advantages
+of Ireland. Speaking of the North, he says,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And sure it is yet a most beautifull and sweet countrey as any
+is under heaven, seamed throughout with many goodly rivers,
+replenished with all sortes of fish, most aboundantly
+sprinckled with many sweet Ilandes, and goodly lakes, like
+litle Inland Seas, that will carry even ships upon theyr
+waters, adorned with goodly woodes fitt for building of howses
+and shippes, soe comodiously, as that yf some princes in the
+world had them, they would soone hope to be lordes of all the
+seas, and ere long of all the world; also full of good portes
+and havens opening upon England and Scotland, as inviting us
+to come to them, to see what excellent comodityes that
+countrey can affoord, besides the soyle it self most fertile,
+fitt to yeeld all kind of fruite that shal be comitted
+therunto. And lastly, the heavens most milde and temperat,
+though somewhat more moyst then the part toward the West.</p></div>
+
+<p>His own home at Kilcolman charmed and delighted him. It was not his
+fault that its trout streams, its Mulla and Fanchin, are not as famous
+as Walter Scott's Teviot and Tweed, or Wordsworth's Yarrow and Duddon,
+or that its hills, Old Mole, and Arlo Hill, have not kept a poetic name
+like Helvellyn and "Eildon's triple height." They have failed to become
+familiar names to us. But the beauties of his home inspired more than
+one sweet pastoral picture in the <i>Faery Queen</i>; and in the last
+fragment remaining to us of it, he celebrates his mountains and woods
+and valleys as once the fabled resort of the Divine Huntress and her
+Nymphs, and the meeting-place of the Gods.</p>
+
+<p>There was one drawback to the enjoyment of his Irish country life, and
+of the natural attractiveness of Kilcolman. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172"></a>[<a href="./images/172.png">172</a>]</span>"Who knows not Arlo Hill?"
+he exclaims, in the scene just referred to from the fragment on
+<i>Mutability</i>. "Arlo, the best and fairest hill in all the holy island's
+heights." It was well known to all Englishmen who had to do with the
+South of Ireland. How well it was known in the Irish history of the
+time, may be seen in the numerous references to it, under various forms,
+such as Aharlo, Harlow, in the Index to the Irish Calendar of Papers of
+this troublesome date, and to continual encounters and ambushes in its
+notoriously dangerous woods. He means by it the highest part of the
+Galtee range, below which to the north, through a glen or defile, runs
+the "river Aherlow." Galtymore, the summit, rises, with precipice and
+gully, more than 3000 feet, above the plains of Tipperary, and is seen
+far and wide. It was connected with the "great wood," the wild region of
+forest, mountain, and bog which stretched half across Munster from the
+Suir to the Shannon. It was the haunt and fastness of Irish outlawry and
+rebellion in the South, which so long sheltered Desmond and his
+followers. Arlo and its "fair forests," harbouring "thieves and wolves,"
+was an uncomfortable neighbour to Kilcolman. The poet describes it as
+ruined by a curse pronounced on the lovely land by the offended goddess
+of the Chase,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Which too too true that land's in-dwellers since have found.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He was not only living in an insecure part, on the very border of
+disaffection and disturbance, but like every Englishman living in
+Ireland, he was living amid ruins. An English home in Ireland, however
+fair, was a home on the sides of &AElig;tna or Vesuvius: it stood where the
+lava flood had once passed, and upon not distant fires. Spenser has left
+us his thoughts on the condition of Ireland, in a paper written between
+the two rebellions, some time <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173"></a>[<a href="./images/173.png">173</a>]</span>between 1595 and 1598, after the twelve
+or thirteen years of so-called peace which followed the overthrow of
+Desmond, and when Tyrone's rebellion was becoming serious. It seems to
+have been much copied in manuscript, but though entered for publication
+in 1598, it was not printed till long after his death in 1633. A copy of
+it among the Irish papers of 1598 shows that it had come under the eyes
+of the English Government. It is full of curious observations, of shrewd
+political remarks, of odd and confused ethnography; but more than all
+this, it is a very vivid and impressive picture of what Sir Walter
+Ralegh called "the common woe of Ireland." It is a picture of a noble
+realm, which its inhabitants and its masters did not know what to do
+with; a picture of hopeless mistakes, misunderstandings, misrule; a
+picture of piteous misery and suffering on the part of a helpless and
+yet untameable and mischievous population&mdash;of unrelenting and scornful
+rigour on the part of their stronger rulers, which yet was absolutely
+ineffectual to reclaim or subdue them. "Men of great wisdom," Spenser
+writes, "have often wished that all that land were a sea-pool."
+Everything, people thought, had been tried, and tried in vain.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Marry, soe there have beene divers good plottes and wise
+counsells cast alleready about reformation of that realme; but
+they say, it is the fatall desteny of that land, that noe
+purposes, whatsoever are meant for her good, will prosper or
+take good effect, which, whether it proceede from the very
+<span class="smcap">Genius</span> of the soyle, or influence of the starres, or that
+Allmighty God hath not yet appoynted the time of her
+reformation, or that He reserveth her in this unquiett state
+still for some secrett scourdge, which shall by her come unto
+England, it is hard to be knowen, but yet much to be feared.</p></div>
+
+<p>The unchanging fatalities of Ireland appear in Spenser's account in all
+their well-known forms; some of them, as if <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174"></a>[<a href="./images/174.png">174</a>]</span>they were what we were
+reading of yesterday. Throughout the work there is an honest zeal for
+order, an honest hatred of falsehood, sloth, treachery, and disorder.
+But there does not appear a trace of consideration for what the Irish
+might feel or desire or resent. He is sensible indeed of English
+mismanagement and vacillation, of the way in which money and force were
+wasted by not being boldly and intelligently employed; he enlarges on
+that power of malignity and detraction which he has figured in the
+Blatant Beast of the <i>Faery Queen</i>: but of English cruelty, of English
+injustice, of English rapacity, of English prejudice, he is profoundly
+unconscious. He only sees that things are getting worse and more
+dangerous; and though he, like others, has his "plot" for the
+subjugation and pacification of the island, and shrinks from nothing in
+the way of severity, not even, if necessary, from extermination, his
+outlook is one of deep despair. He calculates the amount of force, of
+money, of time, necessary to break down all resistance: he is minute and
+perhaps skilful in building his forts and disposing his garrisons; he is
+very earnest about the necessity of cutting broad roads through the
+woods, and building bridges in place of fords; he contemplates restored
+churches, parish schools, a better order of clergy. But where the spirit
+was to come from of justice, of conciliation, of steady and firm
+resistance to corruption and selfishness, he gives us no light. What it
+comes to is, that with patience, temper, and public spirit, Ireland
+might be easily reformed and brought into order: but unless he hoped for
+patience, temper, and public spirit from Lord Essex, to whom he seems to
+allude as the person "on whom the eye of England is fixed, and our last
+hopes now rest," he too easily took for granted what was the real
+difficulty. His picture <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175"></a>[<a href="./images/175.png">175</a>]</span>is exact and forcible, of one side of the
+truth; it seems beyond the thought of an honest, well-informed, and
+noble-minded Englishman that there was another side.</p>
+
+<p>But he was right in his estimate of the danger, and of the immediate
+evils which produced it. He was right in thinking that want of method,
+want of control, want of confidence, and an untimely parsimony,
+prevented severity from having a fair chance of preparing a platform for
+reform and conciliation. He was right in his conviction of the
+inveterate treachery of the Irish Chiefs, partly the result of ages of
+mismanagement, but now incurable. While he was writing, Tyrone, a
+craftier and bolder man than Desmond, was taking up what Desmond had
+failed in. He was playing a game with the English authorities which as
+things then were is almost beyond belief. He was outwitting or cajoling
+the veterans of Irish government, who knew perfectly well what he was,
+and yet let him amuse them with false expectations&mdash;men like Sir John
+Norreys, who broke his heart when he found out how Tyrone had baffled
+and made a fool of him. Wishing to gain time for help from Spain, and to
+extend the rebellion, he revolted, submitted, sued for pardon but did
+not care to take it when granted, fearlessly presented himself before
+the English officers while he was still beleaguering their posts, led
+the English forces a chase through mountains and bogs, inflicted heavy
+losses on them, and yet managed to keep negotiations open as long as it
+suited him. From 1594 to 1598, the rebellion had been gaining ground; it
+had crept round from Ulster to Connaught, from Connaught to Leinster,
+and now from Connaught to the borders of Munster. But Munster, with its
+English landlords and settlers, was still on the whole quiet. At the end
+of 1597, the Council at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176"></a>[<a href="./images/176.png">176</a>]</span>Dublin reported home that "Munster was the best
+tempered of all the rest at this present time; for that though not long
+since sundry loose persons" (among them the base sons of Lord Roche,
+Spenser's adversary in land suits) "became Robin Hoods and slew some of
+the undertakers, dwelling scattered in thatched houses and remote places
+near to woods and fastnesses, yet now they are cut off, and no known
+disturbers left who are like to make any dangerous alteration on the
+sudden." But they go on to add that they "have intelligence that many
+are practised withal from the North, to be of combination with the rest,
+and stir coals in Munster, whereby the whole realm might be in a general
+uproar." And they repeat their opinion that they must be prepared for a
+"universal Irish war, intended to shake off all English government."</p>
+
+<p>In April, 1598, Tyrone received a new pardon; in the following August,
+he surprised an English army near Armagh, and shattered it with a
+defeat, the bloodiest and most complete ever received by the English in
+Ireland. Then the storm burst. Tyrone sent a force into Munster: and
+once more Munster rose. It was a rising of the dispossessed proprietors
+and the whole native population against the English undertakers; a
+"ragged number of rogues and boys," as the English Council describes
+them; rebel kernes, pouring out of the "great wood," and from Arlo, the
+"chief fastness of the rebels." Even the chiefs, usually on good terms
+with the English, could not resist the stream. Even Thomas Norreys, the
+President, was surprised, and retired to Cork, bringing down on himself
+a severe reprimand from the English Government. "You might better have
+resisted than you did, considering the many defensible houses and
+castles possessed by the undertakers, who, for aught we can hear, were
+by no means <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177"></a>[<a href="./images/177.png">177</a>]</span>comforted nor supported by you, but either from lack of
+comfort from you, or out of mere cowardice, fled away from the rebels on
+the first alarm." "Whereupon," says Cox, the Irish historian, "the
+Munsterians, generally, rebel in October, and kill, murder, ravish and
+spoil without mercy; and Tyrone made James Fitz-Thomas, Earl of Desmond,
+on condition to be tributary to him; he was the handsomest man of his
+time, and is commonly called the <i>Sugan</i> Earl."</p>
+
+<p>On the last day of the previous September (Sept. 30, 1598), the English
+Council had written to the Irish Government to appoint Edmund Spenser,
+Sheriff of the County of Cork, "a gentleman dwelling in the County of
+Cork, who is so well known unto you all for his good and commendable
+parts, being a man endowed with good knowledge in learning, and not
+unskilful or without experience in the wars." In October, Munster was in
+the hands of the insurgents, who were driving Norreys before them, and
+sweeping out of house and castle the panic-stricken English settlers. On
+December 9th, Norreys wrote home a despatch about the state of the
+province. This despatch was sent to England by Spenser, as we learn from
+a subsequent despatch of Norreys of December 21.<a name="FNanchor_177-3_27" id="FNanchor_177-3_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_177-3_27" class="fnanchor">[177:3]</a> It was received
+at Whitehall, as appears from Robert Cecil's endorsement, on the 24th of
+December. The passage from Ireland seems to have been a long one. And
+this is the last original document which remains about Spenser.</p>
+
+<p>What happened to him in the rebellion we learn generally from two
+sources, from Camden's <i>History</i>, and from Drummond of Hawthornden's
+Recollections of Ben <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178"></a>[<a href="./images/178.png">178</a>]</span>Jonson's conversations with him in 1619. In the
+Munster insurrection of October, the new Earl of Desmond's followers did
+not forget that Kilcolman was an old possession of the Desmonds. It was
+sacked and burnt. Jonson related that a little new-born child of
+Spenser's perished in the flames. Spenser and his wife escaped, and he
+came over to England, a ruined and heart-broken man. He died Jan. 16,
+1598/9; "he died," said Jonson, "for lack of bread in King Street
+[Westminster], and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of
+Essex, saying that he had no time to spend them." He was buried in the
+Abbey, near the grave of Chaucer, and his funeral was at the charge of
+the Earl of Essex. Beyond this we know nothing; nothing about the
+details of his escape, nothing of the fate of his manuscripts, or the
+condition in which he left his work, nothing about the suffering he went
+through in England. All conjecture is idle waste of time. We only know
+that the first of English poets perished miserably and prematurely, one
+of the many heavy sacrifices which the evil fortune of Ireland has cost
+to England; one of many illustrious victims to the madness, the evil
+customs, the vengeance of an ill-treated and ill-governed people.</p>
+
+<p>One Irish rebellion brought him to Ireland, another drove him out of it.
+Desmond's brought him to pass his life there, and to fill his mind with
+the images of what was then Irish life, with its scenery, its
+antipathies, its tempers, its chances, and necessities. Tyrone's swept
+him from Ireland, beggared and hopeless. Ten years after his death, a
+bookseller, reprinting the six books of the <i>Faery Queen</i>, added two
+cantos and a fragment, <i>On Mutability</i>, supposed to be part of the
+<i>Legend of Constancy</i>. Where and how he got them he has not <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179"></a>[<a href="./images/179.png">179</a>]</span>told us. It
+is a strange and solemn meditation, on the universal subjection of all
+things to the inexorable conditions of change. It is strange, with its
+odd episode and fable which Spenser cannot resist about his neighbouring
+streams, its borrowings from Chaucer, and its quaint mixture of
+mythology with sacred and with Irish scenery, Olympus and Tabor, and his
+own rivers and mountains. But it is full of his power over thought and
+imagery; and it is quite in a different key from anything in the first
+six books. It has an undertone of awe-struck and pathetic sadness.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What man that sees the ever whirling wheel<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But that thereby doth find and plainly feel<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How Mutability in them doth play<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her cruel sports to many men's decay.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He imagines a mighty Titaness, sister of Hecate and Bellona, most
+beautiful and most terrible, who challenges universal dominion over all
+things in earth and heaven, sun and moon, planets and stars, times and
+seasons, life and death; and finally over the wills and thoughts and
+natures of the gods, even of Jove himself; and who pleads her cause
+before the awful Mother of all things, figured as Chaucer had already
+imagined her:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Great Nature, ever young, yet full of eld;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still moving, yet unmoved from her stead;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unseen of any, yet of all beheld,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thus sitting on her throne.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He imagines all the powers of the upper and nether worlds assembled
+before her on his own familiar hills, instead of Olympus, where she
+shone like the Vision which "dazed" those "three sacred saints" on
+"Mount Thabor." Before her pass all things known of men, in rich and
+picturesque procession; the Seasons pass, and the Months, and the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180"></a>[<a href="./images/180.png">180</a>]</span>Hours, and Day and Night, Life, as "a fair young lusty boy," Death, grim
+and grisly;&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yet is he nought but parting of the breath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unbodied, unsoul'd, unheard, unseene&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and on all of them the claims of the Titaness, Mutability, are
+acknowledged. Nothing escapes her sway in this present state, except
+Nature which, while seeming to change, never really changes her ultimate
+constituent elements, or her universal laws. But when she seemed to have
+extorted the admission of her powers, Nature silences her. Change is
+apparent, and not real; and the time is coming when all change shall end
+in the final changeless change.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">"I well consider all that ye have said,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And find that all things stedfastnesse do hate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And changed be; yet, being rightly wayd,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They are not changed from their first estate;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But by their change their being do dilate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And turning to themselves at length againe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Do worke their owne perfection so by fate:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But they raigne over Change, and do their states maintaine.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">"Cease therefore, daughter, further to aspire,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thee content thus to be rul'd by mee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But time shall come that all shall changed bee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And from thenceforth none no more change shal see."<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So was the Titanesse put downe and whist,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Jove confirm'd in his imperiall see.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then was that whole assembly quite dismist,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Natur's selfe did vanish, whither no man wist.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What he meant&mdash;how far he was thinking of those daring arguments of
+religious and philosophical change of which the world was beginning to
+be full, we cannot now tell. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181"></a>[<a href="./images/181.png">181</a>]</span>The allegory was not finished: at least it
+is lost to us. We have but a fragment more, the last fragment of his
+poetry. It expresses the great commonplace which so impressed itself on
+the men of that time, and of which his works are full. No words could be
+more appropriate to be the last words of one who was so soon to be in
+his own person such an instance of their truth. They are fit closing
+words to mark his tragic and pathetic disappearance from the high and
+animated scene in which his imagination worked. And they record, too,
+the yearning hope of rest not extinguished by terrible and fatal
+disaster:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Mutabilitie, and well it way,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Me seemes, that though she all unworthy were<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the Heav'ns Rule; yet, very sooth to say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In all things else she beares the greatest sway:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And love of things so vaine to cast away;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of that same time when no more Change shall be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the pillours of Eternity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That is contrayr to Mutabilitie;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For all that moveth doth in Change delight:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But thence-forth all shall rest eternally<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O! that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabaoths sight.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_166-1_25" id="Footnote_166-1_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_166-1_25"><span class="label">[166:1]</span></a> Who is <i>Edmondus Spenser, Prebendary of Effin</i>
+(Elphin)? in a list of arrears of first fruits; Calendar of State
+Papers, <i>Ireland</i>, Dec. 8, 1586, p. 222. Church preferments were under
+special circumstances allowed to be held by laymen. See the Queen's
+"Instructions," 1579; in Preface to Calendar of Carew MSS. 1589-1600, p.
+ci.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_168-2_26" id="Footnote_168-2_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_168-2_26"><span class="label">[168:2]</span></a> "In these kind of historical allusions Spenser usually
+perplexes the subject: he leads you on, and then designedly misleads
+you."&mdash;Upton, quoted by Craik, iii. 92.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_177-3_27" id="Footnote_177-3_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_177-3_27"><span class="label">[177:3]</span></a> I am indebted for this reference to Mr. Hans Claude
+Hamilton. See also his Preface to Calendar of Irish Papers, 1574-85, p.
+lxxvi.</p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="center">THE END.</p>
+
+<p class="smallgap"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182"></a>[<a href="./images/182.png">182</a>]</span></p>
+<p class="center">LONDON:<br />
+GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, PRINTERS,<br />
+ST. JOHN'S SQUARE.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1_ads" id="Page_1_ads"></a>[<a href="./images/1_ad.png">1</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.</h2>
+
+<h3>EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.</h3>
+
+<p><i>These Short Books are addressed to the general public with a view both
+to stirring and satisfying an interest in literature and its great
+topics in the minds of those who have to run as they read. An immense
+class is growing up, and must every year increase, whose education will
+have made them alive to the importance of the masters of our literature,
+and capable of intelligent curiosity as to their performances. The
+Series is intended to give the means of nourishing this curiosity, to an
+extent that shall be copious enough to be profitable for knowledge and
+life, and yet be brief enough to serve those whose leisure is scanty.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The following are arranged for:</i>&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="Titles in English Men of Letters Series" style="margin-left: 15%;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4" border="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>SPENSER</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>The Dean of St. Paul's.</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">[<i>Ready.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>HUME</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Professor Huxley.</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">[<i>Ready.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>BUNYAN</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>James Anthony Froude.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>JOHNSON</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Leslie Stephen.</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">[<i>Ready.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>GOLDSMITH</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>William Black.</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">[<i>Ready.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>MILTON</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Mark Pattison.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>COWPER</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Goldwin Smith.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>SWIFT</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>John Morley.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>BURNS</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Principal Shairp.</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">[<i>Ready.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>SCOTT</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Richard H. Hutton.</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">[<i>Ready.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>SHELLEY</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>J. A. Symonds.</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">[<i>Ready.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2_ads" id="Page_2_ads"></a>[<a href="./images/2_ad.png">2</a>]</span><i>GIBBON</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>J. C. Morison.</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">[<i>Ready.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>BYRON</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Professor Nichol.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>DEFOE</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>W. Minto.</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">[<i>Ready.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>BURKE</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>John Morley.</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">[<i>In the Press.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>HAWTHORNE</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Henry James.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>CHAUCER</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>A. W. Ward.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>THACKERAY</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Anthony Trollope.</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">[<i>Ready.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>ADAM SMITH</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft" style="padding-right: 4em;"><i>Leonard H. Courtney, M.P.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>BENTLEY</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Professor R. C. Jebb.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>LANDOR</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Professor Sidney Calvin.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>POPE</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Leslie Stephen.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft" style="padding-right: 4em;"><i>WORDSWORTH</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>F. W. H. Myers.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>SOUTHEY</i></td>
+  <td class="tdleft"><i>Prof. E. Dowden.</i></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="center">[<i>OTHERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED.</i>]</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 20%;" />
+<h3>OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The new series opens well with Mr. Leslie Stephen's sketch of
+Dr. Johnson. It could hardly have been done better; and it
+will convey to the readers for whom it is intended a juster
+estimate of Johnson than either of the two essays of Lord
+Macaulay."&mdash;<i>Pall Mall Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>"We have come across few writers who have had a clearer
+insight into Johnson's character, or who have brought to the
+study of it a better knowledge of the time in which Johnson
+lived and the men whom he knew."&mdash;<i>Saturday Review.</i></p>
+
+<p>"We could not wish for a more suggestive introduction to Scott
+and his poems and novels."&mdash;<i>Examiner.</i></p>
+
+<p>"The tone of the volume is excellent throughout."&mdash;<i>Athen&aelig;um</i>
+Review of "Scott."</p>
+
+<p>"As a clear, thoughtful, and attractive record of the life and
+works of the greatest among the world's historians, it
+deserves the highest praise."&mdash;<i>Examiner</i> Review of "Gibbon."</p>
+
+<p>"The lovers of this great poet (Shelley) are to be
+congratulated at having at their command so fresh, clear, and
+intelligent a presentment of the subject written by a man of
+adequate and wide culture."&mdash;<i>Athen&aelig;um.</i></p>
+
+<p>"It may fairly be said that no one now living could have
+expounded Hume with more sympathy or with equal
+perspicuity."&mdash;<i>Athen&aelig;um.</i></p>
+
+<p>"Of the charm of Mr. Black's style we have often spoken. In
+this little volume he shows that he is as capable of
+penetrating and expounding the character of an historical
+person of a past time as he is of giving life to persons of
+the present time invented by himself."&mdash;<i>Saturday Review.</i></p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Minto's book is careful and accurate in all that it
+states, and fruitful in all that it suggests. It will repay
+reading more than once."&mdash;<i>Athen&aelig;um.</i></p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3_ads" id="Page_3_ads"></a>[<a href="./images/3_ad.png">3</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>MACMILLAN'S GLOBE LIBRARY.</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Price 3s. 6d. per volume, in cloth. Also kept in a variety of calf and
+morocco bindings, at moderate prices.</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 20%;" />
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>The </i><span class="smcap">Saturday Review</span><i> says: "The Globe Editions are admirable
+for their scholarly editing, their typographical excellence,
+their compendious form, and their cheapness." The </i><span class="smcap">British
+Quarterly Review</span><i> says: "In compendiousness, elegance, and
+scholarliness the Globe Editions of Messrs. Macmillan surpass
+any popular series of our classics hitherto given to the
+public. As near an approach to miniature perfection as has
+ever been made.</i>"</p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 20%;" />
+
+<p class="secth"><b>Shakespeare's Complete Works.</b> Edited by <span class="smcap">W. G. Clark, M.A.</span>, and <span class="smcap">W. Aldis
+Wright, M.A.</span>, Editors of the "Cambridge Shakespeare." With Glossary. pp.
+1075.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>The </i><span class="smcap">Athen&aelig;um</span><i> says this edition is "a marvel of beauty,
+cheapness, and compactness.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. For the busy man, above all for
+the working student, this is the best of all existing
+Shakespeares.</i>"</p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><b>Spenser's Complete Works.</b> Edited from the Original Editions and
+Manuscripts, by <span class="smcap">R. Morris</span>, with a Memoir by <span class="smcap">J. W. Hales, M.A.</span> With
+Glossary. pp. lv., 736.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>Worthy&mdash;and higher praise it needs not&mdash;of the beautiful
+'Globe Series.'</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Daily News.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><b>Sir Walter Scott's Poetical Works.</b> Edited, with a Biographical and
+Critical Memoir, by <span class="smcap">Francis Turner Palgrave</span>, and Copious Notes. pp.
+xliii., 559.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>We can almost sympathise with a middle-aged grumbler, who,
+after reading Mr. Palgrave's Memoir and Introduction, should
+exclaim, 'Why was there not such an edition of Scott when I
+was a school-boy?'</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Guardian.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><b>Complete Works of Robert Burns.</b> Edited from the best Printed and
+Manuscript authorities, with Glossarial Index, Notes, and a Biographical
+Memoir by <span class="smcap">Alexander Smith</span>. pp. lxii., 636.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>Admirable in all respects.</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Spectator.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><b>Robinson Crusoe.</b> Edited after the Original Editions, with a Biographical
+Introduction by <span class="smcap">Henry Kingsley</span>. pp. xxxi., 607.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>A most excellent and in every way desirable
+edition.</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Court Circular.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4_ads" id="Page_4_ads"></a>[<a href="./images/4_ad.png">4</a>]</span>
+<b>Goldsmith's Miscellaneous Works.</b> Edited with Biographical Introduction,
+by Professor <span class="smcap">Masson</span>. pp. lx., 695.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>Such an admirable compendium of the facts of Goldsmith's
+life, and so careful and minute a delineation of the mixed
+traits of his peculiar character as to be a very model of a
+literary biography in little.</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Scotsman.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><b>Pope's Poetical Works.</b> Edited, with Notes, and Introductory Memoir by <span class="smcap">A.
+W. Ward, M.A.</span>, Professor of History in Owens College Manchester. pp.
+lii., 508.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>The </i><span class="smcap">Literary Churchman</span><i> remarks: "The Editor's own notes and
+introductory memoir are excellent, the memoir alone would be
+cheap and well worth buying at the price of the whole
+volume.</i>"</p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><b>Dryden's Poetical Works.</b> Edited, with a Memoir, Revised Text, and Notes,
+by <span class="smcap">W. D. Christie, M.A.</span>, of Trinity College, Cambridge. pp. lxxxvii.,
+662.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>An admirable edition, the result of great research and of a
+careful revision of the text.</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Pall Mall Gazette.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><b>Cowper's Poetical Works.</b> Edited, with Notes and Biographical
+Introduction, by <span class="smcap">William Benham</span>, Vicar of Margate. pp. lxxiii., 536.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>Mr. Benham's edition of Cowper is one of permanent
+value.</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Saturday Review.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><b>Morte d'Arthur.</b>&mdash;SIR THOMAS MALORY'S BOOK OF KING ARTHUR AND OF HIS
+NOBLE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE. The original Edition of <span class="smcap">Caxton</span>,
+revised for Modern Use. With an Introduction by Sir <span class="smcap">Edward Strachey</span>,
+Bart. pp. xxxvii., 509.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>It is with perfect confidence that we recommend this edition
+of the old romance to every class of readers.</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Pall Mall
+Gazette.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><b>The Works of Virgil.</b> Rendered into English Prose, with Introductions,
+Notes, Running Analysis, and an Index. By <span class="smcap">James Lonsdale, M.A.</span>, and
+<span class="smcap">Samuel Lee, M.A.</span> pp. 228.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>A more complete Edition of Virgil in English it is scarcely
+possible to conceive than the scholarly work before
+us.</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Globe.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><b>The Works of Horace.</b> Rendered into English Prose, with Introductions,
+Running Analysis, Notes, and Index. By <span class="smcap">James Lonsdale, M.A.</span>, and <span class="smcap">Samuel
+Lee, M.A.</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>The </i><span class="smcap">Standard</span><i> says, "To classical and non-classical readers
+it will be invaluable.</i>"</p></div>
+
+
+<p class="secth"><b>Milton's Poetical Works.</b>&mdash;Edited, with Introductions, by Professor
+<span class="smcap">Masson</span>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>In every way an admirable book.</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Pall Mall Gazette.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p class="sectctr">MACMILLAN &amp; CO., LONDON.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="notebox">
+<h2><a name="TN" id="TN"></a>TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES</h2>
+
+<p>Pages ii, iv, and vi are blank in the original.</p>
+
+<p>The following corrections have been made to the text:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Page 6: dust was raised."<span class="label">[6:5]</span>[anchor missing in
+original]</p>
+
+<p>Page 41: scenery on which the poet's sweetness[original has
+sweetnesss]</p>
+
+<p>Page 42: "[quotation mark missing in original]Shepherd that
+did fetch</p>
+
+<p>Page 48: Discourse[original has Discouse] of English Poetrie</p>
+
+<p>Page 76: as deputy for the said Briskett)[ending parenthesis
+missing in original]</p>
+
+<p>Page 83: [original has extraneous quotation mark]In the meane
+while I must struggle</p>
+
+<p>Page 105: looselie scattered abroad,[original has comma]</p>
+
+<p>Page 122: as most fitte[original has fittte] for the
+excellency</p>
+
+<p>Page 151: standard of moral character[original has charater]</p>
+
+<p>Page 173: "Men of great wisdom," Spenser writes[original has
+writers]</p>
+
+<p>Page 174: Throughout the work there is an[original has a]
+honest zeal</p>
+
+<p>Page 178: through in England.[original has comma] All
+conjecture</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Spenser, by R. W. Church
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Spenser, by R. W. Church
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Spenser
+       (English Men of Letters Series)
+
+Author: R. W. Church
+
+Release Date: January 27, 2010 [EBook #31101]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPENSER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lisa Reigel, and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been
+left as in the original. Some typographical and punctuation errors have
+been corrected. A complete list follows the text. Words in Greek in the
+original are transliterated and placed between =equal signs=. Words
+italicized in the original are surrounded by _underscores_. Words in
+bold in the original are surrounded by +plus signs+. Characters inside
+{braces} are superscripted in the original. In quoted material, a row of
+asterisks represents an ellipsis. Ellipses match the original.
+
+
+
+
+                               SPENSER
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                            R. W. CHURCH,
+
+                         DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S,
+                  HONORARY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE.
+
+
+                               London:
+                          MACMILLAN AND CO.
+                                 1879
+
+
+       _The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved._
+
+
+
+
+NOTICE.
+
+
+As the plan of these volumes does not encourage footnotes, I wish to say
+that, besides the biographies prefixed to the various editions of
+Spenser, there are two series of publications, which have been very
+useful to me. One is the series of Calendars of State Papers, especially
+the State Papers on Ireland and the Carew MSS. at Lambeth, with the
+prefaces of Mr. Hans Claude Hamilton and the late Professor Brewer. The
+other is Mr. E. Arber's series of reprints of old English books, and his
+Transcript of the Stationers' Registers, a work, I suppose, without
+parallel in its information about the early literature of a country, and
+edited by him with admirable care and public spirit. I wish also to say
+that I am much indebted to Mr. Craik's excellent little book on _Spenser
+and his Poetry_.
+
+                                                         R. W. C.
+
+_March, 1879._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+     CHAPTER I.
+                                                             PAGE
+     SPENSER'S EARLY LIFE (1552-1579)                           1
+
+
+     CHAPTER II.
+
+     THE NEW POET--THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR (1579)              29
+
+
+     CHAPTER III.
+
+     SPENSER IN IRELAND (1580)                                 51
+
+
+     CHAPTER IV.
+
+     THE FAERY QUEEN--THE FIRST PART (1580-1590)               81
+
+
+     CHAPTER V.
+
+     THE FAERY QUEEN                                          118
+
+
+     CHAPTER VI.
+
+     SECOND PART OF THE FAERY QUEEN--SPENSER'S LAST
+         YEARS (1590-1599)                                    166
+
+
+
+
+SPENSER.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+SPENSER'S EARLY LIFE.
+
+[1552-1579.]
+
+
+Spenser marks a beginning in English literature. He is the first
+Englishman who, in that great division of our history which dates from
+the Reformation, attempted and achieved a poetical work of the highest
+order. Born about the same time as Hooker (1552-1554), in the middle of
+that eventful century which began with Henry VIII., and ended with
+Elizabeth, he was the earliest of our great modern writers in poetry, as
+Hooker was the earliest of our great modern writers in prose. In that
+reviving English literature, which, after Chaucer's wonderful promise,
+had been arrested in its progress, first by the Wars of the Roses, and
+then by the religious troubles of the Reformation, these two were the
+writers who first realized to Englishmen the ideas of a high literary
+perfection. These ideas vaguely filled many minds; but no one had yet
+shown the genius and the strength to grasp and exhibit them in a way to
+challenge comparison with what had been accomplished by the poetry and
+prose of Greece, Rome, and Italy. There had been poets in England since
+Chaucer, and prose writers since Wycliffe had translated the Bible.
+Surrey and Wyatt have deserved to live, while a crowd of poets, as
+ambitious as they, and not incapable of occasional force and sweetness,
+have been forgotten. Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, Tyndale, the
+translator of the New Testament, Bishop Latimer, the writers of many
+state documents, and the framers, either by translation or composition,
+of the offices of the English Prayer Book, showed that they understood
+the power of the English language over many of the subtleties and
+difficulties of thought, and were alive to the music of its cadences.
+Some of these works, consecrated by the highest of all possible
+associations, have remained, permanent monuments and standards of the
+most majestic and most affecting English speech. But the verse of
+Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville, and the prose of More and Ascham were but
+noble and promising efforts. Perhaps the language was not ripe for their
+success; perhaps the craftsmen's strength and experience were not equal
+to the novelty of their attempt. But no one can compare the English
+styles of the first half of the sixteenth century with the contemporary
+styles of Italy, with Ariosto, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, without
+feeling the immense gap in point of culture, practice, and skill--the
+immense distance at which the Italians were ahead, in the finish and
+reach of their instruments, in their power to handle them, in command
+over their resources, and facility and ease in using them. The Italians
+were more than a century older; the English could not yet, like the
+Italians, say what they would; the strength of English was, doubtless,
+there in germ, but it had still to reach its full growth and
+development. Even the French prose of Rabelais and Montaigne was more
+mature. But in Spenser, as in Hooker, all these tentative essays of
+vigorous but unpractised minds have led up to great and lasting works.
+We have forgotten all these preliminary attempts, crude and imperfect,
+to speak with force and truth, or to sing with measure and grace. There
+is no reason why they should be remembered, except by professed
+inquirers into the antiquities of our literature; they were usually
+clumsy and awkward, sometimes grotesque, often affected, always
+hopelessly wanting in the finish, breadth, moderation, and order which
+alone can give permanence to writing. They were the necessary exercises
+by which Englishmen were recovering the suspended art of Chaucer, and
+learning to write; and exercises, though indispensably necessary, are
+not ordinarily in themselves interesting and admirable. But when the
+exercises had been duly gone through, then arose the original and
+powerful minds, to take full advantage of what had been gained by all
+the practising, and to concentrate and bring to a focus all the hints
+and lessons of art which had been gradually accumulating. Then the
+sustained strength and richness of the _Faery Queen_ became possible;
+contemporary with it, the grandeur and force of English prose began in
+Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_; and then, in the splendid Elizabethan
+Drama, that form of art which has nowhere a rival, the highest powers of
+poetic imagination became wedded, as they had never been before in
+England or in the world, to the real facts of human life, and to its
+deepest thoughts and passions.
+
+More is known about the circumstances of Spenser's life than about the
+lives of many men of letters of that time; yet our knowledge is often
+imperfect and inaccurate. The year 1552 is now generally accepted as the
+year of his birth. The date is inferred from a passage in one of his
+Sonnets,[4:1] and this probably is near the truth. That is to say that
+Spenser was born in one of the last two years of Edward VI.; that his
+infancy was passed during the dark days of Mary; and that he was about
+six years old when Elizabeth came to the throne. About the same time
+were born Ralegh, and, a year or two later (1554), Hooker and Philip
+Sidney. Bacon (1561), and Shakespere (1564), belong to the next decade
+of the century.
+
+He was certainly a Londoner by birth, and early training. This also we
+learn from himself, in the latest poem published in his life-time. It is
+a bridal ode (_Prothalamion_), to celebrate the marriage of two
+daughters of the Earl of Worcester, written late in 1596. It was a time
+in his life of disappointment and trouble, when he was only a rare
+visitor to London. In the poem he imagines himself on the banks of
+London's great river, and the bridal procession arriving at Lord Essex's
+house; and he takes occasion to record the affection with which he still
+regarded "the most kindly nurse" of his boyhood.
+
+       Calm was the day, and through the trembling air
+       Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play,
+       A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
+       Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair:
+       When I, (whom sullen care,
+       Through discontent of my long fruitless stay
+       In Princes Court, and expectation vain
+       Of idle hopes, which still do fly away,
+       Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain,)
+       Walkt forth to ease my pain
+       Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames;
+       Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems,
+       Was painted all with variable flowers,
+       And all the meads adorned with dainty gems
+       Fit to deck maidens' bowers,
+       And crown their paramours
+     Against the bridal day, which is not long:
+     Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+       At length they all _to merry London came,
+       To merry London, my most kindly nurse,
+       That to me gave this life's first native source,
+       Though from another place I take my name,
+       A house of ancient fame_.
+       There, when they came, whereas those bricky towers
+       The which on Thames broad aged back do ride,
+       Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
+       There whilome wont the Templar Knights to bide,
+       Till they decayed through pride:
+       Next whereunto there stands a stately place,
+       _Where oft I gained gifts and goodly grace[5:2]
+       Of that great Lord, which therein wont to dwell;
+       Whose want too well now feels my friendless case;
+       But ah! here fits not well
+       Old woes, but joys, to tell_
+     Against the bridal day, which is not long:
+     Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song:
+       Yet therein now doth lodge a noble peer,[5:3]
+       Great England's glory and the wide world's wonder,
+       Whose dreadful name late through all Spain did thunder,
+       And Hercules two pillars, standing near,
+       Did make to quake and fear.
+       Fair branch of honour, flower of chivalry!
+       That fillest England with thy triumph's fame,
+       Joy have thou of thy noble victory,[5:4]
+       And endless happiness of thine own name
+       That promiseth the same.
+       That through thy prowess, and victorious arms,
+       Thy country may be freed from foreign harms;
+       And great Elisa's glorious name may ring
+       Through all the world, filled with thy wide alarms.
+
+Who his father was, and what was his employment we know not. From one of
+the poems of his later years we learn that his mother bore the famous
+name of Elizabeth, which was also the cherished one of Spenser's wife.
+
+           My love, my life's best ornament,
+     By whom my spirit out of dust was raised.[6:5]
+
+But his family, whatever was his father's condition, certainly claimed
+kindred, though there was a difference in the spelling of the name, with
+a house then rising into fame and importance, the Spencers of Althorpe,
+the ancestors of the Spencers and Churchills of modern days. Sir John
+Spencer had several daughters, three of whom made great marriages.
+Elizabeth was the wife of Sir George Carey, afterwards the second Lord
+Hunsdon, the son of Elizabeth's cousin and Counsellor. Anne, first, Lady
+Compton, afterwards married Thomas Sackville, the son of the poet, Lord
+Buckhurst, and then Earl of Dorset. Alice, the youngest, whose first
+husband, Lord Strange, became Earl of Derby, after his death married
+Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper, Baron Ellesmere, and then Viscount
+Brackley. These three sisters are celebrated by him in a gallery of the
+noble ladies of the Court,[6:6] under poetical names--"Phyllis, the
+flower of rare perfection," "Charillis, the pride and primrose of the
+rest," and "Sweet Amaryllis, the youngest but the highest in degree."
+Alice, Lady Strange, Lady Derby, Lady Ellesmere and Brackley, and then
+again Dowager Lady Derby, the "Sweet Amaryllis" of the poet, had the
+rare fortune to be a personal link between Spenser and Milton. She was
+among the last whom Spenser honoured with his homage: and she was the
+first whom Milton honoured; for he composed his Arcades to be acted
+before her by her grandchildren, and the _Masque of Comus_ for her
+son-in-law, Lord Bridgewater, and his daughter, another Lady Alice. With
+these illustrious sisters Spenser claimed kindred. To each of these he
+dedicated one of his minor poems; to Lady Strange, the _Tears of the
+Muses_; to Lady Compton, the Apologue of the Fox and the Ape, _Mother
+Hubberd's Tale_; to Lady Carey, the Fable of the Butterfly and the
+Spider, _Muiopotmos_. And in each dedication he assumed on their part
+the recognition of his claim.
+
+                    The sisters three,
+     The honour of the noble family,
+     Of which I meanest boast myself to be.
+
+Whatever his degree of relationship to them, he could hardly even in the
+days of his fame have ventured thus publicly to challenge it, unless
+there had been some acknowledged ground for it. There are obscure
+indications, which antiquarian diligence may perhaps make clear, which
+point to East Lancashire as the home of the particular family of
+Spensers to which Edmund Spenser's father belonged. Probably he was,
+however, in humble circumstances.
+
+Edmund Spenser was a Londoner by education as well as birth. A recent
+discovery by Mr. R. B. Knowles, further illustrated by Dr. Grosart,[7:7]
+has made us acquainted with Spenser's school. He was a pupil, probably
+one of the earliest ones, of the grammar school, then recently (1560)
+established by the Merchant Taylors' Company, under a famous teacher,
+Dr. Mulcaster. Among the manuscripts at Townley Hall are preserved the
+account books of the executors of a bountiful London citizen, Robert
+Nowell, the brother of Dr. Alexander Nowell, who was Dean of St. Paul's
+during Elizabeth's reign, and was a leading person in the ecclesiastical
+affairs of the time. In these books, in a crowd of unknown names of
+needy relations and dependents, distressed foreigners, and parish
+paupers, who shared from time to time the liberality of Mr. Robert
+Nowell's representatives, there appear among the numerous "poor
+scholars" whom his wealth assisted, the names of Richard Hooker, and
+Lancelot Andrewes. And there, also, in the roll of the expenditure at
+Mr. Nowell's pompous funeral at St. Paul's in February, 1568/9, among
+long lists of unknown men and women, high and low, who had mourning
+given them, among bills for fees to officials, for undertakers' charges,
+for heraldic pageantry and ornamentation, for abundant supplies for the
+sumptuous funeral banquet, are put down lists of boys, from the chief
+London schools, St. Paul's, Westminster, and others, to whom two yards
+of cloth were to be given to make their gowns: and at the head of the
+six scholars named from Merchant Taylors' is the name of Edmund Spenser.
+
+He was then, probably, the senior boy of the school, and in the
+following May he went to Cambridge. The Nowells still helped him: we
+read in their account books under April 28, 1569, "to Edmond Spensore,
+scholler of the m'chante tayler scholl, at his gowinge to penbrocke
+hall in chambridge, x{s}." On the 20th of May, he was admitted sizar,
+or serving clerk at Pembroke Hall; and on more than one occasion
+afterwards, like Hooker and like Lancelot Andrewes, also a Merchant
+Taylors' boy, two or three years Spenser's junior, and a member of the
+same college, Spenser had a share in the benefactions, small in
+themselves, but very numerous, with which the Nowells after the fine
+fashion of the time, were accustomed to assist poor scholars at the
+Universities. In the visitations of Merchant Taylors' School, at which
+Grindal, Bishop of London, was frequently present,[9:8] it is not
+unlikely that his interest was attracted, in the appositions or
+examinations, to the promising senior boy of the school. At any rate
+Spenser, who afterwards celebrated Grindal's qualities as a bishop, was
+admitted to a place, one which befitted a scholar in humble
+circumstances, in Grindal's old college. It is perhaps worth noticing
+that all Spenser's early friends, Grindal, the Nowells, Dr. Mulcaster,
+his master, were north country men.
+
+Spenser was sixteen or seventeen when he left school for the university,
+and he entered Cambridge at the time when the struggle which was to
+occupy the reign of Elizabeth was just opening. At the end of the year
+1569, the first distinct blow was struck against the queen and the new
+settlement of religion, by the Rising of the North. In the first ten
+years of Elizabeth's reign, Spenser's school time at Merchant Taylors',
+the great quarrel had slumbered. Events abroad occupied men's minds; the
+religious wars in France, the death of the Duke of Guise (1563), the
+loss of Havre, and expulsion of the English garrisons, the close of the
+Council of Trent (1563), the French peace, the accession of Pius V.
+(1565/6). Nearer home, there was the marriage of Mary of Scotland with
+Henry Darnley (1565), and all the tragedy which followed, Kirk of Field
+(1567), Lochleven, Langside, Carlisle, the imprisonment of the pretender
+to the English Crown (1568). In England, the authority of Elizabeth had
+established itself, and the internal organization of the Reformed Church
+was going on, in an uncertain and tentative way, but steadily. There was
+a struggle between Genevan exiles, who were for going too fast, and
+bishops and politicians who were for going too slow; between authority
+and individual judgment, between home-born state traditions and foreign
+revolutionary zeal. But outwardly, at least, England had been peaceful.
+Now however a great change was at hand. In 1566, the Dominican
+Inquisitor, Michael Ghislieri, was elected Pope, under the title of Pius
+V.
+
+In Pius (1566-72), were embodied the new spirit and policy of the Roman
+Church, as they had been created and moulded by the great Jesuit order,
+and by reforming bishops like Ghiberti of Verona, and Carlo Borromeo of
+Milan. Devout and self-denying as a saint, fierce and inflexible against
+abuses as a puritan, resolute and uncompromising as a Jacobin idealist
+or an Asiatic despot, ruthless and inexorable as an executioner, his
+soul was bent on re-establishing, not only by preaching and martyrdom,
+but by the sword and by the stake, the unity of Christendom and of its
+belief. Eastwards and westwards, he beheld two formidable foes and two
+serious dangers; and he saw before him the task of his life in the
+heroic work of crushing English heresy and beating back Turkish
+misbelief. He broke through the temporizing caution of his predecessors
+by the Bull of Deposition against Elizabeth in 1570. He was the soul of
+the confederacy which won the day of Lepanto against the Ottomans in
+1571. And though dead, his spirit was paramount in the slaughter of St.
+Bartholomew in 1572.
+
+In the year 1569, while Spenser was passing from school to college, his
+emissaries were already in England, spreading abroad that Elizabeth was
+a bastard and an apostate, incapable of filling a Christian throne,
+which belonged by right to the captive Mary. The seed they sowed bore
+fruit. In the end of the year, southern England was alarmed by the news
+of the rebellion of the two great Earls in the north, Percy of
+Northumberland and Neville of Westmoreland. Durham was sacked and the
+mass restored by an insurgent host, before which an "aged gentleman,"
+Richard Norton with his sons, bore the banner of the Five Wounds of
+Christ. The rebellion was easily put down, and the revenge was stern. To
+the men who had risen at the instigation of the Pope and in the cause of
+Mary, Elizabeth gave, as she had sworn "such a breakfast as never was in
+the North before." The hangman finished the work on those who had
+escaped the sword. Poetry, early and late, has recorded the dreary fate
+of those brave victims of a mistaken cause, in the ballad of the _Rising
+of the North_, and in the _White Doe of Rylstone_. It was the signal
+given for the internecine war which was to follow between Rome and
+Elizabeth. And it was the first great public event which Spenser would
+hear of in all men's mouths, as he entered on manhood, the prelude and
+augury of fierce and dangerous years to come. The nation awoke to the
+certainty--one which so profoundly affects sentiment and character both
+in a nation and in an individual--that among the habitual and fixed
+conditions of life is that of having a serious and implacable enemy ever
+to reckon with.
+
+And in this year, apparently in the transition time between school and
+college, Spenser's literary ventures began. The evidence is curious, but
+it seems to be clear. In 1569, a refugee Flemish physician from Antwerp,
+who had fled to England from the "abominations of the Roman Antichrist"
+and the persecutions of the Duke of Alva, John Vander Noodt, published
+one of those odd miscellanies, fashionable at the time, half moral and
+poetical, half fiercely polemical, which he called a "_Theatre_, wherein
+be represented as well the Miseries and Calamities which follow the
+voluptuous Worldlings, as also the great Joys and Pleasures which the
+Faithful do enjoy--an argument both profitable and delectable to all
+that sincerely love the word of God." This "little treatise," was a
+mixture of verse and prose, setting forth in general, the vanity of the
+world, and, in particular, predictions of the ruin of Rome and
+Antichrist: and it enforced its lessons by illustrative woodcuts. In
+this strange jumble are preserved, we can scarcely doubt, the first
+compositions which we know of Spenser's. Among the pieces are some
+Sonnets of Petrarch, and some Visions of the French poet Joachim du
+Bellay, whose poems were published in 1568. In the collection itself,
+these pieces are said by the compiler to have been translated by him
+"out of the Brabants speech," and "out of Dutch into English." But in a
+volume of "poems of the world's vanity," and published years afterwards
+in 1591, ascribed to Spenser, and put together, apparently with his
+consent, by his publisher, are found these very pieces from Petrarch and
+Du Bellay. The translations from Petrarch are almost literally the same,
+and are said to have been "formerly translated." In the Visions of Du
+Bellay there is this difference, that the earlier translations are in
+blank verse, and the later ones are rimed as sonnets; but the change
+does not destroy the manifest identity of the two translations. So that
+unless Spenser's publisher, to whom the poet had certainly given some of
+his genuine pieces for the volume, is not to be trusted,--which, of
+course, is possible, but not probable--or unless,--what is in the last
+degree inconceivable,--Spenser had afterwards been willing to take the
+trouble of turning the blank verse of Du Bellay's unknown translator
+into rime, the Dutchman who dates his _Theatre of Worldlings_ on the
+25th May, 1569, must have employed the promising and fluent school boy,
+to furnish him with an English versified form, of which he himself took
+the credit, for compositions which he professes to have known only in
+the Brabants or Dutch translations. The sonnets from Petrarch are
+translated with much command of language; there occurs in them, what was
+afterwards a favourite thought of Spenser's:--
+
+                             --The Nymphs,
+     That sweetly in accord did _tune their voice
+     To the soft sounding of the waters' fall_.[13:9]
+
+It is scarcely credible that the translator of the sonnets could have
+caught so much as he has done of the spirit of Petrarch without having
+been able to read the Italian original; and if Spenser was the
+translator, it is a curious illustration of the fashionableness of
+Italian literature in the days of Elizabeth, that a school-boy just
+leaving Merchant Taylors' should have been so much interested in it. Dr.
+Mulcaster, his master, is said by Warton to have given special attention
+to the teaching of the English language.
+
+If these translations were Spenser's, he must have gone to Cambridge
+with a faculty of verse, which for his time may be compared to that with
+which winners of prize poems go to the universities now. But there was
+this difference, that the school-boy versifiers of our days are rich
+with the accumulated experience and practice of the most varied and
+magnificent poetical literature in the world; while Spenser had but one
+really great English model behind him; and Chaucer, honoured as he was,
+had become in Elizabeth's time, if not obsolete, yet in his diction,
+very far removed from the living language of the day. Even Milton, in
+his boyish compositions, wrote after Spenser and Shakespeare, with their
+contemporaries, had created modern English poetry. Whatever there was in
+Spenser's early verses of grace and music was of his own finding: no one
+of his own time, except in occasional and fitful snatches, like stanzas
+of Sackville's, had shown him the way. Thus equipped, he entered the
+student world, then full of pedantic and ill-applied learning, of the
+disputations of Calvinistic theology, and of the beginnings of those
+highly speculative puritanical controversies, which were the echo at the
+University of the great political struggles of the day, and were soon to
+become so seriously practical. The University was represented to the
+authorities in London as being in a state of dangerous excitement,
+troublesome and mutinous. Whitgift, afterwards Elizabeth's favourite
+archbishop, Master, first of Pembroke, and then of Trinity, was
+Vice-Chancellor of the University; but as the guardian of established
+order, he found it difficult to keep in check the violent and
+revolutionary spirit of the theological schools. Calvin was beginning to
+be set up there as the infallible doctor of Protestant theology.
+Cartwright from the Margaret Professor's chair was teaching the
+exclusive and divine claims of the Geneva platform of discipline, and in
+defiance of the bishops and the government was denouncing the received
+Church polity and ritual as Popish and anti-Christian. Cartwright, an
+extreme and uncompromising man, was deprived in 1570; but the course
+which things were taking under the influence of Rome and Spain gave
+force to his lessons and warnings, and strengthened his party. In this
+turmoil of opinions, amid these hard and technical debates, these fierce
+conflicts between the highest authorities, and this unsparing violence
+and bitterness of party recriminations, Spenser, with the tastes and
+faculties of a poet, and the love not only of what was beautiful, but of
+what was meditative and dreamy, began his university life.
+
+It was not a favourable atmosphere for the nurture of a great poet. But
+it suited one side of Spenser's mind, as it suited that of all but the
+most independent Englishmen of the time, Shakespere, Bacon, Ralegh.
+Little is known of Spenser's Cambridge career. It is probable, from the
+persons with whom he was connected, that he would not be indifferent to
+the debates around him, and that his religious prepossessions were then,
+as afterwards, in favour of the conforming puritanism in the Church, as
+opposed to the extreme and thorough-going puritanism of Cartwright. Of
+the conforming puritans, who would have been glad of a greater
+approximation to the Swiss model, but who, whatever their private wishes
+or dislikes, thought it best, for good reasons or bad, to submit to the
+strong determination of the government against it, and to accept what
+the government approved and imposed, Grindal, who held successively the
+great sees of London, York, and Canterbury, and Nowell, Dean of St.
+Paul's, Spenser's benefactor, were representative types. Grindal, a
+waverer like many others in opinion, had also a noble and manly side to
+his character, in his hatred of practical abuses, and in the courageous
+and obstinate resistance which he could offer to power, when his sense
+of right was outraged. Grindal, as has been said, was perhaps
+instrumental in getting Spenser into his own old college, Pembroke Hall,
+with the intention, it may be, as was the fashion of bishops of that
+time, of becoming his patron. But certainly after his disgrace in 1577,
+and when it was not quite safe to praise a great man under the
+displeasure of the Court, Grindal is the person whom Spenser first
+singled out for his warmest and heartiest praise. He is introduced under
+a thin disguise, "Algrind," in Spenser's earliest work after he left
+Cambridge, the _Shepherd's Calendar_, as the pattern of the true and
+faithful Christian pastor. And if Pembroke Hall retained at all the tone
+and tendencies of such masters as Ridley, Grindal, and Whitgift, the
+school in which Spenser grew up was one of their mitigated puritanism.
+But his puritanism was political and national, rather than religious. He
+went heartily with the puritan party in their intense hatred of Rome and
+Roman partisans; he went with them also in their denunciations of the
+scandals and abuses of the ecclesiastical government at home. But in
+temper of mind and intellectual bias he had little in common with the
+puritans. For the stern austerities of Calvinism, its fierce and eager
+scholasticism, its isolation from human history, human enjoyment, and
+all the manifold play and variety of human character, there could not be
+much sympathy in a man like Spenser, with his easy and flexible nature,
+keenly alive to all beauty, an admirer even when he was not a lover of
+the alluring pleasures of which the world is full, with a perpetual
+struggle going on in him, between his strong instincts of purity and
+right, and his passionate appreciation of every charm and grace. He
+shows no signs of agreement with the internal characteristics of the
+puritans, their distinguishing theology, their peculiarities of thought
+and habits, their protests, right or wrong, against the fashions and
+amusements of the world. If not a man of pleasure, he yet threw himself
+without scruple into the tastes, the language, the pursuits, of the gay
+and gallant society in which they saw so much evil: and from their
+narrow view of life, and the contempt, dislike, and fear, with which
+they regarded the whole field of human interest, he certainly was parted
+by the widest gulf. Indeed, he had not the sternness and concentration
+of purpose, which made Milton the great puritan poet.
+
+Spenser took his Master's degree in 1576, and then left Cambridge. He
+gained no Fellowship, and there is nothing to show how he employed
+himself. His classical learning, whether acquired there or elsewhere,
+was copious, but curiously inaccurate; and the only specimen remaining
+of his Latin composition in verse is contemptible in its mediaeval
+clumsiness. We know nothing of his Cambridge life except the friendships
+which he formed there. An intimacy began at Cambridge of the closest and
+most affectionate kind, which lasted long into after-life, between him
+and two men of his college, one older in standing than himself, the
+other younger; Gabriel Harvey, first a fellow of Pembroke, and then a
+student or teacher of civil law at Trinity Hall, and Edward Kirke, like
+Spenser, a sizar at Pembroke, recently identified with the E. K., who
+was the editor and commentator of Spenser's earliest work, the anonymous
+_Shepherd's Calendar_. Of the younger friend this is the most that is
+known. That he was deeply in Spenser's confidence as a literary
+coadjutor, and possibly in other ways, is shown in the work which he
+did. But Gabriel Harvey was a man who had influence on Spenser's ideas
+and purposes, and on the direction of his efforts. He was a classical
+scholar of much distinction in his day, well read in the Italian authors
+then so fashionable, and regarded as a high authority on questions of
+criticism and taste. Except to students of Elizabethan literary history,
+he has become an utterly obscure personage; and he has not usually been
+spoken of with much respect. He had the misfortune, later in life, to
+plunge violently into the scurrilous quarrels of the day, and as he was
+matched with wittier and more popular antagonists, he has come down to
+us as a foolish pretender, or at least as a dull and stupid scholar who
+knew little of the real value of the books he was always ready to quote,
+like the pedant of the comedies, or Shakespere's schoolmaster
+Holofernes. Further, he was one who, with his classical learning, had
+little belief in the resources of his mother tongue, and he was one of
+the earliest and most confident supporters of a plan then fashionable,
+for reforming English verse, by casting away its natural habits and
+rhythms, and imposing on it the laws of the classical metres. In this he
+was not singular. The professed treatises of this time on poetry, of
+which there were several, assume the same theory, as the mode of
+"reforming" and duly elevating English verse. It was eagerly accepted by
+Philip Sidney and his Areopagus of wits at court, who busied themselves
+in devising rules of their own--improvements as they thought on those of
+the university men--for English hexameters and sapphics, or as they
+called it, artificial versifying. They regarded the comparative value of
+the native English rhythms and the classical metres, much as our
+ancestors of Addison's day regarded the comparison between Gothic and
+Palladian architecture. One, even if it sometimes had a certain romantic
+interest, was rude and coarse; the other was the perfection of polite
+art and good taste. Certainly in what remains of Gabriel Harvey's
+writing, there is much that seems to us vain and ridiculous enough; and
+it has been naturally surmised that he must have been a dangerous friend
+and counsellor to Spenser. But probably we are hard upon him. His
+writings, after all, are not much more affected and absurd in their
+outward fashion than most of the literary composition of the time; his
+verses are no worse than those of most of his neighbours; he was not
+above, but he was not below, the false taste and clumsiness of his age;
+and the rage for "artificial versifying" was for the moment in the air.
+And it must be said, that though his enthusiasm for English hexameters
+is of a piece with the puritan use of scripture texts in divinity and
+morals, yet there is no want of hard-headed shrewdness in his remarks;
+indeed, in his rules for the adaptation of English words and accents to
+classical metres, he shows clearness and good sense in apprehending the
+conditions of the problem, while Sidney and Spenser still appear
+confused and uncertain. But in spite of his pedantry, and though he had
+not, as we shall see, the eye to discern at first the genius of the
+_Faery Queen_, he has to us the interest of having been Spenser's first,
+and as far as we can see, to the last, dearest friend. By both of his
+younger fellow-students at Cambridge, he was looked up to with the
+deepest reverence, and the most confiding affection. Their language is
+extravagant, but there is no reason to think that it was not genuine. E.
+Kirke, the editor of Spenser's first venture, the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+commends the "new poet" to his patronage, and to the protection of his
+"mighty rhetoric," and exhorts Harvey himself to seize the poetical
+"garland which to him alone is due." Spenser speaks in the same terms;
+"_veruntamen te sequor solum; nunquam vero assequar_." Portions of the
+early correspondence between Harvey and Spenser have been preserved to
+us, possibly by Gabriel Harvey's self-satisfaction in regard to his own
+compositions. But with the pedagogue's jocoseness, and a playfulness
+which is like that of an elephant, it shows on both sides easy
+frankness, sincerity, and warmth, and not a little of the early
+character of the younger man. In Spenser's earliest poetry, his
+pastorals, Harvey appears among the imaginary rustics, as the poet's
+"special and most familiar friend," under the name of Hobbinol,--
+
+     "Good Hobbinol, that was so true."
+
+To him Spenser addresses his confidences, under the name of Colin Clout,
+a name borrowed from Skelton, a satirical poet of Henry VIII.'s time,
+which Spenser kept throughout his poetical career. Harvey reappears in
+one of Spenser's latest writings, a return to the early pastoral, _Colin
+Clout's come home again_, a picture drawn in distant Ireland, of the
+brilliant but disappointing court of Elizabeth. And from Ireland in
+1586, was addressed to Harvey by "his devoted friend during life," the
+following fine sonnet, which, whatever may have been the merit of
+Harvey's criticisms and his literary quarrels with Greene and Nash,
+shows at least Spenser's unabated honour for him.
+
+     TO THE RIGHT WORSHIPFUL, MY SINGULAR GOOD FRIEND, M.
+     GABRIEL HARVEY, DOCTOR OF THE LAWS.
+
+     HARVEY, the happy above happiest men
+     I read; that, sitting like a looker on
+     Of this world's stage, dost note with critic pen
+     The sharp dislikes of each condition;
+     And, as one careless of suspicion,
+     Ne fawnest for the favour of the great;
+     Ne fearest foolish reprehension
+     Of faulty men, which danger to thee threat;
+     But freely dost, of what thee list, entreat,
+     Like a great lord of peerless liberty;
+     Lifting the good up to high honour's seat,
+     And the evil damning over more to die;
+     For life and death is in thy doomful writing;
+     So thy renown lives ever by enditing.
+
+     Dublin, this xviii. of July, 1586. Your devoted friend, during life,
+                                                  EDMUND SPENSER.
+
+Between Cambridge and Spenser's appearance in London, there is a short
+but obscure interval. What is certain is, that he spent part of it in
+the North of England; that he was busy with various poetical works, one
+of which was soon to make him known as a new star in the poetical
+heaven; and lastly, that in the effect on him of a deep but unrequited
+passion, he then received what seems to have been a strong and
+determining influence on his character and life. It seems likely that
+his sojourn in the north, which perhaps first introduced the London-bred
+scholar, the "Southern Shepherd's Boy," to the novel and rougher country
+life of distant Lancashire, also gave form and local character to his
+first considerable work. But we do not know for certain where his abode
+was in the north; of his literary activity, which must have been
+considerable, we only partially know the fruit; and of the lady whom he
+made so famous, that her name became a consecrated word in the poetry of
+the time, of Rosalind, the "Widow's Daughter of the Glen," whose refusal
+of his suit, and preference for another, he lamented so bitterly, yet
+would allow no one else to blame, we know absolutely nothing. She would
+not be his wife; but apparently, he never ceased to love her through all
+the chances and temptations, and possibly errors of his life, even
+apparently in the midst of his passionate admiration of the lady whom,
+long afterwards, he did marry. To her kindred and condition, various
+clues have been suggested, only to provoke and disappoint us. Whatever
+her condition, she was able to measure Spenser's powers: Gabriel Harvey
+has preserved one of her compliments--"Gentle Mistress Rosalind once
+reported him to have all the intelligences at commandment; and at
+another, christened him her _Signior Pegaso_." But the unknown Rosalind
+had given an impulse to the young poet's powers, and a colour to his
+thoughts, and had enrolled Spenser in that band and order of
+poets,--with one exception, not the greatest order,--to whom the
+wonderful passion of love, in its heights and its depths, is the element
+on which their imagination works, and out of which it moulds its most
+beautiful and characteristic creations.
+
+But in October, 1579, he emerges from obscurity. If we may trust the
+correspondence between Gabriel Harvey and Spenser, which was published
+at the time, Spenser was then in London.[22:1] It was the time of the
+crisis of the Alencon courtship, while the Queen was playing fast and
+loose with her Valois lover, whom she playfully called her frog; when
+all about her, Burghley, Leicester, Sidney, and Walsingham, were
+dismayed, both at the plan itself, and at her vacillations; and just
+when the Puritan pamphleteer, who had given expression to the popular
+disgust at a French marriage, especially at a connexion with the family
+which had on its hands the blood of St. Bartholomew, was sentenced to
+lose his right hand as a seditious libeller. Spenser had become
+acquainted with Philip Sidney, and Sidney's literary and courtly
+friends. He had been received into the household of Sidney's uncle, Lord
+Leicester, and dates one of his letters from Leicester House. Among his
+employments he had written, "_Stemmata Dudleiana_." He is doubting
+whether or not to publish, "to utter," some of his poetical
+compositions: he is doubting, and asks Harvey's advice, whether or not
+to dedicate them to His Excellent Lordship, "lest by our much cloying
+their noble ears he should gather contempt of myself, or else seem
+rather for gain and commodity to do it, and some sweetness that I have
+already tasted." Yet, he thinks, that when occasion is so fairly offered
+of estimation and preferment, it may be well to use it: "while the iron
+is hot, it is good striking; and minds of nobles vary, as their
+estates." And he was on the eve of starting across the sea to be
+employed in Leicester's service, on some permanent mission in France,
+perhaps in connexion with the Alencon intrigues. He was thus launched
+into what was looked upon as the road of preferment; in his case, as it
+turned out, a very subordinate form of public employment, which was to
+continue almost for his lifetime. Sidney had recognized his unusual
+power, if not yet his genius. He brought him forward; perhaps he
+accepted him as a friend. Tradition makes him Sidney's companion at
+Penshurst; in his early poems, Kent is the county with which he seems
+most familiar. But Sidney certainly made him known to the queen; he
+probably recommended him as a promising servant to Leicester: and he
+impressed his own noble and beautiful character deeply on Spenser's
+mind. Spenser saw and learned in him what was then the highest type of
+the finished gentleman. He led Spenser astray. Sidney was not without
+his full share of that affectation, which was then thought refinement.
+Like Gabriel Harvey, he induced Spenser to waste his time on the
+artificial versifying which was in vogue. But such faults and mistakes
+of fashion, and in one shape or another they are inevitable in all ages,
+were as nothing, compared to the influence on a highly receptive nature,
+of a character so elevated and pure, so genial, so brave and true. It
+was not in vain that Spenser was thus brought so near to his
+"Astrophel."
+
+These letters tell us all that we know of Spenser's life at this time.
+During these anxious eighteen months, and connected with persons like
+Sidney and Leicester, Spenser only writes to Harvey on literary
+subjects. He is discreet, and will not indulge Harvey's "desire to hear
+of my late being with her Majesty." According to a literary fashion of
+the time, he writes and is addressed as _M. Immerito_, and the great
+business which occupies him and fills the letters is the scheme devised
+in Sidney's _Areopagus_ for the "general surceasing and silence of bald
+Rymers, and also of the very best of them too; and for prescribing
+certain laws and rules of quantities of English syllables for English
+verse." Spenser "is more in love with his English versifying than with
+ryming,"--"which," he says to Harvey, "I should have done long since, if
+I would then have followed your counsel." Harvey, of course, is
+delighted; he thanks the good angel which puts it into the heads of
+Sidney and Edward Dyer, "the two very diamonds of her Majesty's court,"
+"our very Castor and Pollux," to "help forward our new famous enterprise
+for the exchanging of barbarous rymes for artificial verses;" and the
+whole subject is discussed at great length between the two friends; "Mr.
+Drant's" rules are compared with those of "Mr. Sidney," revised by "Mr.
+Immerito;" and examples, highly illustrative of the character of the
+"famous enterprise" are copiously given. In one of Harvey's letters we
+have a curious account of changes of fashion in studies and ideas at
+Cambridge. They seem to have changed since Spenser's time.
+
+     I beseech you all this while, what news at _Cambridge_?
+     _Tully_ and _Demosthenes_ nothing so much studied as they were
+     wont: _Livy_ and _Sallust_ perhaps more, rather than less:
+     _Lucian_ never so much: _Aristotle_ much named but little
+     read: _Xenophon_ and _Plato_ reckoned amongst discoursers, and
+     conceited superficial fellows; much verbal and sophistical
+     jangling; little subtle and effectual disputing. _Machiavel_ a
+     great man: _Castilio_, of no small repute: _Petrarch_ and
+     _Boccace_ in every man's mouth: _Galateo_ and _Guazzo_ never
+     so happy: but some acquainted with _Unico Aretino_: the
+     _French_ and _Italian_ highly regarded: the _Latin_ and
+     _Greek_ but lightly. The _Queen Mother_ at the beginning or
+     end of every conference: all inquisitive after news: new
+     _books_, new fashions, new laws, new officers, and some after
+     new elements, some after new heavens and hells too. _Turkish_
+     affairs familiarly known: castles built in the air: much ado,
+     and little help: in no age so little so much made of; every
+     one highly in his own favour. Something made of nothing, in
+     spight of Nature: numbers made of cyphers, in spight of Art.
+     Oxen and asses, notwithstanding the absurdity it seemed to
+     _Plautus_, drawing in the same yoke: the Gospel taught, not
+     learnt; Charity cold; nothing good, but by imputation; the
+     Ceremonial Law in word abrogated, the Judicial in effect
+     disannull'd, the Moral abandon'd; _the Light, the Light_ in
+     every man's lips, but mark their eyes, and you will say they
+     are rather like owls than eagles. As of old books, so of
+     ancient virtue, honesty, fidelity, equity, new abridgments;
+     every day spawns new opinions: heresy in divinity, in
+     philosophy, in humanity, in manners, grounded upon hearsay;
+     doctors contemn'd; the _devil_ not so hated as the _pope_;
+     many invectives, but no amendment. No more ado about caps and
+     surplices; Mr. _Cartwright_ quite forgotten.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     _David_, _Ulysses_, and _Solon_, feign'd themselves fools and
+     madmen; our fools and madmen feign themselves _Davids_,
+     _Ulysses's_, and _Solons_. It is pity fair weather should do
+     any hurt; but I know what peace and quietness hath done with
+     some melancholy pickstraws.
+
+The letters preserve a good many touches of character which are
+interesting. This, for instance, which shows Spenser's feeling about
+Sidney. "New books," writes Spenser, "I hear of none, but only of one,
+that writing a certain book called _The School of Abuse_, [Stephen
+Gosson's _Invective against poets, pipers, players, &c._] and dedicating
+to M. Sidney, was for his labour scorned: _if at least it be in the
+goodness of that nature to scorn_." As regards Spenser himself, it is
+clear from the letters that Harvey was not without uneasiness lest his
+friend, from his gay and pleasure-loving nature, and the temptations
+round him, should be carried away into the vices of an age, which,
+though very brilliant and high-tempered, was also a very dissolute one.
+He couches his counsels mainly in Latin; but they point to real danger;
+and he adds in English,--"Credit me, I will never lin [= cease] baiting
+at you, till I have rid you quite of this yonkerly and womanly humour."
+But in the second pair of letters of April, 1580, a lady appears.
+Whether Spenser was her husband or her lover, we know not; but she is
+his "sweetheart." The two friends write of her in Latin. Spenser sends
+in Latin the saucy messages of his sweetheart, "meum corculum," to
+Harvey; Harvey, with academic gallantry, sends her in Latin as many
+thanks for her charming letter as she has hairs, "half golden, half
+silver, half jewelled, in her little head;"--she is a second little
+Rosalind--"altera Rosalindula," whom he salutes as "Domina Immerito, mea
+bellissima Colina Clouta." But whether wife or mistress, we hear of her
+no more. Further, the letters contain notices of various early works of
+Spenser. The "new" _Shepherd's Calendar_, of which more will be said,
+had just been published. And in this correspondence of April, 1580, we
+have the first mention of the _Faery Queen_. The compositions here
+mentioned have been either lost, or worked into his later poetry; his
+_Dreams_, _Epithalamion Thamesis_, apparently in the "reformed verse,"
+his _Dying Pelican_, his _Slumber_, his _Stemmata Dudleiana_, his
+_Comedies_. They show at least the activity and eagerness of the writer
+in his absorbing pursuit. But he was still in bondage to the belief that
+English poetry ought to try to put on a classical dress. It is strange
+that the man who had written some of the poetry in the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ should have found either satisfaction or promise in the
+following attempt at Trimeter Iambics.
+
+     And nowe requite I you with the like, not with the verye
+     beste, but with the verye shortest, namely, with a few
+     Iambickes: I dare warrant they be precisely perfect for the
+     feete (as you can easily judge), and varie not one inch from
+     the Rule. I will imparte yours to Maister _Sidney_ and Maister
+     _Dyer_ at my nexte going to the Courte. I praye you, keepe
+     mine close to your selfe, or your verie entire friends,
+     Maister _Preston_, Maister _Still_, and the reste.
+
+                        _Iambicum Trimetrum._
+
+          Unhappie Verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,
+            Make thy selfe fluttring wings of thy fast flying
+            Thought, and fly forth unto my Love wheresoever she be:
+
+          Whether lying reastlesse in heavy bedde, or else
+            Sitting so cheerlesse at the cheerfull boorde, or else
+            Playing alone carelesse on hir heavenlie Virginals.
+
+          If in Bed, tell hir, that my eyes can take no reste:
+            If at Boorde, tell hir that my mouth can eate no meate:
+            If at hir Virginals, tell hir, I can heare no mirth.
+
+          Asked why? say: Waking Love suffereth no sleepe:
+            Say, that raging Love dothe appall the weake stomacke:
+            Say, that lamenting Love marreth the Musicall.
+
+          Tell hir, that hir pleasures were wonte to lull me asleepe:
+            Tell hir, that hir beautie was wonte to feede mine eyes:
+            Tell hir, that hir sweete Tongue was wonte to make me mirth.
+
+          Nowe doe I nightly waste, wanting my kindely reste:
+            Nowe doe I dayly starve, wanting my lively foode:
+            Nowe doe I alwayes dye, wanting thy timely mirth.
+
+          And if I waste, who will bewaile my heavy chaunce?
+            And if I starve, who will record my cursed end?
+            And if I dye, who will saye: _this was Immerito_?
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4:1]
+
+       ----Since the winged god his planet clear
+     Began in me to move, one year is spent:
+     The which doth longer unto me appear
+     Than _all those forty_ which my life outwent.
+
+                  _Sonnet_ LX., probably written in 1593 or 1594.
+
+[5:2] Leicester House, then Essex House, in the Strand.
+
+[5:3] Earl of Essex.
+
+[5:4] At Cadiz, June 21, 1596.
+
+[6:5] _Sonnet_ LXXIV.
+
+[6:6] _Colin Clout's come Home again_, l. 536. Craik, _Spenser_, i. 9.
+10.
+
+[7:7] See _The Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell_, 1568-1580: from
+the MSS. at Towneley Hall. Edited by Rev. A. B. Grosart, 1877.
+
+[9:8] H. B. Wilson, _Hist. of Merchant Taylors' School_, p. 23.
+
+[13:9] Comp. _Sheph. Cal._ April l. 36. June l. 8. F. Q. 6. 10. 7.
+
+[22:1] Published in June, 1580. Reprinted incompletely in Haslewood,
+_Ancient Critical Essays_ (1815), ii. 255. Extracts given in editions of
+Spenser by Hughes, Todd, and Morris. The letters are of April, 1579, and
+October, 1580.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE NEW POET--THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR.
+
+[1579.]
+
+
+It is clear that when Spenser appeared in London, he had found out his
+powers and vocation as a poet. He came from Cambridge, fully conscious
+of the powerful attraction of the imaginative faculties, conscious of an
+extraordinary command over the resources of language, and with a
+singular gift of sensitiveness to the grace and majesty and
+suggestiveness of sound and rhythm, such as makes a musician. And
+whether he knew it or not, his mind was in reality made up, as to what
+his English poetry was to be. In spite of opinions and fashions round
+him, in spite of university pedantry and the affectations of the court,
+in spite of Harvey's classical enthusiasm, and Sidney's Areopagus, and
+in spite of half-fancying himself converted to their views, his own
+powers and impulses showed him the truth, and made him understand better
+than his theories what a poet could and ought to do with English speech
+in its free play and genuine melodies. When we first come upon him, we
+find that at the age of twenty-seven, he had not only realized an idea
+of English poetry far in advance of anything which his age had yet
+conceived or seen; but that, besides what he had executed or planned, he
+had already in his mind the outlines of the _Faery Queen_, and, in some
+form or other, though perhaps not yet as we have it, had written some
+portion of it.
+
+In attempting to revive for his own age Chaucer's suspended art, Spenser
+had the tendencies of the time with him. The age was looking out for
+some one to do for England what had been grandly done for Italy. The
+time in truth was full of poetry. The nation was just in that condition
+which is most favourable to an outburst of poetical life or art. It was
+highly excited; but it was also in a state of comparative peace and
+freedom from external disturbance. "An over-faint quietness," writes
+Sidney in 1581, lamenting that there were so few good poets, "should
+seem to strew the house for poets." After the first ten years of
+Elizabeth's reign, and the establishment of her authority, the country
+had begun to breathe freely, and fall into natural and regular ways.
+During the first half of the century, it had had before it the most
+astonishing changes which the world had seen for centuries. These
+changes seemed definitely to have run their course; with the convulsions
+which accompanied them, their uprootings and terrors, they were gone;
+and the world had become accustomed to their results. The nation still
+had before it great events, great issues, great perils, great and
+indefinite prospects of adventure and achievement. The old quarrels and
+animosities of Europe had altered in character: from being wars between
+princes, and disputes of personal ambition, they had attracted into them
+all that interests and divides mankind, from high to low. Their
+animating principle was a high and a sacred cause: they had become wars
+of liberty, and wars of religion. The world had settled down to the
+fixed antipathies and steady rivalries of centuries to come. But the
+mere shock of transition was over. Yet the remembrance of the great
+break-up was still fresh. For fifty years the English people had had
+before its eyes the great vicissitudes which make tragedy. They had seen
+the most unforeseen and most unexpected revolutions in what had for ages
+been held certain and immovable; the overthrow of the strongest
+institutions, and most venerable authorities; the violent shifting of
+feelings from faith to passionate rejection, from reverence to scorn and
+a hate which could not be satisfied. They had seen the strangest turns
+of fortune, the most wonderful elevations to power, the most terrible
+visitations of disgrace. They had seen the mightiest ruined, the
+brightest and most admired brought down to shame and death, men struck
+down with all the forms of law, whom the age honoured as its noblest
+ornaments. They had seen the flames of martyr or heretic, heads which
+had worn a crown laid one after another on the block, controversies, not
+merely between rivals for power, but between the deepest principles and
+the most rooted creeds, settled on the scaffold. Such a time of
+surprise,--of hope and anxiety, of horror and anguish to-day, of relief
+and exultation to-morrow,--had hardly been to England as the first half
+of the sixteenth century. All that could stir men's souls, all that
+could inflame their hearts, or that could wring them, had happened.
+
+And yet, compared with previous centuries, and with what was going on
+abroad, the time now was a time of peace, and men lived securely. Wealth
+was increasing. The Wars of the Roses had left the crown powerful to
+enforce order, and protect industry and trade. The nation was beginning
+to grow rich. When the day's work was done, men's leisure was not
+disturbed by the events of neighbouring war. They had time to open
+their imaginations to the great spectacle which had been unrolled before
+them, to reflect upon it, to put into shape their thoughts about it. The
+intellectual movement of the time had reached England, and its strong
+impulse to mental efforts in new and untried directions was acting
+powerfully upon Englishmen. But though there was order and present peace
+at home, there was much to keep men's minds on the stretch. There was
+quite enough danger and uncertainty to wind up their feelings to a high
+pitch. But danger was not so pressing as to prevent them from giving
+full place to the impressions of the strange and eventful scene round
+them, with its grandeur, its sadness, its promises. In such a state of
+things there is everything to tempt poetry. There are its materials and
+its stimulus, and there is the leisure to use its materials.
+
+But the poet had not yet been found; and everything connected with
+poetry was in the disorder of ignorance and uncertainty. Between the
+counsels of a pedantic scholarship, and the rude and hesitating, but
+true instincts of the natural English ear, every one was at sea. Yet it
+seemed as if every one was trying his hand at verse. Popular writing
+took that shape. The curious and unique record of literature preserved
+in the registers of the Stationers' Company, shows that the greater
+proportion of what was published, or at least entered for publication,
+was in the shape of ballads. The ballad vied with the sermon in doing
+what the modern newspaper does, in satisfying the public craving for
+information, amusement, or guidance. It related the last great novelty,
+the last great battle or crime, a storm or monstrous birth. It told some
+pathetic or burlesque story, or it moralized on the humours or follies
+of classes and professions, of young and old, of men and of women. It
+sang the lover's hopes or sorrows, or the adventures of some hero of
+history or romance. It might be a fable, a satire, a libel, a squib, a
+sacred song or paraphrase, a homily. But about all that it treated it
+sought to throw more or less the colour of imagination. It appealed to
+the reader's feelings, or sympathy, or passion. It attempted to raise
+its subject above the level of mere matter of fact. It sought for choice
+and expressive words; it called in the help of measure and rhythm. It
+aimed at a rude form of art. Presently the critical faculty came into
+play. Scholars, acquainted with classical models and classical rules,
+began to exercise their judgment on their own poetry, to construct
+theories, to review the performances before them, to suggest plans for
+the improvement of the poetic art. Their essays are curious, as the
+beginnings of that great critical literature, which in England, in spite
+of much infelicity, has only been second to the poetry which it judged.
+But in themselves they are crude, meagre, and helpless; interesting
+mainly, as showing how much craving there was for poetry, and how little
+good poetry to satisfy it, and what inconceivable doggrel could be
+recommended by reasonable men, as fit to be admired and imitated. There
+is fire and eloquence in Philip Sidney's _Apologie for Poetrie_ (1581);
+but his ideas about poetry were floating, loose, and ill defined, and he
+had not much to point to as of first-rate excellence in recent writers.
+Webbe's _Discourse of English Poetrie_ (1586), and the more elaborate
+work ascribed to George Puttenham (1589), works of tame and artificial
+learning without Sidney's fire, reveal equally the poverty, as a whole,
+of what had been as yet produced in England as poetry, in spite of the
+widespread passion for poetry. The specimens which they quote and praise
+are mostly grotesque to the last degree. Webbe improves some gracefully
+flowing lines of Spenser's into the most portentous Sapphics; and
+Puttenham squeezes compositions into the shapes of triangles, eggs, and
+pilasters. Gabriel Harvey is accused by his tormentor, Nash, of doing
+the same, "of having writ verse in all kinds, as in form of a pair of
+gloves, a dozen of points, a pair of spectacles, a two-hand sword, a
+poynado, a colossus, a pyramid, a painter's easel, a market cross, a
+trumpet, an anchor, a pair of pot-hooks." Puttenham's Art of Poetry,
+with its books, one on Proportion, the other on Ornament, might be
+compared to an Art of War, of which one book treated of barrack drill,
+and the other of busbies, sabretasches, and different forms of
+epaulettes and feathers. These writers do not want good sense or the
+power to make a good remark. But the stuff and material for good
+criticism, the strong and deep poetry, which makes such criticisms as
+theirs seem so absurd, had not yet appeared.
+
+A change was at hand; and the suddenness of it is one of the most
+astonishing things in literary history. The ten years from 1580 to 1590
+present a set of critical essays, giving a picture of English poetry of
+which, though there are gleams of a better hope, and praise is specially
+bestowed on a "new poet," the general character is feebleness, fantastic
+absurdity, affectation and bad taste. Force, and passion, and simple
+truth, and powerful thoughts of the world and man, are rare; and
+poetical reformers appear maundering about miserable attempts at English
+hexameters and sapphics. What was to be looked for from all that? Who
+could suppose what was preparing under it all? But the dawn was come.
+The next ten years, from 1590 to 1600, not only saw the _Faery Queen_,
+but they were the years of the birth of the English Drama. Compare the
+idea which we get of English poetry from Philip Sidney's Defense in
+1581, and Puttenham's treatise in 1589, I do not say with Shakespere,
+but with Lamb's selections from the Dramatic Poets, many of them unknown
+names to the majority of modern readers; and we see at once what a bound
+English poetry has made; we see that a new spring time of power and
+purpose in poetical thought has opened; new and original forms have
+sprung to life of poetical grandeur, seriousness, and magnificence. From
+the poor and rude play-houses, with their troops of actors most of them
+profligate and disreputable, their coarse excitements, their buffoonery,
+license, and taste for the monstrous and horrible,--denounced not
+without reason as corruptors of public morals, preached against at
+Paul's Cross, expelled the city by the Corporation, classed by the law
+with rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and patronized by the great
+and unscrupulous nobles in defiance of it--there burst forth suddenly a
+new poetry, which with its reality, depth, sweetness and nobleness took
+the world captive. The poetical ideas and aspirations of the Englishmen
+of the time had found at last adequate interpreters, and their own
+national and unrivalled expression.
+
+And in this great movement Spenser was the harbinger and announcing
+sign. But he was only the harbinger. What he did was to reveal to
+English ears as it never had been revealed before, at least, since the
+days of Chaucer, the sweet music, the refined grace, the inexhaustible
+versatility of the English tongue. But his own efforts were in a
+different direction from that profound and insatiable seeking after the
+real, in thought and character, in representation and expression, which
+made Shakespere so great, and his brethren great in proportion as they
+approached him. Spenser's genius continued to the end under the
+influences which were so powerful when it first unfolded itself. To the
+last it allied itself, in form, at least, with the artificial. To the
+last it moved in a world which was not real, which never had existed,
+which, any how, was only a world of memory and sentiment. He never threw
+himself frankly on human life as it is; he always viewed it through a
+veil of mist which greatly altered its true colours, and often distorted
+its proportions. And thus while more than any one he prepared the
+instruments and the path for the great triumph, he himself missed the
+true field for the highest exercise of poetic power; he missed the
+highest honours of that in which he led the way.
+
+Yet, curiously enough, it seems as if, early in his career, he was
+affected by the strong stream which drew Shakespere. Among the
+compositions of his first period, besides _The Shepherd's Calendar_, are
+_Nine Comedies_,--clearly real plays, which his friend Gabriel Harvey
+praised with enthusiasm. As early as 1579 Spenser had laid before
+Gabriel Harvey for his judgement and advice, a portion of the _Fairy
+Queen_ in some shape or another, and these nine comedies. He was
+standing at the parting of the ways. The allegory, with all its tempting
+associations and machinery, with its ingenuities and pictures, and
+boundless license to vagueness and to fancy, was on one side; and on the
+other, the drama, with its _prima facie_ and superficially prosaic
+aspects, and its kinship to what was customary and commonplace and
+unromantic in human life. Of the nine comedies, composed on the model of
+those of Ariosto and Machiavelli and other Italians, every trace has
+perished. But this was Gabriel Harvey's opinion of the respective value
+of the two specimens of work submitted to him, and this was his counsel
+to their author. In April, 1580, he thus writes to Spenser.
+
+     In good faith I had once again nigh forgotten your _Faerie
+     Queene_; howbeit, by good chance, I have now sent her home at
+     the last neither in better or worse case than I found her. And
+     must you of necessity have my judgement of her indeed? To be
+     plain, I am void of all judgement, if your _Nine Comedies_,
+     whereunto in imitation of Herodotus, you give the names of the
+     Nine Muses (and in one man's fancy not unworthily), come not
+     nearer Ariosto's comedies, either for the fineness of
+     plausible elocution, or the rareness of poetical invention,
+     than that _Elvish Queen_ doth to his _Orlando Furioso_, which
+     notwithstanding you will needs seem to emulate, and hope to
+     overgo, as you flatly professed yourself in one of your last
+     letters.
+
+     Besides that you know, it hath been the usual practice of the
+     most exquisite and odd wits in all nations, and specially in
+     Italy rather to show, and advance themselves that way than any
+     other: as, namely, those three notorious discoursing heads,
+     Bibiena, Machiavel, and Aretino did (to let Bembo and Ariosto
+     pass) with the great admiration and wonderment of the whole
+     country: being indeed reputed matchable in all points, both
+     for conceit of wit and eloquent deciphering of matters, either
+     with Aristophanes and Menander in Greek, or with Plautus and
+     Terence in Latin, or with any other in any other tongue. But I
+     will not stand greatly with you in your own matters. If so be
+     the _Faery Queene_ be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses,
+     and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo: mark what
+     I say, and yet I will not say that I thought, but there is an
+     end for this once, and fare you well, till God or some good
+     angel put you in a better mind.
+
+It is plain on which side Spenser's own judgement inclined. He had
+probably written the comedies, as he had written English hexameters, out
+of deference to others, or to try his hand. But the current of his own
+secret thoughts, those thoughts, with their ideals and aims, which tell
+a man what he is made for, and where his power lies, set another way.
+The _Fairy Queen was_ 'fairer in his eye than the Nine Muses, and
+Hobgoblin did run away with the garland from Apollo.' What Gabriel
+Harvey prayed for as the 'better mind' did not come. And we cannot
+repine at a decision which gave us, in the shape which it took at last,
+the allegory of the _Fairy Queen_.
+
+But the _Fairy Queen_, though already planned and perhaps begun, belongs
+to the last ten years of the century, to the season of fulfilment not of
+promise, to the blossoming, not to the opening bud. The new hopes for
+poetry which Spenser brought were given in a work, which the _Fairy
+Queen_ has eclipsed and almost obscured, as the sun puts out the morning
+star. Yet that which marked a turning-point in the history of our
+poetry, was the book which came out, timidly and anonymously, in the end
+of 1579, or the beginning of 1580, under the borrowed title of the
+_Shepherd's Calendar_, a name familiar in those days as that of an early
+medley of astrology and homely receipts from time to time reprinted,
+which was the Moore's or Zadkiel's almanac of the time. It was not
+published ostensibly by Spenser himself, though it is inscribed to
+Philip Sidney in a copy of verses signed with Spenser's masking name of
+_Immerito_. The avowed responsibility for it might have been
+inconvenient for a young man pushing his fortune among the cross
+currents of Elizabeth's court. But it was given to the world by a friend
+of the author's, signing himself E. K., now identified with Spenser's
+fellow-student at Pembroke, Edward Kirke, who dedicates it in a long,
+critical epistle of some interest to the author's friend, Gabriel
+Harvey, and after the fashion of some of the Italian books of poetry,
+accompanies it with a gloss, explaining words, and to a certain extent,
+allusions. Two things are remarkable in Kirke's epistle. One is the
+confidence with which he announces the yet unrecognized excellence of
+"this one new poet," whom he is not afraid to put side by side with
+"that good old poet," Chaucer, the "loadstar of our language." The other
+point is the absolute reliance which he places on the powers of the
+English language, handled by one who has discerned its genius, and is
+not afraid to use its wealth. "In my opinion, it is one praise of many,
+that are due to this poet, that he hath laboured to restore, as to their
+rightful heritage, such good and natural English words, as have been
+long time out of use, or almost clean disherited, which is the only
+cause, that our mother tongue, which truly of itself is both full enough
+for prose, and stately enough for verse, hath long time been counted
+most bare and barren of both." The friends, Kirke and Harvey, were not
+wrong in their estimate of the importance of Spenser's work. The "new
+poet," as he came to be customarily called, had really made one of those
+distinct steps in his art, which answer to discoveries and inventions in
+other spheres of human interest--steps which make all behind them seem
+obsolete and mistaken. There was much in the new poetry which was
+immature and imperfect, not a little that was fantastic and affected.
+But it was the first adequate effort of reviving English poetry.
+
+The _Shepherd's Calendar_ consists of twelve compositions, with no other
+internal connexion than that they are assigned respectively to the
+twelve months of the year. They are all different in subject, metre,
+character, and excellence. They are called _AEglogues_, according to the
+whimsical derivation adopted from the Italians of the word which the
+classical writers called Eclogues: "_AEglogai_, as it were =aigon= or
+=aigonomon logoi=, that is, Goatherd's Tales." The book is in its form
+an imitation of that highly artificial kind of poetry which the later
+Italians of the Renaissance had copied from Virgil, as Virgil had copied
+it from the Sicilian and Alexandrian Greeks, and to which had been given
+the name of Bucolic or Pastoral. Petrarch, in imitation of Virgil, had
+written Latin Bucolics, as he had written a Latin Epic, his _Africa_. He
+was followed in the next century by Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516), the
+"old Mantuan," of Holofernes in _Love's Labour's Lost_, whose Latin
+"Eglogues" became a favourite school-book in England, and who was
+imitated by a writer who passed for a poet in the time of Henry VIII.,
+Alexander Barclay. In the hands of the Sicilians, pastoral poetry may
+have been an attempt at idealizing country life almost as genuine as
+some of Wordsworth's poems; but it soon ceased to be that, and in
+Alexandrian hands it took its place among the recognized departments of
+classic and literary copying, in which Virgil found and used it. But a
+further step had been made since Virgil had adopted it as an instrument
+of his genius. In the hands of Mantuan and Barclay it was a vehicle for
+general moralizing, and in particular for severe satire on women and the
+clergy. And Virgil, though he may himself speak under the the names of
+Tityrus and Menalcas, and lament Julius Caesar as Daphnis, did not
+conceive of the Roman world as peopled by flocks and sheep-cotes, or its
+emperors and chiefs, its poets, senators, and ladies, as shepherds and
+shepherdesses, of higher or lower degree. But in Spenser's time, partly
+through undue deference to what was supposed to be Italian taste, partly
+owing to the tardiness of national culture, and because the poetic
+impulses had not yet gained power to force their way through the
+embarrassment and awkwardness which accompany reviving art,--the world
+was turned for the purposes of the poetry of civil life, into a pastoral
+scene. Poetical invention was held to consist in imagining an
+environment, a set of outward circumstances, as unlike as possible to
+the familiar realities of actual life and employment, in which the
+primary affections and passions had their play. A fantastic basis,
+varying according to the conventions of the fashion, was held essential
+for the representation of the ideal. Masquerade and hyperbole were the
+stage and scenery on which the poet's sweetness, or tenderness, or
+strength was to be put forth. The masquerade, when his subject belonged
+to peace, was one of shepherds: when it was one of war and adventure, it
+was a masquerade of knight errantry. But a masquerade was necessary, if
+he was to raise his composition above the vulgarities and trivialities
+of the street, the fire-side, the camp, or even the court; if he was to
+give it the dignity, the ornament, the unexpected results, the
+brightness, and colour, which belong to poetry. The fashion had the
+sanction of the brilliant author of the _Arcadia_, the "Courtier,
+Soldier, Scholar," who was the "mould of form," and whose judgment was
+law to all men of letters in the middle years of Elizabeth, the
+all-accomplished Philip Sidney. Spenser submitted to this fashion from
+first to last. When first he ventured on a considerable poetical
+enterprise, he spoke his thoughts, not in his own name, nor as his
+contemporaries ten years later did, through the mouth of characters in a
+tragic or comic drama, but through imaginary rustics, to whom every one
+else in the world was a rustic, and lived among the sheep-folds, with a
+background of downs or vales or fields, and the open sky above. His
+shepherds and goatherds bear the homely names of native English clowns,
+Diggon Davie, Willye, and Piers; Colin Clout, adopted from Skelton,
+stands for Spenser himself; Hobbinol, for Gabriel Harvey; Cuddie,
+perhaps for Edward Kirke; names revived by Ambrose Phillips, and laughed
+at by Pope, when pastorals again came into vogue with the wits of Queen
+Anne.[42:1] With them are mingled classical ones like Menalcas, French
+ones from Marot, anagrams like Algrind for Grindal, significant ones
+like Palinode, plain ones like Lettice, and romantic ones like Rosalind;
+and no incongruity seems to be found in matching a beautiful shepherdess
+named Dido with a Great Shepherd called Lobbin, or when the verse
+requires it, Lobb. And not merely the speakers in the dialogue are
+shepherds; every one is in their view a shepherd. Chaucer is the "god of
+shepherds," and Orpheus is a--
+
+              "Shepherd that did fetch his dame
+     From Plutoe's baleful bower withouten leave."
+
+The "fair Elisa," is the Queen of shepherds all; her great father is
+Pan, the shepherds' god, and Anne Boleyn is Syrinx. It is not unnatural
+that when the clergy are spoken of, as they are in three of the poems,
+the figure should be kept up. But it is curious to find that the
+shepherd's god, the great Pan, who stands in one connexion for Henry
+VIII., should in another represent in sober earnest the Redeemer and
+Judge of the world.[42:2]
+
+The poems framed in this grotesque setting, are on many themes, and of
+various merit, and probably of different dates. Some are simply amatory
+effusions of an ordinary character, full of a lover's despair and
+complaint. Three or four are translations or imitations; translations
+from Marot, imitations from Theocritus, Bion, or Virgil. Two of them
+contain fables told with great force and humour. The story of the Oak
+and the Briar, related as his friendly commentator, Kirke, says, "so
+lively and so feelingly, as if the thing were set forth in some picture
+before our eyes," for the warning of "disdainful younkers," is a first
+fruit, and promise of Spenser's skill in vivid narrative. The fable of
+the Fox and the Kid, a curious illustration of the popular discontent at
+the negligence of the clergy, and the popular suspicions about the arts
+of Roman intriguers, is told with great spirit, and with mingled humour
+and pathos. There is of course a poem in honour of the great queen, who
+was the goddess of their idolatry to all the wits and all the learned of
+England, the "faire Eliza," and a compliment is paid to Leicester,
+
+                 The worthy whom she loveth best,--
+     That first the White Bear to the stake did bring.
+
+Two of them are avowedly burlesque imitations of rustic dialect and
+banter, carried on with much spirit. One composition is a funeral
+tribute to some unknown lady; another is a complaint of the neglect of
+poets by the great. In three of the AEglogues he comes on a more serious
+theme; they are vigorous satires on the loose living and greediness of
+clergy forgetful of their charge, with strong invectives against foreign
+corruption and against the wiles of the wolves and foxes of Rome, with
+frequent allusions to passing incidents in the guerilla war with the
+seminary priests, and with a warm eulogy on the faithfulness and wisdom
+of Archbishop Grindal; whose name is disguised as old Algrind, and with
+whom in his disgrace the poet is not afraid to confess deep sympathy.
+They are, in a poetical form, part of that manifold and varied system of
+Puritan aggression on the established ecclesiastical order of England,
+which went through the whole scale from the "Admonition to Parliament,"
+and the lectures of Cartwright and Travers, to the libels of Martin
+Mar-prelate: a system of attack which with all its injustice and
+violence, and with all its mischievous purposes, found but too much
+justification in the inefficiency and corruption of many both of the
+bishops and clergy, and in the rapacious and selfish policy of the
+government, forced to starve and cripple the public service, while great
+men and favourites built up their fortunes out of the prodigal
+indulgence of the Queen.
+
+The collection of poems is thus a very miscellaneous one, and cannot be
+said to be in its subjects inviting. The poet's system of composition,
+also, has the disadvantage of being to a great degree unreal, forced and
+unnatural. Departing from the precedent of Virgil and the Italians, but
+perhaps copying the artificial Doric of the Alexandrians, he professes
+to make his language and style suitable to the "ragged and rustical"
+rudeness of the shepherds whom he brings on the scene, by making it both
+archaic and provincial. He found in Chaucer a store of forms and words
+sufficiently well known to be with a little help intelligible, and
+sufficiently out of common use to give the character of antiquity to a
+poetry which employed them. And from his sojourn in the North he is said
+to have imported a certain number of local peculiarities which would
+seem unfamiliar and harsh in the South. His editor's apology for this
+use of "ancient solemn words," as both proper and as ornamental, is
+worth quoting; it is an early instance of what is supposed to be not yet
+common, a sense of pleasure in that wildness which we call picturesque.
+
+     And first for the words to speak: I grant they be something
+     hard, and of most men unused: yet English, and also used of
+     most excellent Authors and most famous Poets. In whom, when as
+     this our Poet hath been much travelled and throughly read, how
+     could it be, (as that worthy Orator said,) but that 'walking
+     in the sun, although for other cause he walked, yet needs he
+     mought be sun-burnt'; and having the sound of those ancient
+     poets still ringing in his ears, he mought needs, in singing,
+     hit out some of their tunes. But whether he useth them by such
+     casualty and custom, or of set purpose and choice, as thinking
+     them fittest for such rustical rudeness of shepherds, either
+     for that their rough sound would make his rymes more ragged
+     and rustical, or else because such old and obsolete words are
+     most used of country folks, sure I think, and I think not
+     amiss, that they bring great grace, and, as one would say,
+     authority, to the verse. . . . . Yet neither everywhere must
+     old words be stuffed in, nor the common Dialect and manner of
+     speaking so corrupted thereby, that, as in old buildings, it
+     seem disorderly and ruinous. But as in most exquisite pictures
+     they use to blaze and portrait not only the dainty lineaments
+     of beauty, but also round about it to shadow the rude thickets
+     and craggy cliffs, that by the baseness of such parts, more
+     excellency may accrue to the principal--for ofttimes, we find
+     ourselves I know not how, singularly delighted with the show
+     of such natural rudeness, and take great pleasure in that
+     disorderly order:--even so do these rough and harsh terms
+     enlumine, and make more clearly to appear, the brightness of
+     brave and glorious words. So oftentimes a discord in music
+     maketh a comely concordance.
+
+But when allowance is made for an eclectic and sometimes pedantic
+phraseology, and for mannerisms to which the fashion of the age tempted
+him, such as the extravagant use of alliteration, or, as they called it,
+"hunting the letter," the _Shepherd's Calendar_ is, for its time, of
+great interest.
+
+Spenser's force, and sustained poetical power, and singularly musical
+ear are conspicuous in this first essay of his genius. In the poets
+before him of this century, fragments and stanzas, and perhaps single
+pieces might be found, which might be compared with his work. Fugitive
+pieces, chiefly amatory, meet us of real sprightliness, or grace, or
+tenderness. The stanzas which Sackville, afterwards, Lord Buckhurst,
+contributed to the collection called the _Mirror of Magistrates_,[46:3]
+are marked with a pathetic majesty, a genuine sympathy for the
+precariousness of greatness, which seem a prelude to the Elizabethan
+drama. But these fragments were mostly felicitous efforts, which soon
+passed on into the ungainly, the uncouth, the obscure or the grotesque.
+But in the _Shepherd's Calendar_ we have for the first time in the
+century, the swing, the command, the varied resources of the real poet,
+who is not driven by failing language or thought into frigid or tumid
+absurdities. Spenser is master over himself and his instrument even when
+he uses it in a way which offends our taste. There are passages in the
+_Shepherd's Calendar_ of poetical eloquence, of refined vigour, and of
+musical and imaginative sweetness, such as the English language had
+never attained to, since the days of him, who was to the age of Spenser,
+what Shakespere and Milton are to ours, the pattern and fount of poetry,
+Chaucer. Dryden is not afraid to class Spenser with Theocritus and
+Virgil, and to write that the _Shepherd's Calendar_ is not to be matched
+in any language.[46:4] And this was at once recognized. The authorship
+of it, as has been said, was not formally acknowledged. Indeed, Mr.
+Collier remarks that seven years after its publication, and after it had
+gone through three or four separate editions, it was praised by a
+contemporary poet, George Whetstone, himself a friend of Spenser's, as
+the "reputed work of Sir Philip Sidney." But if it was officially a
+secret, it was an open secret, known to every one who cared to be well
+informed. It is possible that the free language used in it about
+ecclesiastical abuses was too much in sympathy with the growing
+fierceness and insolence of Puritan invective to be safely used by a
+poet who gave his name: and one of the reasons assigned for Burghley's
+dislike to Spenser is the praise bestowed in the _Shepherd's Calendar_
+on Archbishop Grindal, then in deep disgrace for resisting the
+suppression of the puritan prophesyings. But anonymous as it was, it had
+been placed under Sidney's protection; and it was at once warmly
+welcomed. It is not often that in those remote days we get evidence of
+the immediate effect of a book; but we have this evidence in Spenser's
+case. In this year, probably, after it was published, we find it spoken
+of by Philip Sidney, not without discriminating criticism, but as one of
+the few recent examples of poetry worthy to be named after Chaucer.
+
+     I account the _Mirror of Magistrates_ meetly furnished of
+     beautiful parts; and in the Earl of Surrey's _Lyrics_ many
+     things tasting of birth, and worthy of a noble mind. The
+     _Shepherd's Calendar_ hath much poetry in his Eglogues: indeed
+     worthy the reading if I be not deceived. That same framing of
+     his style in an old rustic language I dare not allow, sith
+     neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sanazar in
+     Italian, did affect it. Besides these do I not remember to
+     have seen but few (to speak boldly) printed that have poetical
+     sinews in them.
+
+Sidney's patronage of the writer and general approval of the work
+doubtless had something to do with making Spenser's name known: but he
+at once takes a place in contemporary judgment which no one else takes,
+till the next decade of the century. In 1586, Webbe published his
+_Discourse of English Poetrie_. In this, the author of the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ is spoken of by the name given him by its Editor, E. K----, as
+the "new poet," just as earlier in the century, the _Orlando Furioso_
+was styled the "nuova poesia;" and his work is copiously used to supply
+examples and illustrations of the critic's rules and observations.
+Webbe's review of existing poetry was the most comprehensive yet
+attempted: but the place which he gives to the new poet, whose name was
+in men's mouths, though like the author of _In Memoriam_, he had not
+placed it on his title-page, was one quite apart.
+
+     This place [to wear the Laurel] have I purposely reserved for
+     one, who, if not only, yet in my judgement principally,
+     deserveth the title of the rightest English poet that ever I
+     read: that is, the author of the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+     intituled to the worthy Gentleman Master Philip Sidney,
+     whether it was Master Sp. or what rare scholar in Pembroke
+     Hall soever, because himself and his friends, for what respect
+     I know not, would not reveal it, I force not greatly to set
+     down. Sorry I am that I cannot find none other with whom I
+     might couple him in this catalogue in his rare gift of poetry:
+     although one there is, though now long since seriously
+     occupied in graver studies, Master Gabriel Harvey, yet as he
+     was once his most special friend and fellow poet, so because
+     he hath taken such pains not only in his Latin poetry . . .
+     but also to reform our English verse . . . therefore will I
+     adventure to set them together as two of the rarest wits and
+     learnedest masters of poetry in England.
+
+He even ventured to compare him favourably with Virgil.
+
+     But now yet at the last hath England hatched up one poet of
+     this sort, in my conscience comparable with the best in any
+     respect: even Master Sp., author of the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+     whose travail in that piece of English poetry I think verily
+     is so commendable, as none of equal judgement can yield him
+     less praise for his excellent skill and skilful excellency
+     showed forth in the same than they would to either Theocritus
+     or Virgil, whom in mine opinion, if the coarseness of our
+     speech, (I mean the course of custom which he would not
+     infringe,) had been no more let unto him than their pure
+     native tongues were unto them, he would have, if it might be,
+     surpassed them.
+
+The courtly author of the _Arte of English Poesie_, 1589, commonly cited
+as G. Puttenham, classes him with Sidney. And from this time his name
+occurs in every enumeration of English poetical writers, till he
+appears, more than justifying this early appreciation of his genius, as
+Chaucer's not unworthy successor, in the _Faery Queen_. Afterwards, as
+other successful poetry was written, and the standards of taste were
+multiplied, this first enthusiastic reception cooled down. In James the
+First's time, Spenser's use of "old outworn words" is criticized as
+being no more "practical English" than Chaucer or Skelton: it is not
+"courtly" enough.[49:5] The success of the _Shepherd's Calendar_ had
+also, apparently, substantial results, which some of his friends thought
+of with envy. They believed that it secured him high patronage, and
+opened to him a way to fortune. Poor Gabriel Harvey, writing in the year
+in which the _Shepherd's Calendar_ came out, contrasts his own less
+favoured lot, and his ill-repaid poetical efforts, with Colin Clout's
+good luck.
+
+     But ever and ever, methinks, your great Catoes, _Ecquid erit
+     pretii_, and our little Catoes, _Res age quae prosunt_, make
+     such a buzzing and ringing in my head, that I have little joy
+     to animate and encourage either you or him to go forward,
+     unless ye might make account of some certain ordinary wages,
+     or at the least wise have your meat and drink for your day's
+     works. As for myself, howsoever I have toyed and trifled
+     heretofore, I am now taught, and I trust I shall shortly
+     learn, (no remedy, I must of mere necessity give you over in
+     the plain field) to employ my travail and time wholly or
+     chiefly on those studies and practices that carry, as they
+     say, meat in their mouth, having evermore their eye upon the
+     Title, _De pane lucrando_, and their hand upon their
+     halfpenny. For I pray now what saith Mr. Cuddie, alias you
+     know who, in the tenth AEglogue of the aforesaid famous new
+     Calendar.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+          The dapper ditties, that I wont devise
+            To feed youths' fancy and the flocking fry,
+          Delighten much: what I the best for thy?
+            They han the pleasure, I a sclender prize.
+          I beat the bush, the birds to them do fly.
+            What good thereof to Cuddie can arise?
+
+     But Master Colin Clout is not everybody, and albeit his old
+     companions, Master Cuddie and Master Hobinoll, be as little
+     beholding to their mistress poetry as ever you wist: yet he,
+     peradventure, by the means of her special favour, and some
+     personal privilege, may haply live by _Dying Pelicans_, and
+     purchase great lands and lordships with the money which his
+     _Calendar_ and _Dreams_ have, and will afford him.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[42:1] In the _Guardian_, No. 40. Compare Johnson's _Life of Ambrose
+Phillips_.
+
+[42:2] _Shepherd's Calendar_, May, July, and September.
+
+[46:3] First published in 1559. It was popular book, and was often
+re-edited.
+
+[46:4] Dedication to Virgil.
+
+[49:5] Bolton in Haslewood, ii. 249.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SPENSER IN IRELAND.
+
+[1580.]
+
+
+In the first week of October, 1579, Spenser was at Leicester House,
+expecting "next week" to be despatched on Leicester's service to France.
+Whether he was sent or not, we do not know. Gabriel Harvey, writing at
+the end of the month, wagers that "for all his saying, he will not be
+gone over sea, neither this week nor the next." In one of the AEglogues
+(September) there are some lines which suggest, but do not necessarily
+imply, the experience of an eye-witness of the state of religion in a
+Roman Catholic country. But we can have nothing but conjecture whether
+at this time or any other Spenser was on the Continent. The _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ was entered at Stationers' Hall, December 5, 1579. In April,
+1580, as we know from one of his letters to Harvey, he was at
+Westminster. He speaks of the _Shepherd's Calendar_ as published; he is
+contemplating the publication of other pieces, and then "he will in hand
+forthwith with his _Fairie Queene_," of which he had sent Harvey a
+specimen. He speaks especially of his _Dreams_ as a considerable work.
+
+     I take best my _Dreams_ should come forth alone, being grown
+     by means of the Gloss (running continually in manner of a
+     Paraphrase) full as great as my _Calendar_. Therein be some
+     things excellently, and many things wittily discoursed of E.
+     K., and the pictures so singularly set forth and portrayed, as
+     if Michael Angelo were there, he could (I think) nor amend the
+     best, nor reprehend the worst. I know you would like them
+     passing well.
+
+It is remarkable that of a book so spoken of, as of the _Nine Comedies_,
+not a trace, as far as appears, is to be found. He goes on to speak with
+much satisfaction of another composition, which was probably
+incorporated, like the _Epithalamion Thamesis_, in his later work.
+
+     Of my _Stemmata Dudleiana_, and specially of the sundry
+     Apostrophes therein, addressed you know to whom, much more
+     advisement he had, than so lightly to send them abroad: now
+     list, trust me (though I do never very well) yet, in mine own
+     fancy, I never did better. _Veruntamen te sequor solum:
+     nunquam vero assequar._
+
+He is plainly not dissatisfied with his success, and is looking forward
+to more. But no one in those days could live by poetry. Even scholars,
+in spite of university endowments, did not hope to live by their
+scholarship; and the poet or man of letters only trusted that his work,
+by attracting the favour of the great, might open to him the door of
+advancement. Spenser was probably expecting to push his fortunes in some
+public employment under the patronage of two such powerful favourites as
+Sidney and his uncle Leicester. Spenser's heart was set on poetry: but
+what leisure he might have for it would depend on the course his life
+might take. To have hung on Sidney's protection, or gone with him as his
+secretary to the wars, to have been employed at home or abroad in
+Leicester's intrigues, to have stayed in London filling by Leicester's
+favour some government office, to have had his habits moulded and his
+thoughts affected by the brilliant and unscrupulous society of the
+court, or by the powerful and daring minds which were fast thronging the
+political and literary scene--any of these contingencies might have
+given his poetical faculty a different direction; nay, might have even
+abridged its exercise or suppressed it. But his life was otherwise
+ordered. A new opening presented itself. He had, and he accepted, the
+chance of making his fortune another way. And to his new manner of life,
+with its peculiar conditions, may be ascribed, not indeed the original
+idea of that which was to be his great work, but the circumstances under
+which the work was carried out, and which not merely coloured it, but
+gave it some of its special and characteristic features.
+
+That which turned the course of his career, and exercised a decisive
+influence, certainly on its events and fate, probably also on the turn
+of his thoughts and the shape and moulding of his work, was his
+migration to Ireland, and his settlement there for the greater part of
+the remaining eighteen years of his life. We know little more than the
+main facts of this change from the court and the growing intellectual
+activity of England, to the fierce and narrow interests of a cruel and
+unsuccessful struggle for colonization, in a country which was to
+England much what Algeria was to France some thirty years ago. Ireland,
+always unquiet, had became a serious danger to Elizabeth's Government.
+It was its "bleeding ulcer." Lord Essex's great colonizing scheme, with
+his unscrupulous severity, had failed. Sir Henry Sidney, wise, firm, and
+wishing to be just, had tried his hand as Deputy for the third time in
+the thankless charge of keeping order; he, too, after a short gleam of
+peace, had failed also. For two years Ireland had been left to the local
+administration, totally unable to heal its wounds, or cope with its
+disorders. And now, the kingdom threatened to become a vantage-ground to
+the foreign enemy. In November, 1579, the Government turned their eyes
+on Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, a man of high character, and a soldier
+of distinction. He, or they, seem to have hesitated; or rather, the
+hesitation was on both sides. He was not satisfied with many things in
+the policy of the Queen in England: his discontent had led him, strong
+Protestant as he was, to coquet with Norfolk and the partisans of Mary
+Queen of Scots, when England was threatened with a French marriage ten
+years before. His name stands among the forty nobles on whom Mary's
+friends counted.[54:1] And on the other hand, Elizabeth did not like him
+or trust him. For some time she refused to employ him. At length, in the
+summer of 1580, he was appointed to fill that great place which had
+wrecked the reputation and broken the hearts of a succession of able and
+high-spirited servants of the English Crown, the place of Lord-Deputy in
+Ireland. He was a man who was interested in the literary enterprise of
+the time. In the midst of his public employment in Holland, he had been
+the friend and patron of George Gascoigne, who left a high reputation,
+for those days, as poet, wit, satirist, and critic. Lord Grey now took
+Spenser, the "new poet," the friend of Philip Sidney, to Ireland as his
+Secretary.
+
+Spenser was not the only scholar and poet who about this time found
+public employment in Ireland. Names which appear in literary records,
+such as Warton's _History of English Poetry_, poets like Barnaby Googe
+and Ludovic Bryskett, reappear as despatch-writers or agents in the
+Irish State Papers. But one man came over to Ireland about the same time
+as Spenser, whose fortunes were a contrast to his. Geoffrey Fenton was
+one of the numerous translators of the time. He had dedicated Tragical
+Tales from the French and Italian to Lady Mary Sidney, Guevara's
+Epistles from the Spanish to Lady Oxford, and a translation of
+Guicciardini to the Queen. About this time, he was recommended by his
+brother to Walsingham for foreign service; he was soon after in Ireland:
+and in the summer of 1580, he was made Secretary to the Government. He
+shortly became one of the most important persons in the Irish
+administration. He corresponded confidentially and continually with
+Burghley and Walsingham. He had his eye on the proceedings of Deputies
+and Presidents, and reported freely their misdoings or their
+unpopularity. His letters form a considerable part of the Irish Papers.
+He became a powerful and successful public servant. He became Sir
+Geoffrey Fenton; he kept his high place for his life; he obtained grants
+and lands; and he was commemorated as a great personage, in a pompous
+monument in St. Patrick's Cathedral. This kind of success was not to be
+Spenser's.
+
+Lord Grey of Wilton was a man in whom his friends saw a high and heroic
+spirit. He was a statesman in whose motives and actions his religion had
+a dominant influence: and his religion--he is called by the vague name
+of Puritan--was one which combined a strong and doubtless genuine zeal
+for the truth of Christian doctrine and for purity of morals, with the
+deepest and deadliest hatred of what he held to be their natural enemy,
+the Anti-Christ of Rome. The "good Lord Grey," he was, if we believe
+his secretary, writing many years after this time, and when he was dead,
+"most gentle, affable, loving, and temperate; always known to be a most
+just, sincere, godly, and right noble man, far from sternness, far from
+unrighteousness." But the infelicity of his times bore hardly upon him,
+and Spenser admits, what is known otherwise, that he left a terrible
+name behind him. He was certainly a man of severe and unshrinking sense
+of duty, and like many great Englishmen of the time, so resolute in
+carrying it out to the end, that it reached, when he thought it
+necessary, to the point of ferocity. Naturally, he had enemies, who did
+not spare his fame; and Spenser, who came to admire and reverence him,
+had to lament deeply that "that good lord was blotted with the name of a
+bloody man," one who "regarded not the life of the queen's subjects no
+more than dogs, and had wasted and consumed all, so as now she had
+nothing almost left, but to reign in their ashes."
+
+Lord Grey was sent over at a moment of the utmost confusion and danger.
+In July, 1579, Drury wrote to Burghley to stand firmly to the helm, for
+"that a great storm was at hand." The South of Ireland was in fierce
+rebellion, under the Earl of Desmond and Dr. Nicolas Sanders, who was
+acting under the commission of the Pope, and promising the assistance of
+the King of Spain; and a band of Spanish and Italian adventurers,
+unauthorized, but not uncountenanced by their Government, like Drake in
+the Indies, had landed with arms and stores, and had fortified a port at
+Smerwick, on the south-western coast of Kerry. The North was deep in
+treason, restless, and threatening to strike. Round Dublin itself, the
+great Irish Lords of the Pale, under Lord Baltinglass, in the summer of
+1580, had broken into open insurrection, and were holding out a hand to
+the rebels of the South. The English garrisons, indeed, small as they
+were, could not only hold their own against the ill-armed and
+undisciplined Irish bands, but could inflict terrible chastisement on
+the insurgents. The native feuds were turned to account; Butlers were
+set to destroy their natural enemies the Geraldines, and the Earl of
+Ormond their head, was appointed General in Munster, to execute English
+vengeance and his own on the lands and people of his rival Desmond. But
+the English chiefs were not strong enough to put down the revolt. "The
+conspiracy throughout Ireland," wrote Lord Grey, "is so general, that
+without a main force it will not be appeased. There are cold service and
+unsound dealing generally." On the 12th of August, 1580, Lord Grey
+landed, amid a universal wreck of order, of law, of mercy, of industry;
+and among his counsellors and subordinates, the only remedy thought of
+was that of remorseless and increasing severity.
+
+It can hardly be doubted that Spenser must have come over with him. It
+is likely that where he went, his Secretary would accompany him. And if
+so, Spenser must soon have become acquainted with some of the scenes and
+necessities of Irish life. Within three weeks after Lord Grey's landing,
+he and those with him were present at the disaster of Glenmalure, a
+rocky defile near Wicklow, where the rebels enticed the English captains
+into a position in which an ambuscade had been prepared, after the
+manner of Red Indians in the last century, and of South African savages
+now, and where, in spite of Lord Grey's courage, "which could not have
+been bettered by Hercules," a bloody defeat was inflicted on his troops,
+and a number of distinguished officers were cut off. But Spenser was
+soon to see a still more terrible example of this ruthless warfare. It
+was necessary, above all things to destroy the Spanish fort at Smerwick,
+in order to prevent the rebellion being fed from abroad: and in
+November, 1580, Lord Grey in person undertook the work. The incidents of
+this tragedy have been fully recorded, and they formed at the time a
+heavy charge against Lord Grey's humanity, and even his honour. In this
+instance Spenser must almost certainly have been on the spot. Years
+afterwards, in his _View of the State of Ireland_, he describes and
+vindicates Lord Grey's proceedings; and he does so, "being," as he
+writes, "as near them as any." And we have Lord Grey's own despatch to
+Queen Elizabeth, containing a full report of the tragical business. We
+have no means of knowing how Lord Grey employed Spenser, or whether he
+composed his own despatches. But from Spenser's position, the Secretary,
+if he had not some hand in the following vivid and forcible account of
+the taking of Smerwick,[58:2] must probably have been cognizant of it;
+though there are some slight differences in the despatch, and in the
+account which Spenser himself wrote afterwards in his pamphlet on Irish
+Affairs.
+
+After describing the proposal of the garrison for a parley, Lord Grey
+proceeds,--
+
+     There was presently sent unto me one Alexandro, their camp
+     master; he told me that certain Spaniards and Italians were
+     there arrived upon fair speeches and great promises, which
+     altogether vain and false they found; and that it was no part
+     of their intent to molest or take any government from your
+     Majesty; for proof, that they were ready to depart as they
+     came and deliver into my hands the fort. Mine answer was, that
+     for that I perceived their people to stand of two nations,
+     Italian and Spanish, I would give no answer unless a Spaniard
+     was likewise by. He presently went and returned with a Spanish
+     captain. I then told the Spaniard that I knew their nation to
+     have an absolute prince, one that was in good league and amity
+     with your Majesty, which made me to marvell that any of his
+     people should be found associate with them that went about to
+     maintain rebels against you. . . And taking it that it could
+     not be his king's will, I was to know by whom and for what
+     cause they were sent. His reply was that the king had not sent
+     them, but that one John Martinez de Ricaldi, Governor for the
+     king at Bilboa, had willed him to levy a band and repair with
+     it to St. Andrews (Santander), and there to be directed by
+     this their colonel here, whom he followed as a blind man, not
+     knowing whither. The other avouched that they were all sent by
+     the Pope for the defence of the _Catholica fede_. My answer
+     was, that I would not greatly have marvelled if men being
+     commanded by natural and absolute princes did sometimes take
+     in hand wrong actions; but that men, and that of account as
+     some of them made show of, should be carried into unjust,
+     desperate, and wicked actions, by one that neither from God or
+     man could claim any princely power or empire, but (was) indeed
+     a detestable shaveling, the right Antichrist and general
+     ambitious tyrant over all right principalities, and patron of
+     the _Diabolica fede_--this I could not but greatly rest in
+     wonder. Their fault therefore far to be aggravated by the
+     vileness of their commander; and that at my hands no condition
+     or composition they were to expect, other than they should
+     render me the fort, and yield their selves to my will for life
+     or death. With this answer he departed; after which there was
+     one or two courses to and fro more, to have gotten a certainty
+     for some of their lives: but finding that it would not be, the
+     colonel himself about sunsetting came forth and requested
+     respite with surcease of arms till the next morning, and then
+     he would give a resolute answer.
+
+     Finding that to be but a gain of time to them, and a loss of
+     the same for myself, I definitely answered I would not grant
+     it, and therefore presently either that he took my offer or
+     else return and I would fall to my business. He then embraced
+     my knees simply putting himself to my mercy, only he prayed
+     that for that night he might abide in the fort, and that in
+     the morning all should be put into my hands. I asked hostages
+     for the performance; they were given. Morning came; I
+     presented my companies in battle before the fort, the colonel
+     comes forth with ten or twelve of his chief gentlemen,
+     trailing their ensigns rolled up, and presented them unto me
+     with their lives and the fort. I sent straight certain
+     gentlemen in, to see their weapons and armour laid down, and
+     to guard the munition and victual there left for spoil. Then
+     put I in certain bands, who straight fell to execution. There
+     were six hundred slain. Munition and victual great store:
+     though much wasted through the disorder of the soldier, which
+     in that fury could not be helped. Those that I gave life unto,
+     I have bestowed upon the captains and gentlemen whose service
+     hath well deserved. . . Of the six hundred slain, four hundred
+     were as gallant and goodly personages as of any (soldiers) I
+     ever beheld. So hath it pleased the Lord of Hosts to deliver
+     your enemies into your Highnesses' hand, and so too as one
+     only excepted, not one of yours is either lost or hurt.
+
+Another account adds to this that "the Irish men and women were hanged,
+with an Englishman who had served Dr. Sanders, and two others whose arms
+and legs were broken for torture."
+
+Such scenes as those of Glenmalure and Smerwick, terrible as they were,
+it might have been any one's lot to witness who found himself in
+presence of the atrocious warfare of those cruel days, in which the
+ordinary exasperation of combatants was made more savage and unforgiving
+by religious hatred, and by the license which religious hatred gave to
+irregular adventure and the sanguinary repression of it. They were not
+confined to Ireland. Two years later the Marquis de Santa Cruz treated
+in exactly the same fashion a band of French adventurers, some eighty
+noblemen and gentlemen and two hundred soldiers, who were taken in an
+attempt on the Azores during a time of nominal peace between the crowns
+of France and Spain. In the Low Countries, and in the religious wars of
+France, it need not be said that even the 'execution' at Smerwick was
+continually outdone; and it is what the Spaniards would of course have
+done to Drake if they had caught him. Nor did the Spanish Government
+complain of this treatment of its subjects, who had no legal commission.
+
+But the change of scene and life to Spenser was much more than merely
+the sight of a disastrous skirmish and a capitulation without quarter.
+He had passed to an entirely altered condition of social life; he had
+passed from pleasant and merry England, with its comparative order and
+peace, its thriving homesteads and wealthy cities, its industry and
+magnificence,--
+
+                             Eliza's blessed field,
+     That still with people, peace, and plenty flows--
+
+to a land, beautiful indeed, and alluring, but of which the only law was
+disorder, and the only rule failure. The Cambridge student, the follower
+of country life in Lancashire or Kent, the scholar discussing with
+Philip Sidney and corresponding with Gabriel Harvey about classical
+metres and English rimes; the shepherd poet, Colin Clout, delicately
+fashioning his innocent pastorals, his love complaints, or his dexterous
+panegyrics or satires; the courtier, aspiring to shine in the train of
+Leicester before the eyes of the great queen,--found himself
+transplanted into a wild and turbulent savagery, where the elements of
+civil society hardly existed, and which had the fatal power of drawing
+into its own evil and lawless ways the English who came into contact
+with it. Ireland had the name and the framework of a Christian realm. It
+had its hierarchy of officers in Church and State, its Parliament, its
+representative of the Crown. It had its great earls and lords, with
+noble and romantic titles, its courts and councils and administration;
+the Queen's laws were there, and where they were acknowledged, which was
+not, however, everywhere, the English speech was current. But underneath
+this name and outside, all was coarse, and obstinately set against
+civilized order. There was nothing but the wreck and clashing of
+disintegrated customs, the lawlessness of fierce and ignorant
+barbarians, whose own laws had been destroyed, and who would recognize
+no other; the blood-feuds of rival septs; the ambitious and deadly
+treacheries of rival nobles, oppressing all weaker than themselves, and
+maintaining in waste and idleness their crowds of brutal retainers. In
+one thing only was there agreement, though not even in this was there
+union; and that was in deep, implacable hatred of their English masters.
+And with these English masters, too, amid their own jealousies and
+backbitings and mischief-making, their own bitter antipathies and
+chronic despair, there was only one point of agreement, and that was
+their deep scorn and loathing of the Irish.
+
+This is Irish dealing with Irish, in Munster at this time:--
+
+     The Lord Roche kept a freeholder, who had eight plowlands,
+     prisoner, and hand-locked him till he had surrendered seven
+     plowlands and a half, on agreement to keep the remaining
+     plowland free; but when this was done, the Lord Roche extorted
+     as many exactions from that half-plowland, as from any other
+     half-plowland in his country. . . . And even the great men
+     were under the same oppression from the greater: for the Earl
+     of Desmond forcibly took away the Seneschal of Imokilly's corn
+     from his own land, though he was one of the most considerable
+     gentlemen in Munster.[62:3]
+
+And this is English dealing with Irish:--
+
+     Mr. Henry Sheffield asks Lord Burghley's interest with Sir
+     George Carew, to be made his deputy at Leighlin, in place of
+     Mr. Bagenall, who met his death under the following
+     circumstances:--
+
+     Mr. Bagenall, after he had bought the barony of Odrone of Sir
+     George Carew, could not be contented to let the Kavanaghs
+     enjoy such lands as old Sir Peter Carew, young Sir Peter, and
+     last, Sir George were content that they should have, but
+     threatened to kill them wherever he could meet them. As it is
+     now fallen out, about the last of November, one Henry Heron,
+     Mr. Bagenall's brother-in-law, having lost four kine, making
+     that his quarrel, he being accompanied with divers others to
+     the number of twenty or thereabouts, by the procurement of his
+     brother-in-law, went to the house of Mortagh Oge, a man
+     seventy years old, the chief of the Kavanaghs, with their
+     swords drawn: which the old man seeing, for fear of his life,
+     sought to go into the woods, but was taken and brought before
+     Mr. Heron, who charged him that his son had taken the cows.
+     The old man answered that he could pay for them. Mr. Heron
+     would not be contented, but bade his men kill him, he desiring
+     to be brought for trial at the sessions. Further, the morrow
+     after they went again into the woods, and there they found
+     another old man, a servant of Mortagh Oge, and likewise killed
+     him, Mr. Heron saying that it was because he would not confess
+     the cows.
+
+     On these murders, the sons of the old man laid an ambush for
+     Mr. Bagenall; who, following them more upon will than with
+     discretion, fell into their hands, and were slain with
+     thirteen more. He had sixteen wounds above his girdle, and one
+     of his legs cut off, and his tongue drawn out of his mouth and
+     slit. There is not one man dwelling in all this country that
+     was Sir George Carew's, but every man fled, and left the whole
+     country waste; and so I fear me it will continue, now the
+     deadly feud is so great between them.[63:4]
+
+Something like this has been occasionally seen in our colonies towards
+the native races; but there it never reached the same height of
+unrestrained and frankly justified indulgence. The English officials and
+settlers knew well enough that the only thought of the native Irish was
+to restore their abolished customs, to recover their confiscated lands,
+to re-establish the crippled power of their chiefs; they knew that for
+this insurrection was ever ready, and that treachery would shrink from
+nothing. And to meet it, the English on the spot--all but a few who were
+denounced as unpractical sentimentalists for favouring an irreconcilable
+foe--could think of no way of enforcing order, except by a wholesale use
+of the sword and the gallows. They could find no means of restoring
+peace except turning the rich land into a wilderness, and rooting out by
+famine those whom the soldier or the hangman had not overtaken. "No
+governor shall do any good here," wrote an English observer in 1581,
+"except he show himself a Tamerlane."
+
+In a general account, even contemporary, such statements might suggest a
+violent suspicion of exaggeration. We possess the means of testing it.
+The Irish State Papers of the time contain the ample reports and
+letters, from day to day, of the energetic and resolute Englishmen
+employed in council or in the field--men of business like Sir William
+Pelham, Sir Henry Wallop, Edward Waterhouse, and Geoffrey
+Fenton;--daring and brilliant officers, like Sir William Drury, Sir
+Nicolas Malby, Sir Warham St. Leger, Sir John Norreys, and John Zouch.
+These papers are the basis of Mr. Froude's terrible chapters on the
+Desmond rebellion, and their substance in abstract or abridgment is
+easily accessible in the printed calendars of the Record Office. They
+show that from first to last, in principle and practice, in council and
+in act, the Tamerlane system was believed in, and carried out without a
+trace of remorse or question as to its morality. "If hell were open, and
+all the evil spirits were abroad," writes Walsingham's correspondent
+Andrew Trollope, who talked about Tamerlane, "they could never be worse
+than these Irish rogues--rather dogs, and worse than dogs, for dogs do
+but after their kind, and they degenerate from all humanity." There is
+but one way of dealing with wild dogs or wolves; and accordingly the
+English chiefs insisted that this was the way to deal with the Irish.
+The state of Ireland, writes one, "is like an old cloak often before
+patched, wherein is now made so great a gash that all the world doth
+know that there is no remedy but to make a new." This means, in the
+language of another, "that there is no way to daunt these people but by
+the edge of the sword, and to plant better in their place, or rather,
+let them cut one another's throats." These were no idle words. Every
+page of these papers contains some memorandum of execution and
+destruction. The progress of a Deputy, or the President of a province,
+through the country is always accompanied with its tale of hangings.
+There is sometimes a touch of the grotesque. "At Kilkenny," writes Sir
+W. Drury, "the jail being full, we caused sessions immediately to begin.
+Thirty-six persons were executed, among which some good ones; two for
+treason, a blackamoor, and two witches by natural law, for that we found
+no law to try them by in this realm." It is like the account of some
+unusual kind of game in a successful bag. "If taking of cows, and
+killing of kerne and churles had been worth advertizing," writes Lord
+Grey to the Queen, "I would have had every day to have troubled your
+Highness." Yet Lord Grey protests in the same letter that he has never
+taken the life of any, however evil, who submitted. At the end of the
+Desmond outbreak, the chiefs in the different provinces send in their
+tale of death. Ormond complains of the false reports of his "slackness
+in but killing three men," whereas the number was more than 3000; and he
+sends in his "brief note" of his contribution to the slaughter, "598
+persons of quality, besides 3000 or 4000 others, and 158 slain since his
+discharge." The end was that, as one of the chief actors writes, Sir
+Warham St. Leger, "Munster is nearly unpeopled by the murders done by
+the rebels, and the killings by the soldiers; 30,000 dead of famine in
+half a year, besides numbers that are hanged and killed. The realm," he
+adds, "was never in greater danger, or in like misery." But in the
+murderous work itself there was not much danger. "Our wars," writes Sir
+Henry Wallop, in the height of the struggle, "are but like fox-hunting."
+And when the English Government remonstrates against this system of
+massacre, the Lord-Deputy writes back that "he sorrows that pity for the
+wicked and evil should be enchanted into her Majesty."
+
+And of this dreadful policy, involving, as the price of the extinction
+of Desmond's rebellion, the absolute desolation of the South and West of
+Ireland, Lord Grey came to be the deliberate and unfaltering champion.
+His administration lasted only two years, and in spite of his natural
+kindness of temper, which we need not doubt, it was, from the supposed
+necessities of his position, and the unwavering consent of all English
+opinions round him, a rule of extermination. No scruple ever crossed his
+mind, except that he had not been sufficiently uncompromising in putting
+first the religious aspect of the quarrel. "If Elizabeth had allowed
+him," writes Mr. Froude, "he would have now made a Mahommedan conquest
+of the whole island, and offered the Irish the alternative of the
+Gospel or the sword." With the terrible sincerity of a Puritan, he
+reproached himself that he had allowed even the Queen's commands to come
+before the "one article of looking to God's dear service." "I confess my
+sin," he wrote to Walsingham, "I have followed man too much," and he saw
+why his efforts had been in vain. "Baal's prophets and councillors shall
+prevail. I see it is so. I see it is just. I see it past help. I rest
+despaired." His policy of blood and devastation, breaking the neck of
+Desmond's rebellion, but failing to put an end to it, became at length
+more than the home Government could bear; and with mutual
+dissatisfaction he was recalled before his work was done. Among the
+documents relating to his explanations with the English Government, is
+one of which this is the abstract: "Declaration (Dec. 1583), by Arthur,
+Lord Grey, of Wilton, to the Queen, showing the state of Ireland when he
+was appointed Deputy, with the services of his government, and the
+plight he left it in. 1485 chief men and gentlemen slain, not accounting
+those of meaner sort, nor yet executions by law, and killing of churles,
+which were innumerable."
+
+This was the world into which Spenser was abruptly thrown, and in which
+he was henceforward to have his home. He first became acquainted with it
+as Lord Grey's Secretary in the Munster war. He himself in later days
+with ample experience and knowledge reviewed the whole of this dreadful
+history, its policy, its necessities, its results: and no more
+instructive document has come down to us from those times. But his
+description of the way in which the plan of extermination was carried
+out in Munster before his eyes, may fittingly form a supplement to the
+language on the spot of those responsible for it.
+
+     _Eudox._ But what, then, shall be the conclusion of this
+     war? . . .
+
+     _Iren._--The end will I assure me be very short and much
+     sooner than can be, in so great a trouble, as it seemeth,
+     hoped for, although there should none of them fall by the
+     sword nor be slain by the soldier: yet thus being kept from
+     manurance and their cattle from running abroad, by this hard
+     restraint they would quickly consume themselves, and devour
+     one another. The proof whereof I saw sufficiently exampled in
+     these late wars of Munster; for notwithstanding that the same
+     was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle
+     that you would have thought they should have been able to
+     stand long, yet ere one year and a half they were brought to
+     such wretchedness as that any stony heart would have rued the
+     same. Out of every corner of the woods and glynnes they came
+     creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear
+     them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like
+     ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead
+     carrions, happy where they could find them, yea and one
+     another soon after, insomuch that the very carcases they
+     spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a
+     plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a
+     feast for a time, yet not able long to continue there withal;
+     that in a short space there were none almost left, and a most
+     populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and
+     beast; yet sure in all that war there perished not many by the
+     sword, but all by the extremity of famine which they
+     themselves had wrought.
+
+It is hardly surprising that Lord Grey's Secretary should share the
+opinions and the feelings of his master and patron. Certainly in his
+company and service, Spenser learned to look upon Ireland and the Irish
+with the impatience and loathing which filled most Englishmen; and it
+must be added with the same greedy eyes. In this new atmosphere, in
+which his life was henceforth spent, amid the daily talk of ravage and
+death, the daily scramble for the spoils of rebels and traitors, the
+daily alarms of treachery and insurrection, a man naturally learns
+hardness. Under Spenser's imaginative richness, and poetic delicacy of
+feeling, there appeared two features. There was a shrewd sense of the
+practical side of things: and there was a full share of that sternness
+of temper which belonged to the time. He came to Ireland for no romantic
+purpose: he came to make his fortune as well as he could: and he
+accepted the conditions of the place and scene, and entered at once into
+the game of adventure and gain which was the natural one for all English
+comers, and of which the prizes were lucrative offices and forfeited
+manors and abbeys. And in the native population and native interests, he
+saw nothing but what called forth not merely antipathy, but deep moral
+condemnation. It was not merely that the Irish were ignorant,
+thriftless, filthy, debased and loathsome in their pitiable misery and
+despair: it was that in his view, justice, truth, honesty had utterly
+perished among them, and therefore were not due to them. Of any other
+side to the picture, he like other good Englishmen, was entirely
+unconscious: he saw only on all sides of him the empire of barbarism and
+misrule which valiant and godly Englishmen were fighting to vanquish and
+destroy--fighting against apparent but not real odds. And all this was
+aggravated by the stiff adherence of the Irish to their old religion.
+Spenser came over with the common opinion of Protestant Englishmen, that
+they had at least in England the pure and undoubted religion of the
+Bible: and in Ireland, he found himself face to face with the very
+superstition in its lowest forms which he had so hated in England. He
+left it plotting in England; he found it in armed rebellion in Ireland.
+Like Lord Grey, he saw in Popery the root of all the mischiefs of
+Ireland; and his sense of true religion, as well as his convictions of
+right, conspired to recommend to him Lord Grey's pitiless government.
+The opinion was everywhere--it was undisputed and unexamined--that a
+policy of force, direct or indirect, was the natural and right way of
+reducing diverging religions to submission and uniformity: that
+religious disagreement ought as a matter of principle to be subdued by
+violence of one degree or another. All wise and good men thought so: all
+statesmen and rulers acted so. Spenser found in Ireland a state of
+things which seemed to make this doctrine the simplest dictate of common
+sense.
+
+In August, 1582, Lord Grey left Ireland. He had accepted his office with
+the utmost reluctance, from the known want of agreement between the
+Queen and himself as to policy. He had executed it in a way which
+greatly displeased the home Government. And he gave it up with his
+special work, the extinction of Desmond's rebellion, still
+unaccomplished. In spite of the thousands slain, and a province made a
+desert, Desmond was still at large and dangerous. Lord Grey had been
+ruthlessly severe, and yet not successful. For months there had been an
+interchange of angry letters between him and the Government. Burghley,
+he complains to Walsingham, was "so heavy against him." The Queen and
+Burghley wanted order restored, but did not like either the expense of
+war, or the responsibility before other governments for the severity
+which their agents on the spot judged necessary. Knowing that he did not
+please, he had begun to solicit his recall before he had been a year in
+Ireland; and at length he was recalled, not to receive thanks, but to
+meet a strict, if not hostile, inquiry into his administration. Besides
+what had been on the surface of his proceedings to dissatisfy the
+Queen, there had been, as in the case of every Deputy, a continued
+underground stream of backbiting and insinuation going home against him.
+Spenser did not forget this, when in the _Faery Queen_ he shadowed forth
+Lord Grey's career in the adventures of Arthegal, the great Knight of
+Justice, met on his return home from his triumphs by the hags, Envy and
+Detraction, and the braying of the hundred tongues of the Blatant Beast.
+Irish lords and partisans, calling themselves loyal, when they could not
+get what they wanted, or when he threatened them for their insincerity
+or insolence, at once wrote to England. His English colleagues, civil
+and military, were his natural rivals or enemies, ever on the watch to
+spy out and report, if necessary, to misrepresent, what was questionable
+or unfortunate in his proceedings. Permanent officials like Archbishop
+Adam Loftus the Chancellor, or Treasurer Wallop, or Secretary Fenton,
+knew more than he did; they corresponded directly with the ministers;
+they knew that they were expected to keep a strict watch on his
+expenditure; and they had no scruple to send home complaints against him
+behind his back, as they did against one another. A secretary in Dublin
+like Geoffrey Fenton is described as a moth in the garment of every
+Deputy. Grey himself complains of the underhand work; he cannot prevent
+"backbiters' report:" he has found of late "very suspicious dealing
+amongst all his best esteemed associates;" he "dislikes not to be
+informed of the charges against him." In fact, they were accusing him of
+one of the gravest sins of which a Deputy could be guilty; they were
+writing home that he was lavishing the forfeited estates among his
+favourites, under pretence of rewarding service, to the great loss and
+permanent damage of her Majesty's revenue; and they were forwarding
+plans for commissions to distribute these estates, of which the Deputy
+should not be a member.
+
+He had the common fate of those who accepted great responsibilities
+under the Queen. He was expected to do very hard tasks with insufficient
+means, and to receive more blame where he failed than thanks where he
+succeeded. He had every one, English and Irish, against him in Ireland,
+and no one for him in England. He was driven to violence because he
+wanted strength; he took liberties with forfeitures belonging to the
+Queen because he had no other means of rewarding public services. It is
+not easy to feel much sympathy for a man who, brave and public spirited
+as he was, could think of no remedy for the miseries of Ireland but
+wholesale bloodshed. Yet, compared with the resident officials who
+caballed against him, and who got rich on these miseries, the Wallops
+and Fentons of the Irish Council, this stern Puritan, so remorseless in
+what he believed to be his duty to his Queen and his faith, stands out
+as an honest and faithful public servant of a Government which seemed
+hardly to know its own mind, which vacillated between indulgence and
+severity, and which hampered its officers by contradictory policies,
+ignorant of their difficulties, and incapable of controlling the
+supplies for a costly and wasteful war. Lord Grey's strong hand, though
+incapable of reaching the real causes of Irish evils, undoubtedly saved
+the country at a moment of serious peril, and once more taught lawless
+Geraldines, and Eustaces, and Burkes the terrible lesson of English
+power. The work which he had half done in crushing Desmond was soon
+finished by Desmond's hereditary rival, Ormond; and under the milder,
+but not more popular, rule of his successor, the proud and irritable
+Sir John Perrot, Ireland had for a few years the peace which consisted
+in the absence of a definite rebellion, till Tyrone began to stir in
+1595, and Perrot went back a disgraced man, to die a prisoner in the
+Tower.
+
+Lord Grey left behind him unappeasable animosities, and returned to meet
+jealous rivals and an ill-satisfied mistress. But he had left behind one
+whose admiration and reverence he had won, and who was not afraid to
+take care of his reputation. Whether Spenser went back with his patron
+or not in 1582, he was from henceforth mainly resident in Ireland. Lord
+Grey's administration, and the principles on which it had been carried
+on, had made a deep impression on Spenser's mind. His first ideal had
+been Philip Sidney, the attractive and all-accomplished gentleman,--
+
+                  The President
+     Of noblesse and of chevalrie,--
+
+And to the end the pastoral Colin Clout, for he ever retained his first
+poetic name, was faithful to his ideal. But in the stern Proconsul,
+under whom he had become hardened into a keen and resolute colonist, he
+had come in contact with a new type of character; a governor under the
+sense of duty, doing the roughest of work in the roughest of ways. In
+Lord Grey, he had this character, not as he might read of it in books,
+but acting out its qualities in present life, amid the unexpected
+emergencies, the desperate alternatives, the calls for instant decision,
+the pressing necessities and the anxious hazards, of a course full of
+uncertainty and peril. He had before his eyes day by day, fearless,
+unshrinking determination, in a hateful and most unpromising task. He
+believed that he saw a living example of strength, manliness, and
+nobleness; of unsparing and unswerving zeal for order and religion, and
+good government; of single-hearted devotion to truth and right, and to
+the Queen. Lord Grey grew at last, in the poet's imagination, into the
+image and representative of perfect and masculine justice. When Spenser
+began to enshrine in a great allegory his ideas of human life and
+character, Lord Grey supplied the moral features, and almost the name,
+of one of its chief heroes. Spenser did more than embody his memory in
+poetical allegories. In Spenser's _View of the present State of
+Ireland_, written some years after Lord Grey's death, he gives his
+mature, and then at any rate, disinterested approbation of Lord Grey's
+administration, and his opinion of the causes of its failure. He kindles
+into indignation when "most untruely and maliciously, those evil tongues
+backbite and slander the sacred ashes of that most just and honourable
+personage, whose least virtue, of many most excellent, which abounded in
+his heroical spirit, they were never able to aspire unto."
+
+Lord Grey's patronage had brought Spenser into the public service;
+perhaps that patronage, the patronage of a man who had powerful enemies,
+was the cause that Spenser's preferments, after Lord Grey's recall, were
+on so moderate a scale. The notices which we glean from indirect sources
+about Spenser's employment in Ireland are meagre enough, but they are
+distinct. They show him as a subordinate public servant, of no great
+account, but yet, like other public servants in Ireland, profiting, in
+his degree, by the opportunities of the time. In the spring following
+Lord Grey's arrival (March 22, 1581), Spenser was appointed Clerk of
+Decrees and Recognizances in the Irish Court of Chancery, retaining his
+place as Secretary to the Lord-Deputy, in which character his signature
+sometimes appears in the Irish Records, certifying State documents sent
+to England. This office is said by Fuller to have been a "lucrative"
+one. In the same year he received a lease of the Abbey and Manor of
+Enniscorthy, in the County of Wexford. Enniscorthy was an important post
+in the network of English garrisons, on one of the roads from Dublin to
+the South. He held it but for a short time. It was transferred by him to
+a citizen of Wexford, Richard Synot, an agent, apparently, of the
+powerful Sir Henry Wallop, the Treasurer; and it was soon after
+transferred by Synot to his patron, an official who secured to himself a
+large share of the spoils of Desmond's rebellion. Further, Spenser's
+name appears, in a list of persons (January, 1582), among whom Lord Grey
+had distributed some of the forfeited property of the rebels--a list
+sent home by him in answer to charges of waste and damage to the Queen's
+revenue, busily urged against him in Ireland by men like Wallop and
+Fenton, and readily listened to by English ministers like Burghley, who
+complained that Ireland was a "gulf of consuming treasure." The grant
+was mostly to persons active in service, among others one to Wallop
+himself; and a certain number of smaller value to persons of Lord Grey's
+own household. There, among yeomen ushers, gentlemen ushers, gentlemen
+serving the Lord-Deputy, and Welshmen and Irishmen with uncouth names,
+to whom small gratifications had been allotted out of the spoil, we
+read--"the lease of a house in Dublin belonging to [Lord] Baltinglas for
+six years to come to Edmund Spenser, one of the Lord-Deputy's
+Secretaries, valued at 5_l._" . . . "of a 'custodiam' of John Eustace's
+[one of Baltinglas' family] land of the Newland to Edmund Spenser, one
+of the Lord-Deputy's Secretaries." In July, 1586, when every one was
+full of the project for "planting" Munster, he was still in Dublin, for
+he addresses from thence a sonnet to Gabriel Harvey. In March, 1588/9,
+we find the following, in a list of officers on the establishment of the
+province of Munster, which the government was endeavouring to colonize
+from the west of England: "Lodovick Briskett, clerk to the council (at
+20_l._ per annum), 13_l._ 6_s._ 8_d._ (this is exercised by one Spenser,
+as deputy for the said Briskett), to whom (i. e. Briskett) it was
+granted by patent 6 Nov. 25 Eliz. (1583)." (_Carew MSS._) Bryskett was a
+man much employed in Irish business. He had been Clerk to the Irish
+Council, had been a correspondent of Burghley and Walsingham, and had
+aspired to be Secretary of State when Fenton obtained the post: possibly
+in disappointment, he had retired, with an office which he exercised by
+deputy, to his lands in Wexford. He was a poet, and a friend of
+Spenser's: and it may have been by his interest with the dispensers of
+patronage, that "one Spenser," who had been his deputy, succeeded to his
+office.
+
+In this position Spenser was brought into communication with the
+powerful English chiefs on the Council of Munster, and also with the
+leading men among the Undertakers as they were called, among whom more
+than half a million of acres of the escheated and desolate lands of the
+fallen Desmond were to be divided, on condition of each Undertaker
+settling on his estate a proportionate number of English gentlemen,
+yeomen, artisans and labourers with their families, who were to bring
+the ruined province into order and cultivation. The President and
+Vice-President of the Council were the two Norreys, John and Thomas, two
+of the most gallant of a gallant family. The project for the planting of
+Munster had been originally started before the rebellion, in 1568. It
+had been one of the causes of the rebellion; but now that Desmond was
+fallen, it was revived. It had been received in England with favour and
+hope. Men of influence and enterprise, Sir Christopher Hatton,
+Walsingham, Walter Ralegh, had embarked in it: and the government had
+made an appeal to the English country gentlemen to take advantage of
+this new opening for their younger sons, and to send them over at the
+head of colonies from the families of their tenants and dependants, to
+occupy a rich and beautiful land on easy terms of rent. In the Western
+Counties, north and south, the appeal had awakened interest. In the list
+of Undertakers are found Cheshire and Lancashire names, Stanley,
+Fleetwood, Molyneux: and a still larger number for Somerset, Devon, and
+Dorset, Popham, Rogers, Coles, Ralegh, Chudleigh, Champernown. The plan
+of settlement was carefully and methodically traced out. The province
+was surveyed as well as it could be under great difficulties. Maps were
+made which Lord Burghley annotated. "Seignories" were created of varying
+size, 12,000, 8000, 6000, 4000 acres, with corresponding obligations as
+to the number and class of farms and inhabitants in each. Legal science
+in England was to protect titles by lengthy patents and leases;
+administrative watchfulness and firmness were to secure them in Ireland.
+Privileges of trade were granted to the Undertakers: they were even
+allowed to transport coin out of England to Ireland: and a long respite
+was granted them before the Crown was to claim its rents. Strict rules
+were laid down to keep the native Irish out of the English lands and
+from intermarrying with the English families. In this partition,
+Seignories were distributed by the Undertakers among themselves with the
+free carelessness of men dividing the spoil. The great people, like
+Hatton and Ralegh, were to have their two or three Seignories: the
+county of Cork with its nineteen Seignories is assigned to the gentleman
+undertakers from Somersetshire. The plan was an ambitious and tempting
+one. But difficulties soon arose. The gentleman undertakers were not in
+a hurry to leave England even on a visit to their desolate and dangerous
+seignories in Munster. The "planting" did not thrive. The Irish were
+inexhaustible in raising legal obstacles and in giving practical
+annoyance. Claims and titles were hard to discover or to extinguish.
+Even the very attainted and escheated lands were challenged by virtue of
+settlements made before the attainders. The result was that a certain
+number of Irish estates were added to the possessions of a certain
+number of English families. But Munster was not planted. Burghley's
+policy, and Walsingham's resolution, and Ralegh's daring inventiveness
+were alike baffled by the conditions of a problem harder than the
+peopling of America or the conquest of India. Munster could not be made
+English. After all its desolation, it reverted in the main to its Irish
+possessors.
+
+Of all the schemes and efforts which accompanied the attempt, and the
+records of which fill the Irish State papers of those years, Spenser was
+the near and close spectator. He was in Dublin and on the spot, as Clerk
+of the Council of Munster. And he had become acquainted, perhaps, by
+this time, had formed a friendship, with Walter Ralegh, one of the most
+active men in Irish business, whose influence was rising wherever he was
+becoming known. Most of the knowledge which Spenser thus gathered, and
+of the impressions which a practical handling of Irish affairs had left
+on him, was embodied in his interesting work, written several years
+later--_A View of the present State of Ireland_. But his connexion with
+Munster not unnaturally brought him also an accession of fortune. When
+Ralegh and the "Somersetshire men" were dividing among them the County
+of Cork, the Clerk of the Council was remembered by some of his friends.
+He was admitted among the Undertakers. His name appears in the list,
+among great statesmen and captains with their seignories of 12,000
+acres, as holding a grant of some 3000. It was the manor and castle of
+Kilcolman, a ruined house of the Desmonds, under the Galtee Hills. It
+appears to have been first assigned to another person.[79:5] But it came
+at last into Spenser's hands, probably in 1586; and henceforward, this
+was his abode and his home.
+
+Kilcolman Castle was near the high road between Mallow and Limerick,
+about three miles from Buttevant and Doneraile, in a plain at the foot
+of the last western falls of the Galtee range, watered by a stream now
+called the Awbeg, but which he celebrates under the name of the Mulla.
+In Spenser's time it was probably surrounded with woods. The earlier
+writers describe it as a pleasant abode with fine views, and so Spenser
+celebrated its natural beauties. The more recent accounts are not so
+favourable. "Kilcolman," says the writer in Murray's Handbook, "is a
+small peel tower, with cramped and dark rooms, a form which every
+gentleman's house assumed in turbulent times. It is situated on the
+margin of a small lake, and, it must be confessed, overlooking an
+extremely dreary tract of country." It was in the immediate
+neighbourhood of the wild country to the north, half forest, half bog,
+the wood and hill of Aharlo, or Arlo, as Spenser writes it, which was
+the refuge and the "great fastness" of the Desmond rebellion. It was
+amid such scenes, amid such occupations, in such society and
+companionship, that the poet of the _Faery Queen_ accomplished as much
+of his work as was given him to do. In one of his later poems, he thus
+contrasts the peace of England with his own home:--
+
+     No wayling there nor wretchednesse is heard,
+     No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,
+     No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard,
+     No nightly bordrags [= border ravage], nor no hue and cries;
+     The shepheards there abroad may safely lie,
+     On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger:
+     No ravenous wolves the good mans hope destroy,
+     Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[54:1] Froude, x. 158.
+
+[58:2] Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1574-1585. Mr. H. C. Hamilton's
+Pref. p. lxxi-lxxiii. Nov. 12, 1580.
+
+[62:3] Cox, Hist. of Ireland, 354.
+
+[63:4] Irish Papers, March 29, 1587.
+
+[79:5] Carew MSS. Calendar, 1587, p. 449. Cf. Irish Papers; Calendar,
+1587, p. 309, 450.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE FAERY QUEEN--THE FIRST PART.
+
+[1580-1590.]
+
+
+The _Faery Queen_ is heard of very early in Spenser's literary course.
+We know that in the beginning of 1580, the year in which Spenser went to
+Ireland, something under that title had been already begun and submitted
+to Gabriel Harvey's judgment; and that among other literary projects,
+Spenser was intending to proceed with it. But beyond the mere name, we
+know nothing, at this time, of Spenser's proposed _Faery Queen_.
+Harvey's criticisms on it tell us nothing of its general plan or its
+numbers. Whether the first sketch had been decided upon, whether the new
+stanza, Spenser's original creation, and its peculiar beauty and
+instrument, had yet been invented by him, while he had been trying
+experiments in metre in the _Shepherd's Calendar_, we have no means of
+determining. But he took the idea with him to Ireland; and in Ireland he
+pursued it and carried it out.
+
+The first authentic account which we have of the composition of the
+_Faery Queen_, is in a pamphlet written by Spenser's friend and
+predecessor in the service of the Council of Munster, Ludowick Bryskett,
+and inscribed to Lord Grey of Wilton: a _Discourse of Civil Life_,
+published in 1606. He describes a meeting of friends at his cottage
+near Dublin, and a conversation that took place on the "ethical" part of
+moral philosophy. The company consisted of some of the principal
+Englishmen employed in Irish affairs, men whose names occur continually
+in the copious correspondence in the Rolls and at Lambeth. There was
+Long, the Primate of Armagh; there were Sir Robert Dillon, the Chief
+Justice of the Common Pleas, and Dormer, the Queen's Solicitor; and
+there were soldiers, like Thomas Norreys, then Vice-President of
+Munster, under his brother John Norreys; Sir Warham Sentleger, on whom
+had fallen so much of the work in the South of Ireland, and who at last,
+like Thomas Norreys, fell in Tyrone's rebellion; Captain Christopher
+Carleil, Walsingham's son-in-law, a man who had gained great distinction
+on land and sea, not only in Ireland, but in the Low Countries, in
+France, and at Carthagena and San Domingo; and Captain Nicholas Dawtry,
+the Seneschal of Clandeboy, in the troublesome Ulster country,
+afterwards "Captain" of Hampshire at the time of the Armada. It was a
+remarkable party. The date of this meeting must have been after the
+summer of 1584, at which time Long was made Primate, and before the
+beginning of 1588, when Dawtry was in Hampshire. The extract is so
+curious, as a picture of the intellectual and literary wants and efforts
+of the times, especially amid the disorders of Ireland, and as a
+statement of Spenser's purpose in his poem, that an extract from it
+deserves to be inserted, as it is given in Mr. Todd's _Life of Spenser_,
+and repeated in that by Mr. Hales.
+
+     "Herein do I greatly envie," writes Bryskett, "the happiness
+     of the Italians, who have in their mother-tongue late writers
+     that have, with a singular easie method taught all that Plato
+     and Aristotle have confusedly or obscurely left written. Of
+     which, some I have begun to reade with no small delight; as
+     Alexander Piccolomini, Gio. Baptista Giraldi, and Guazzo; all
+     three having written upon the Ethick part of Morall
+     Philosophie both exactly and perspicuously. And would God that
+     some of our countrimen would shew themselves so wel affected
+     to the good of their countrie (whereof one principall and most
+     important part consisteth in the instructing men to vertue),
+     as to set downe in English the precepts of those parts of
+     Morall Philosophy, whereby our youth might, without spending
+     so much time as the learning of those other languages require,
+     speedily enter into the right course of vertuous life.
+
+     In the meane while I must struggle with those bookes which I
+     vnderstand and content myselfe to plod upon them, in hope that
+     God (who knoweth the sincerenesse of my desire) will be
+     pleased to open my vnderstanding, so as I may reape that
+     profit of my reading, which I trauell for. Yet is there _a
+     gentleman in this company_, whom I have had often a purpose to
+     intreate, that as his liesure might serue him, he would
+     vouchsafe to spend some time with me to instruct me in some
+     hard points which I cannot of myselfe understand; _knowing him
+     to be not onely perfect in the Greek tongue, but also very
+     well read in Philosophie, both morall and naturall_.
+     Neuertheless such is my bashfulness, as I neuer yet durst open
+     my mouth to disclose this my desire unto him, though I have
+     not wanted some hartning thereunto from himselfe. For of loue
+     and kindnes to me, _he encouraged me long sithens to follow
+     the reading of the Greeke tongue, and offered me his helpe to
+     make me vnderstand it_. But now that so good an opportunitie
+     is offered vnto me, to satisfie in some sort my desire; I
+     thinke I should commit a great fault, not to myselfe alone,
+     but to all this company, if I should not enter my request thus
+     farre, as to moue him to spend this time which we have now
+     destined to familiar discourse and conuersation, in declaring
+     unto us the great benefits which men obtaine by the knowledge
+     of Morall Philosophie, and in making us to know what the same
+     is, what be the parts thereof, whereby vertues are to be
+     distinguished from vices; and finally that he will be pleased
+     to run ouer in such order as he shall thinke good, such and
+     so many principles and rules thereof, as shall serue not only
+     for my better instruction, but also for the contentment and
+     satisfaction of you al. For I nothing doubt, but that euery
+     one of you will be glad to heare so profitable a discourse and
+     thinke the time very wel spent wherin so excellent a knowledge
+     shal be reuealed unto you, from which euery one may be assured
+     to gather some fruit as wel as myselfe.
+
+     Therefore (said I), turning myselfe to _M. Spenser_, It is you
+     sir, to whom it pertaineth to shew yourselfe courteous now
+     unto vs all and to make vs all beholding unto you for the
+     pleasure and profit which we shall gather from your speeches,
+     if you shall vouchsafe to open unto vs the goodly cabinet, in
+     which this excellent treasure of vertues lieth locked up from
+     the vulgar sort. And thereof in the behalfe of all as for
+     myselfe, I do most earnestly intreate you not to say vs nay.
+     Vnto which wordes of mine euery man applauding most with like
+     words of request and the rest with gesture and countenances
+     expressing as much, _M. Spenser_ answered in this maner:
+
+     Though it may seeme hard for me, to refuse the request made by
+     you all, whom euery one alone, I should for many respects be
+     willing to gratifie; yet as the case standeth, I doubt not but
+     with the consent of the most part of you, I shall be excused
+     at this time of this taske which would be laid vpon me; for
+     sure I am, that it is not vnknowne unto you, that I haue
+     alreedy vndertaken a work tending to the same effect, which is
+     in _heroical verse_ under the title of a _Faerie Queene_ to
+     represent all the moral vertues, assigning to euery vertue a
+     Knight to be the patron and defender of the same, in whose
+     actions and feates of arms and chiualry the operations of that
+     vertue, whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed, and
+     the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against
+     the same, to be beaten down and ouercome. Which work, _as I
+     haue already well entred into_, if God shall please to spare
+     me life that I may finish it according to my mind, your wish
+     (_M. Bryskett_) will be in some sort accomplished, though
+     perhaps not so effectually as you could desire. And the same
+     may very well serue for my excuse, if at this time I craue to
+     be forborne in this your request, since any discourse, that I
+     might make thus on the sudden in such a subject would be but
+     simple, and little to your satisfactions. For it would require
+     good aduisement and premeditation for any man to vndertake the
+     declaration of these points that you have proposed, containing
+     in effect the Ethicke part of Morall Philosophie. Whereof
+     since I haue taken in hand to discourse at large in my poeme
+     before spoken, I hope the expectation of that work may serue
+     to free me at this time from speaking in that matter,
+     notwithstanding your motion and all your intreaties. But I
+     will tell you how I thinke by himselfe he may very well excuse
+     my speech, and yet satisfie all you in this matter. I haue
+     seene (as he knoweth) a translation made by himselfe out of
+     the Italian tongue of a dialogue comprehending all the Ethick
+     part of Moral Philosophy written by one of those three he
+     formerly mentioned, and that is by _Giraldi_ vnder the title
+     of a Dialogue of Ciuil life. If it please him to bring us
+     forth that translation to be here read among vs, or otherwise
+     to deliuer to us, as his memory may serue him, the contents of
+     the same; he shal (I warrant you) satisfie you all at the ful,
+     and himselfe wil haue no cause but to thinke the time well
+     spent in reuiewing his labors, especially in the company of so
+     many his friends, who may thereby reape much profit, and the
+     translation happily fare the better by some mending it may
+     receiue in the perusing, as all writings else may do by the
+     often examination of the same. Neither let it trouble him that
+     I so turne ouer to him againe the taske he wold haue put me
+     to; for it falleth out fit for him to verifie the principall
+     of all this Apologie, euen now made for himselfe; because
+     thereby it will appeare that he hath not withdrawne himselfe
+     from seruice of the state to liue idle or wholly priuate to
+     himselfe, but hath spent some time in doing that which may
+     greatly benefit others, and hath serued not a little to the
+     bettering of his owne mind, and increasing of his knowledge;
+     though he for modesty pretend much ignorance, and pleade want
+     in wealth, much like some rich beggars, who either of custom,
+     or for couetousnes, go to begge of others those things whereof
+     they haue no want at home.
+
+     With this answer of _M. Spensers_ it seemed that all the
+     company were wel satisfied, for after some few speeches
+     whereby they had shewed an extreme longing after his worke of
+     the _Fairie Queene_, _whereof some parcels had been by some of
+     them seene_, they all began to presse me to produce my
+     translation mentioned by _M. Spenser_ that it might be perused
+     among them; or else that I should (as near as I could) deliuer
+     unto them the contents of the same, supposing that my memory
+     would not much faile me in a thing so studied and advisedly
+     set downe in writing as a translation must be."
+
+A poet at this time still had to justify his employment by presenting
+himself in the character of a professed teacher of morality, with a
+purpose as definite and formal, though with a different method, as the
+preacher in the pulpit. Even with this profession, he had to encounter
+many prejudices, and men of gravity and wisdom shook their heads at what
+they thought his idle trifling. But if he wished to be counted
+respectable, and to separate himself from the crowd of foolish or
+licentious rimers, he must intend distinctly, not merely to interest,
+but to instruct, by his new and deep conceits. It was under the
+influence of this persuasion that Spenser laid down the plan of the
+_Faery Queen_. It was, so he proposed to himself, to be a work on moral,
+and if time were given him, political philosophy, composed with as
+serious a didactic aim, as any treatise or sermon in prose. He deems it
+necessary to explain and excuse his work by claiming for it this design.
+He did not venture to send the _Faery Queen_ into the world without also
+telling the world its moral meaning and bearing. He cannot trust it to
+tell its own story or suggest its real drift. In the letter to Sir W.
+Ralegh, accompanying the first portion of it, he unfolds elaborately the
+sense of his allegory, as he expounded it to his friends in Dublin. "To
+some," he says, "I know this method will seem displeasant, which had
+rather have good discipline delivered plainly by way of precept, or
+sermoned at large, as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in
+allegorical devises." He thought that Homer and Virgil and Ariosto had
+thus written poetry, to teach the world moral virtue and political
+wisdom. He attempted to propitiate Lord Burghley, who hated him and his
+verses, by setting before him in a dedication sonnet, the true intent of
+his--
+
+                                Idle rimes;
+     The labour of lost time and wit unstaid;
+     Yet if their deeper sense he inly weighed,
+     And the dim veil, with which from common view
+     Their fairer parts are hid, aside be laid,
+     Perhaps not vain they may appear to you.
+
+In earlier and in later times, men do not apologize for being poets; and
+Spenser himself was deceived in giving himself credit for this direct
+purpose to instruct, when he was really following the course marked out
+by his genius. But he only conformed to the curious utilitarian spirit
+which pervaded the literature of the time. Readers were supposed to look
+everywhere for a moral to be drawn, or a lesson to be inculcated, or
+some practical rules to be avowedly and definitely deduced; and they
+could not yet take in the idea that the exercise of the speculative and
+imaginative faculties may be its own end, and may have indirect
+influences and utilities even greater than if it was guided by a
+conscious intention to be edifying and instructive.
+
+The first great English poem of modern times, the first creation of
+English imaginative power since Chaucer, and like Chaucer so thoroughly
+and characteristically English, was not written in England. Whatever
+Spenser may have done to it before he left England with Lord Grey, and
+whatever portions of earlier composition may have been used and worked
+up into the poem as it went on, the bulk of the _Faery Queen_, as we
+have it, was composed in what to Spenser and his friends was almost a
+foreign land--in the conquered and desolated wastes of wild and
+barbarous Ireland. It is a feature of his work on which Spenser himself
+dwells. In the verses which usher in his poem, addressed to the great
+men of Elizabeth's court, he presents his work to the Earl of Ormond, as
+
+     The wild fruit which salvage soil hath bred;
+     Which being through long wars left almost waste,
+     With brutish barbarism is overspread;--
+
+and in the same strain to Lord Grey, he speaks of his "rude rimes, the
+which a rustic muse did weave, in salvage soil." It is idle to speculate
+what difference of form the _Faery Queen_ might have received, if the
+design had been carried out in the peace of England and in the society
+of London. But it is certain that the scene of trouble and danger in
+which it grew up greatly affected it. This may possibly account, though
+it is questionable, for the looseness of texture, and the want of
+accuracy and finish which is sometimes to be seen in it. Spenser was a
+learned poet; and his poem has the character of the work of a man of
+wide reading, but without books to verify or correct. It cannot be
+doubted that his life in Ireland added to the force and vividness with
+which Spenser wrote. In Ireland, he had before his eyes continually, the
+dreary world which the poet of knight errantry imagines. There men might
+in good truth travel long through wildernesses and "great woods" given
+over to the outlaw and the ruffian. There the avenger of wrong need
+seldom want for perilous adventure and the occasion for quelling the
+oppressor. There the armed and unrelenting hand of right was but too
+truly the only substitute for law. There might be found in most certain
+and prosaic reality, the ambushes, the disguises, the treacheries, the
+deceits and temptations, even the supposed witchcrafts and enchantments,
+against which the fairy champions of the virtues have to be on their
+guard. In Ireland, Englishmen saw, or at any rate thought they saw, a
+universal conspiracy of fraud against righteousness, a universal battle
+going on between error and religion, between justice and the most
+insolent selfishness. They found there every type of what was cruel,
+brutal, loathsome. They saw everywhere men whose business it was to
+betray and destroy, women whose business it was to tempt and ensnare and
+corrupt. They thought that they saw too, in those who waged the Queen's
+wars, all forms of manly and devoted gallantry, of noble generosity, of
+gentle strength, of knightly sweetness and courtesy. There were those,
+too, who failed in the hour of trial; who were the victims of temptation
+or of the victorious strength of evil. Besides the open or concealed
+traitors, the Desmonds, and Kildares, and O'Neales, there were the men
+who were entrapped and overcome, and the men who disappointed hopes, and
+became recreants to their faith and loyalty; like Sir William Stanley,
+who, after a brilliant career in Ireland, turned traitor and apostate,
+and gave up Deventer and his Irish bands to the King of Spain.
+
+The realities of the Irish wars and of Irish social and political life
+gave a real subject, gave body and form to the allegory. There in actual
+flesh and blood were enemies to be fought with by the good and true.
+There in visible fact were the vices and falsehoods, which Arthur and
+his companions were to quell and punish. There in living truth were
+_Sansfoy_, and _Sansloy_, and _Sansjoy_; there were _Orgoglio_ and
+_Grantorto_, the witcheries of _Acrasia_ and _Phaedria_, the insolence of
+_Briana_ and _Crudor_. And there, too, were real Knights of goodness and
+the Gospel--Grey, and Ormond, and Ralegh, the Norreyses, St. Leger, and
+Maltby--on a real mission from Gloriana's noble realm to destroy the
+enemies of truth and virtue.
+
+The allegory bodies forth the trials which beset the life of man in all
+conditions and at all times. But Spenser could never have seen in
+England such a strong and perfect image of the allegory itself--with the
+wild wanderings of its personages, its daily chances of battle and
+danger, its hairbreadth escapes, its strange encounters, its prevailing
+anarchy and violence, its normal absence of order and law--as he had
+continually and customarily before him in Ireland. "The curse of God was
+so great," writes John Hooker, a contemporary, "and the land so barren
+both of man and beast, that whosoever did travel from one end to the
+other of all Munster, even from Waterford to Smerwick, about six score
+miles, he should not meet man, woman, or child, saving in cities or
+towns, nor yet see any beast, save foxes, wolves or other ravening
+beasts." It is the desolation through which Spenser's knights pursue
+their solitary way, or join company as they can. Indeed to read the same
+writer's account, for instance, of Ralegh's adventures with the Irish
+chieftains, his challenges and single combats, his escapes at fords and
+woods, is like reading bits of the _Faery Queen_ in prose. As Spenser
+chose to write of knight errantry, his picture of it has doubtless
+gained in truth and strength by his very practical experience of what
+such life as he describes must be. The _Faery Queen_ might almost be
+called the Epic of the English wars in Ireland under Elizabeth, as much
+as the Epic of English virtue and valour at the same period.
+
+At the Dublin meeting described by Bryskett, some time later than 1584,
+Spenser had already "well entered into" his work. In 1589, he came to
+England, bringing with him the first three books; and early in 1590,
+they were published. Spenser himself has told us the story of this first
+appearance of the _Faery Queen_. The person who discovered the
+extraordinary work of genius which was growing up amid the turbulence
+and misery and despair of Ireland, and who once more brought its author
+into the centre of English life, was Walter Ralegh. Ralegh had served
+through much of the Munster war. He had shown in Ireland some of the
+characteristic points of his nature, which made him at once the glory
+and shame of English manhood. He had begun to take a prominent place in
+any business in which he engaged. He had shown his audacity, his
+self-reliance, his resource, and some signs of that boundless but
+prudent ambition which marked his career. He had shown that freedom of
+tongue, that restless and high-reaching inventiveness, and that tenacity
+of opinion, which made him a difficult person for others to work with.
+Like so many of the English captains, he hated Ormond, and saw in his
+feud with the Desmonds the real cause of the hopeless disorder of
+Munster. But also he incurred the displeasure and suspicion of Lord
+Grey, who equally disliked the great Irish Chief, but who saw in the
+"plot" which Ralegh sent to Burghley for the pacification of Munster, an
+adventurer's impracticable and self-seeking scheme. "I must be plain,"
+he writes, "I like neither his carriage nor his company." Ralegh had
+been at Smerwick: he had been in command of one of the bands put in by
+Lord Grey to do the execution. On Lord Grey's departure he had become
+one of the leading persons among the undertakers for the planting of
+Munster. He had secured for himself a large share of the Desmond lands.
+In 1587, an agreement among the undertakers assigned to Sir Walter
+Ralegh, his associates and tenants, three seignories of 12,000 acres
+a-piece, and one of 6000, in Cork and Waterford. But before Lord Grey's
+departure, Ralegh had left Ireland, and had found the true field for his
+ambition, in the English court. From 1582 to 1589, he had shared with
+Leicester and Hatton and afterwards with Essex, the special favour of
+the Queen. He had become Warden of the Stannaries and Captain of the
+Guard. He had undertaken the adventure of founding a new realm in
+America under the name of Virginia. He had obtained grants of
+monopolies, farms of wines, Babington's forfeited estates. His own great
+ship, which he had built, the Ark Ralegh, had carried the flag of the
+High Admiral of England in the glorious but terrible summer of 1588. He
+joined in that tremendous sea-chase from Plymouth to the North Sea,
+when, as Spenser wrote to Lord Howard of Effingham--
+
+         Those huge castles of Castilian King,
+     That vainly threatened kingdoms to displace,
+     Like flying doves, ye did before you chase.
+
+In the summer of 1589, Ralegh had been busy, as men of the sea were
+then, half Queen's servants, half buccaneers, in gathering the abundant
+spoils to be found on the high seas; and he had been with Sir John
+Norreys and Sir Francis Drake in a bootless but not unprofitable
+expedition to Lisbon. On his return from the Portugal voyage his court
+fortunes underwent a change. Essex, who had long scorned "that knave
+Ralegh," was in the ascendant. Ralegh found the Queen, for some reason
+or another, and reasons were not hard to find, offended and dangerous.
+He bent before the storm. In the end of the summer of 1589, he was in
+Ireland, looking after his large seignories, his law-suits with the old
+proprietors, his castle at Lismore, and his schemes for turning to
+account his woods for the manufacture of pipe staves for the French and
+Spanish wine trade.
+
+He visited Spenser, who was his neighbour, at Kilcolman, and the visit
+led to important consequences. The record of it and of the events which
+followed, is preserved in a curious poem of Spenser's written two or
+three years later, and of much interest in regard to Spenser's personal
+history. Taking up the old pastoral form of the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
+with the familiar rustic names of the swains who figured in its
+dialogues,--Hobbinol, Cuddie, Rosalind, and his own Colin Clout,--he
+described under the usual poetical disguise, the circumstances which
+once more took him back from Ireland to the court. The court was the
+place to which all persons wishing to push their way in the world were
+attracted. It was not only the centre of all power, the source of
+favours and honours, the seat of all that swayed the destiny of the
+nation. It was the home of refinement, and wit, and cultivation, the
+place where eminence of all kinds was supposed to be collected, and to
+which all ambitions, literary as much as political, aspired. It was not
+only a royal court; it was also a great club. Spenser's poem shows us
+how he had sped there, and the impressions made on his mind by a closer
+view of the persons and the ways of that awful and dazzling scene,
+which exercised such a spell upon Englishmen, and which seemed to
+combine or concentrate in itself the glory and the goodness of heaven,
+and all the baseness and malignity of earth. The occasion deserved a
+full celebration; it was indeed a turning-point in his life, for it led
+to the publication of the _Faery Queen_, and to the immediate and
+enthusiastic recognition by the Englishmen of the time of his unrivalled
+pre-eminence as a poet. In this poetical record, _Colin Clout's come
+home again_, containing in it history, criticism, satire, personal
+recollections, love passages, we have the picture of his recollections
+of the flush and excitement of those months which saw the first
+appearance of the _Faery Queen_. He describes the interruption of his
+retired and, as he paints it, peaceful and pastoral life in his Irish
+home, by the appearance of Ralegh, the "Shepherd of the Ocean," from
+"the main sea deep." They may have been thrown together before. Both had
+been patronized by Leicester. Both had been together at Smerwick, and
+probably in other passages of the Munster war; both had served under
+Lord Grey, Spenser's master, though he had been no lover of Ralegh. In
+their different degrees, Ralegh with his two or three Seignories of half
+a county, and Spenser with his more modest estate, they were embarked in
+the same enterprise, the plantation of Munster. But Ralegh now appeared
+before Spenser in all the glory of a brilliant favourite, the soldier,
+the explorer, the daring sea-captain, the founder of plantations across
+the ocean, and withal, the poet, the ready and eloquent discourser, the
+true judge and measurer of what was great or beautiful.
+
+The time, too, was one at once of excitement and repose. Men felt as
+they feel after a great peril, a great effort, a great relief; as the
+Greeks did after Salamis and Plataea, as our fathers did after Waterloo.
+In the struggle in the Channel with the might of Spain, England had
+recognized its force and its prospects. One of those solemn moments had
+just passed when men see before them the course of the world turned one
+way, when it might have been turned another. All the world had been
+looking out to see what would come to pass; and nowhere more eagerly
+than in Ireland. Every one, English and Irish alike, stood agaze to "see
+how the game would be played." The great fleet, as it drew near, "worked
+wonderfully uncertain yet calm humours in the people, not daring to
+disclose their real intention." When all was decided, and the distressed
+ships were cast away on the western coast, the Irish showed as much zeal
+as the English in fulfilling the orders of the Irish council, to
+"apprehend and execute all Spaniards found there of what quality
+soever." These were the impressions under which the two men met. Ralegh,
+at the moment, was under a cloud. In the poetical fancy picture set
+before us--
+
+     His song was all a lamentable lay
+     Of great unkindnesse, and of usage hard,
+     Of Cynthia the Ladie of the Sea,
+     Which from her presence faultlesse him debard.
+     And ever and anon, with singults rife,
+     He cryed out, to make his undersong;
+     Ah! my loves queene, and goddesse of my life,
+     Who shall me pittie, when thou doest me wrong?
+
+At Kilcolman, Ralegh became acquainted with what Spenser had done of the
+_Faery Queen_. His rapid and clear judgment showed him how immeasurably
+it rose above all that had yet been produced under the name of poetry in
+England. That alone is sufficient to account for his eager desire that
+it should be known in England. But Ralegh always had an eye to his own
+affairs, marred as they so often were by ill-fortune and his own
+mistakes; and he may have thought of making his peace with Cynthia, by
+reintroducing at Court the friend of Philip Sidney, now ripened into a
+poet not unworthy of Gloriana's greatness. This is Colin Clout's
+account:--
+
+     When thus our pipes we both had wearied well,
+     (Quoth he) and each an end of singing made,
+     He gan to cast great lyking to my lore,
+     And great dislyking to my lucklesse lot,
+     That banisht had my selfe, like wight forlore,
+     Into that waste, where I was quite forgot.
+     The which to leave, thenceforth he counseld mee,
+     Unmeet for man, in whom was ought regardfull,
+     And wend with him, his Cynthia to see:
+     Whose grace was great, and bounty most rewardfull;
+     Besides her peerlesse skill in making well,
+     And all the ornaments of wondrous wit,
+     Such as all womankynd did far excell,
+     Such as the world admyr'd, and praised it.
+     So what with hope of good, and hate of ill,
+     He me perswaded forth with him to fare.
+     Nought tooke I with me, but mine oaten quill:
+     Small needments else need shepheard to prepare.
+     So to the sea we came; the sea, that is
+     A world of waters heaped up on hie,
+     Rolling like mountaines in wide wildernesse,
+     Horrible, hideous, roaring with hoarse crie.
+
+This is followed by a spirited description of a sea-voyage, and of that
+empire of the seas in which, since the overthrow of the Armada, England
+and England's mistress were now claiming to be supreme, and of which
+Ralegh was one of the most active and distinguished officers:--
+
+     And yet as ghastly dreadfull, as it seemes,
+     Bold men, presuming life for gaine to sell,
+     Dare tempt that gulf, and in those wandring stremes
+     Seek waies unknowne, waies leading down to hell.
+     For, as we stood there waiting on the strond,
+     Behold! an huge great vessell to us came,
+     Dauncing upon the waters back to lond,
+     As if it scornd the daunger of the same;
+     Yet was it but a wooden frame and fraile,
+     Glewed togither with some subtile matter.
+     Yet had it armes and wings, and head and taile,
+     And life to move it selfe upon the water.
+     Strange thing! how bold and swift the monster was,
+     That neither car'd for wind, nor haile, nor raine,
+     Nor swelling waves, but thorough them did passe
+     So proudly, that she made them roare againe.
+     The same aboord us gently did receave,
+     And without harme us farre away did beare,
+     So farre that land, our mother, us did leave,
+     And nought but sea and heaven to us appeare.
+     Then hartlesse quite, and full of inward feare,
+     That shepheard I besought to me to tell,
+     Under what skie, or in what world we were,
+     In which I saw no living people dwell.
+     Who, me recomforting all that he might,
+     Told me that that same was the Regiment
+     Of a great Shepheardesse, that Cynthia hight,
+     His liege, his Ladie, and his lifes Regent.
+
+This is the poetical version of Ralegh's appreciation of the treasure
+which he had lighted on in Ireland, and of what he did to make it known
+to the admiration and delight of England. He returned to the Court, and
+Spenser with him. Again, for what reason we know not, he was received
+into favour. The poet, who accompanied him, was brought to the presence
+of the lady, who saw herself in "various mirrors,"--Cynthia, Gloriana,
+Belphoebe, as she heard him read portions of the great poem which was
+to add a new glory to her reign.
+
+       "The Shepheard of the Ocean (quoth he)
+     Unto that Goddesse grace me first enhanced,
+     And to mine oaten pipe enclin'd her eare,
+     That she thenceforth therein gan take delight;
+     And it desir'd at timely houres to heare,
+     All were my notes but rude and roughly dight;
+     For not by measure of her owne great mynde,
+     And wondrous worth, she mott my simple song,
+     But joyd that country shepheard ought could fynd
+     Worth harkening to, emongst the learned throng."
+
+He had already too well caught the trick of flattery--flattery in a
+degree almost inconceivable to us--which the fashions of the time, and
+the Queen's strange self-deceit, exacted from the loyalty and enthusiasm
+of Englishmen. In that art Ralegh was only too apt a teacher. Colin
+Clout, in his story of his recollections of the Court, lets us see how
+he was taught to think and to speak there:--
+
+     But if I her like ought on earth might read,
+     I would her lyken to a crowne of lillies,
+     Upon a virgin brydes adorned head,
+     With Roses dight and Goolds and Daffadillies;
+     Or like the circlet of a Turtle true,
+     In which all colours of the rainbow bee;
+     Or like faire Phebes garlond shining new,
+     In which all pure perfection one may see.
+     But vaine it is to thinke, by paragone
+     Of earthly things, to judge of things divine:
+     Her power, her mercy, her wisdome, none
+     Can deeme, but who the Godhead can define.
+     Why then do I, base shepheard, bold and blind,
+     Presume the things so sacred to prophane?
+     More fit it is t' adore, with humble mind,
+     The image of the heavens in shape humane.
+
+The Queen, who heard herself thus celebrated, celebrated not only as a
+semi-divine person, but as herself unrivalled in the art of "making" or
+poetry,--"her peerless skill in making well,"--granted Spenser a pension
+of 50_l._ a year, which, it is said, the prosaic and frugal Lord
+Treasurer, always hard-driven for money and not caring much for poets,
+made difficulties about paying. But the new poem was not for the
+Queen's ear only. In the registers of the Stationers' Company occurs the
+following entry:--
+
+                                      Primo die Decembris [1589].
+
+     Mr. Ponsonbye--Entered for his Copye, a book intytuled the
+     _fayrye Queene_ dysposed into xij bookes &c., authorysed under
+     thandes of the Archbishop of Canterbery and bothe the Wardens.
+
+                                                           vj{d.}
+
+Thus, between pamphlets of the hour,--an account of the Arms of the City
+Companies on one side, and the last news from France on the other,--the
+first of our great modern English poems was licensed to make its
+appearance. It appeared soon after, with the date of 1590. It was not
+the twelve books, but only the first three. It was accompanied and
+introduced, as usual, by a great host of commendatory and laudatory
+sonnets and poems. All the leading personages at Elizabeth's court were
+appealed to; according to their several tastes or their relations to the
+poet, they are humbly asked to befriend, or excuse, or welcome his
+poetical venture. The list itself is worth quoting:--Sir Christopher
+Hatton, then Lord Chancellor, the Earls of Essex, Oxford,
+Northumberland, Ormond, Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord Grey of Wilton,
+Sir Walter Ralegh, Lord Burleigh, the Earl of Cumberland, Lord Hunsdon,
+Lord Buckhurst, Walsingham, Sir John Norris, President of Munster. He
+addresses Lady Pembroke, in remembrance of her brother, that "heroic
+spirit," "the glory of our days,"
+
+     Who first my Muse did lift out of the floor,
+     To sing his sweet delights in lowly lays.
+
+And he finishes with a sonnet to Lady Carew, one of Sir John Spencer's
+daughters, and another to "all the gracious and beautiful ladies of the
+Court," in which "the world's pride seems to be gathered." There come
+also congratulations and praises for himself. Ralegh addressed to him a
+fine but extravagant sonnet, in which he imagined Petrarch weeping for
+envy at the approval of the _Faery Queen_, while "Oblivion laid him down
+on Laura's hearse," and even Homer trembled for his fame. Gabriel Harvey
+revoked his judgment on the _Elvish Queen_, and not without some regret
+for less ambitious days in the past, cheered on his friend in his noble
+enterprise. Gabriel Harvey has been so much, and not without reason,
+laughed at, and yet his verses welcoming the _Faery Queen_ are so full
+of true and warm friendship, and of unexpected refinement and grace,
+that it is but just to cite them. In the eyes of the world he was an
+absurd personage: but Spenser saw in him perhaps his worthiest and
+trustiest friend. A generous and simple affection has almost got the
+better in them of pedantry and false taste.
+
+     Collyn, I see, by thy new taken taske,
+       Some sacred fury hath enricht thy braynes,
+     That leades thy muse in haughty verse to maske,
+       And loath the layes that longs to lowly swaynes;
+     That lifts thy notes from Shepheardes unto kinges:
+     So like the lively Larke that mounting singes.
+
+     Thy lovely Rosolinde seemes now forlorne,
+       And all thy gentle flockes forgotten quight:
+     Thy chaunged hart now holdes thy pypes in scorne,
+       Those prety pypes that did thy mates delight;
+     Those trusty mates, that loved thee so well;
+     Whom thou gav'st mirth, as they gave thee the bell.
+
+     Yet, as thou earst with thy sweete roundelayes
+       Didst stirre to glee our laddes in homely bowers;
+     So moughtst thou now in these refyned layes
+       Delight the daintie eares of higher powers:
+     And so mought they, in their deepe skanning skill,
+     Alow and grace our Collyns flowing quyll.
+
+     And faire befall that _Faery Queene_ of thine,
+       In whose faire eyes love linckt with vertue sittes;
+     Enfusing, by those bewties fyers devyne,
+       Such high conceites into thy humble wittes,
+     As raised hath poore pastors oaten reedes
+     From rustick tunes, to chaunt heroique deedes.
+
+     So mought thy _Redcrosse Knight_ with happy hand
+       Victorious be in that faire Ilands right,
+     Which thou dost vayle in Type of Faery land,
+       Elizas blessed field, that _Albion_ hight:
+     That shieldes her friendes, and warres her mightie foes,
+     Yet still with people, peace, and plentie flowes.
+
+     But (jolly shepheard) though with pleasing style
+       Thou feast the humour of the Courtly trayne,
+     Let not conceipt thy setled sence beguile,
+       Ne daunted be through envy or disdaine.
+     Subject thy dome to her Empyring spright,
+     From whence thy Muse, and all the world, takes light.
+
+                                                        HOBYNOLL.
+
+And to the Queen herself Spenser presented his work, in one of the
+boldest dedications perhaps ever penned:--
+
+                                  To
+               The Most High, Mightie, and Magnificent
+                              Empresse,
+       Renowmed for piety, vertve, and all gratiovs government,
+                              ELIZABETH,
+                         By the Grace of God,
+      Qveene of England, Fravnce, and Ireland, and of Virginia,
+                     Defendovr of the Faith, &c.
+                       Her most hvmble Servavnt
+                           EDMVND SPENSER,
+                       Doth, in all hvmilitie,
+                  Dedicate, present, and consecrate
+                          These his labovrs,
+               To live with the eternitie of her fame.
+
+"To live with the eternity of her fame,"--the claim was a proud one, but
+it has proved a prophecy. The publication of the _Faery Queen_ placed
+him at once and for his lifetime at the head of all living English
+poets. The world of his day immediately acknowledged the charm and
+perfection of the new work of art which had taken it by surprise. As far
+as appears, it was welcomed heartily and generously. Spenser speaks in
+places of envy and detraction, and he, like others, had no doubt his
+rivals and enemies. But little trace of censure appears, except in the
+stories about Burghley's dislike of him, as an idle rimer, and perhaps
+as a friend of his opponents. But his brother poets, men like Lodge and
+Drayton, paid honour, though in quaint phrases, to the learned Colin,
+the reverend Colin, the excellent and cunning Colin. A greater than
+they, if we may trust his editors, takes him as the representative of
+poetry, which is so dear to him.
+
+     If music and sweet poetry agree,
+     As they must needs, the sister and the brother,
+     Then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me,
+     Because thou lov'st the one, and I the other.
+     _Dowland_ to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
+     Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
+     _Spenser_ to me, whose deep conceit is such
+     As passing all conceit, needs no defence.
+     Thou lov'st to hear the sweet melodious sound
+     That Phoebus' lute, the queen of music, makes;
+     And I in deep delight am chiefly drown'd
+     Whenas himself to singing he betakes.
+     One god is god of both, as poets feign;
+     One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.
+
+               (_Shakespere_, in the _Passionate Pilgrim_, 1599.)
+
+Even the fierce pamphleteer, Thomas Nash, the scourge and torment of
+poor Gabriel Harvey, addresses Harvey's friend as heavenly Spenser, and
+extols "the Faery Singers' stately tuned verse." Spenser's title to be
+the "Poet of poets," was at once acknowledged as by acclamation. And he
+himself has no difficulty in accepting his position. In some lines on
+the death of a friend's wife, whom he laments and praises, the idea
+presents itself that the great queen may not approve of her Shepherd
+wasting his lays on meaner persons; and he puts into his friend's mouth
+a deprecation of her possible jealousy. The lines are characteristic,
+both in their beauty and music, and in the strangeness, in our eyes, of
+the excuse made for the poet.
+
+     Ne let Eliza, royall Shepheardesse,
+     The praises of my parted love envy,
+     For she hath praises in all plenteousnesse
+     Powr'd upon her, like showers of Castaly,
+     By her own Shepheard, Colin, her owne Shepheard,
+     That her with heavenly hymnes doth deifie,
+     Of rustick muse full hardly to be betterd.
+
+     She is the Rose, the glorie of the day,
+     And mine the Primrose in the lowly shade:
+     Mine, ah! not mine; amisse I mine did say:
+     Not mine, but His, which mine awhile her made;
+     Mine to be His, with him to live for ay.
+     O that so faire a flower so soone should fade,
+     And through untimely tempest fall away!
+
+     She fell away in her first ages spring,
+     Whil'st yet her leafe was greene, and fresh her rinde,
+     And whilst her braunch faire blossomes foorth did bring,
+     She fell away against all course of kinde.
+     For age to dye is right, but youth is wrong;
+     She fel away like fruit blowne downe with winde.
+     Weepe, Shepheard! weepe, to make my undersong.
+
+Thus in both his literary enterprises, Spenser had been signally
+successful. The _Shepherd's Calendar_ in 1580 had immediately raised
+high hopes of his powers. The _Faery Queen_ in 1590 had more than
+fulfilled them. In the interval a considerable change had happened in
+English cultivation. Shakespere had come to London, though the world
+did not yet know all that he was. Sidney had published his _Defense of
+Poesie_, and had written the _Arcadia_, though it was not yet published.
+Marlowe had begun to write, and others beside him were preparing the
+change which was to come on the English Drama. Two scholars who had
+shared with Spenser in the bounty of Robert Newell were beginning, in
+different lines, to raise the level of thought and style. Hooker was
+beginning to give dignity to controversy, and to show what English prose
+might rise to. Lancelot Andrewes, Spenser's junior at school and
+college, was training himself at St. Paul's, to lead the way to a larger
+and higher kind of preaching than the English clergy had yet reached.
+The change of scene from Ireland to the centre of English interests,
+must have been, as Spenser describes it, very impressive. England was
+alive with aspiration and effort; imaginations were inflamed and hearts
+stirred by the deeds of men who described with the same energy with
+which they acted. Amid such influences, and with such a friend as
+Ralegh, Spenser may naturally have been tempted by some of the dreams of
+advancement of which Ralegh's soul was full. There is strong
+probability, from the language of his later poems, that he indulged such
+hopes, and that they were disappointed. A year after the entry in the
+Stationers' Register of the _Faery Queen_ (29 Dec., 1590), Ponsonby, his
+publisher, entered a volume of "_Complaints, containing sundry small
+poems of the World's Vanity_," to which he prefixed the following
+notice.
+
+     THE PRINTER TO THE GENTLE READER.
+
+     SINCE my late setting foorth of the _Faerie Queene_, finding
+     that it hath found a favourable passage amongst you, I have
+     sithence endevoured by all good meanes (for the better
+     encrease and accomplishment of your delights,) to get into my
+     handes such smale Poemes of the same Authors, as I heard were
+     disperst abroad in sundrie hands, and not easie to bee come
+     by, by himselfe; some of them having bene diverslie imbeziled
+     and purloyned from him since his departure over Sea. Of the
+     which I have, by good meanes, gathered togeather these fewe
+     parcels present, which I have caused to bee imprinted
+     altogeather, for that they al seeme to containe like matter of
+     argument in them; being all complaints and meditations of the
+     worlds vanitie, verie grave and profitable. To which effect I
+     understand that he besides wrote sundrie others, namelie
+     _Ecclesiastes_ and _Canticum canticorum_ translated, _A
+     senights slumber_, _The hell of lovers_, _his Purgatorie_,
+     being all dedicated to Ladies; so as it may seeme he ment them
+     all to one volume. Besides some other Pamphlets looselie
+     scattered abroad, as _The dying Pellican_, _The howers of the
+     Lord_, _The sacrifice of a sinner_, _The seven Psalmes_, &c.,
+     which when I can, either by himselfe or otherwise, attaine
+     too, I meane likewise for your favour sake to set foorth. In
+     the meane time, praying you gentlie to accept of these, and
+     graciouslie to entertaine the new Poet, _I take leave_.
+
+The collection is a miscellaneous one, both as to subjects and date: it
+contains among other things, the translations from Petrarch and Du
+Bellay, which had appeared in Vander Noodt's _Theatre of Worldlings_, in
+1569. But there are also some pieces of later date; and they disclose
+not only personal sorrows and griefs, but also an experience which had
+ended in disgust and disappointment. In spite of Ralegh's friendship, he
+had found that in the Court he was not likely to thrive. The two
+powerful men who had been his earliest friends had disappeared. Philip
+Sidney had died in 1586; Leicester, soon after the destruction of the
+Armada, in 1588. And they had been followed (April, 1590) by Sidney's
+powerful father-in-law, Francis Walsingham. The death of Leicester,
+untended, unlamented, powerfully impressed Spenser, always keenly alive
+to the pathetic vicissitudes of human greatness. In one of these pieces,
+_The Ruins of Time_, addressed to Sidney's sister, the Countess of
+Pembroke, Spenser thus imagines the death of Leicester,--
+
+     It is not long, since these two eyes beheld
+     A mightie Prince, of most renowmed race,
+     Whom England high in count of honour held,
+     And greatest ones did sue to gaine his grace;
+     Of greatest ones he, greatest in his place,
+     Sate in the bosome of his Soveraine,
+     And _Right and loyall_ did his word maintaine.
+
+     I saw him die, I saw him die, as one
+     Of the meane people, and brought foorth on beare;
+     I saw him die, and no man left to mone
+     His dolefull fate, that late him loved deare:
+     Scarse anie left to close his eylids neare;
+     Scarse anie left upon his lips to laie
+     The sacred sod, or Requiem to saie.
+
+     O! trustless state of miserable men,
+     That builde your blis on hope of earthly thing,
+     And vainlie thinke your selves halfe happie then,
+     When painted faces with smooth flattering
+     Doo fawne on you, and your wide praises sing;
+     And, when the courting masker louteth lowe,
+     Him true in heart and trustie to you trow.
+
+For Sidney, the darling of the time, who had been to him not merely a
+cordial friend, but the realized type of all that was glorious in
+manhood, and beautiful in character and gifts, his mourning was more
+than that of a looker-on at a moving instance of the frailty of
+greatness. It was the poet's sorrow for the poet, who had almost been to
+him what the elder brother is to the younger. Both now, and in later
+years, his affection for one who was become to him a glorified saint,
+showed itself in deep and genuine expression, through the affectations
+which crowned the "herse" of Astrophel and Philisides. He was persuaded
+that Sidney's death had been a grave blow to literature and learning.
+The _Ruins of Time_, and still more the _Tears of the Muses_, are full
+of lamentations over returning barbarism and ignorance, and the slight
+account made by those in power of the gifts and the arts of the writer,
+the poet, and the dramatist. Under what was popularly thought the
+crabbed and parsimonious administration of Burghley, and with the
+churlishness of the Puritans, whom he was supposed to foster, it seemed
+as if the poetry of the time was passing away in chill discouragement.
+The effect is described in lines which, as we now naturally suppose, and
+Dryden also thought, can refer to no one but Shakespere. But it seems
+doubtful whether all this could have been said of Shakespere in 1590. It
+seems more likely that this also is an extravagant compliment to Philip
+Sidney, and his masking performances. He was lamented elsewhere under
+the poetical name of _Willy_. If it refers to him, it was probably
+written before his death, though not published till after it; for the
+lines imply, not that he is literally dead, but that he is in
+retirement. The expression that he is "dead of late," is explained in
+four lines below, as "choosing to sit in idle cell," and is one of
+Spenser's common figures for inactivity or sorrow.[107:1]
+
+The verses are the lamentations of the Muse of Comedy.
+
+     THALIA.
+
+     Where be the sweete delights of learning's treasure
+     That wont with Comick sock to beautefie
+     The painted Theaters, and fill with pleasure
+     The listners eyes and eares with melodie;
+     In which I late was wont to raine as Queene,
+     And maske in mirth with Graces well bescene?
+
+     O! all is gone; and all that goodly glee,
+     Which wont to be the glorie of gay wits,
+     Is layed abed, and no where now to see;
+     And in her roome unseemly Sorrow sits,
+     With hollow browes and greisly countenaunce,
+     Marring my joyous gentle dalliaunce.
+
+     And him beside sits ugly Barbarisme,
+     And brutish Ignorance, ycrept of late
+     Out of dredd darknes of the deepe Abysme,
+     Where being bredd, he light and heaven does hate:
+     They in the mindes of men now tyrannize,
+     And the faire Scene with rudenes foule disguize.
+
+     All places they with follie have possest,
+     And with vaine toyes the vulgare entertaine;
+     But me have banished, with all the rest
+     That whilome wont to wait upon my traine,
+     Fine Counterfesaunce, and unhurtfull Sport,
+     Delight, and Laughter, deckt in seemly sort.
+
+     All these, and all that els the Comick Stage
+     With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced,
+     By which mans life in his likest image
+     Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced;
+     And those sweete wits, which wont the like to frame,
+     Are now despizd, and made a laughing game.
+
+     And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made
+     To mock her selfe, and truth to imitate,
+     With kindly counter under Mimick shade,
+     Our pleasant Willy, ah! _is dead of late_;
+     With whom all joy and jolly merriment
+     Is also deaded, and in dolour drent.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     But that same gentle Spirit, from whose pen
+     Large streames of honnie and sweete Nectar flowe,
+     Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men,
+     Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,
+     Doth rather choose to sit in idle Cell,
+     Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell.
+
+But the most remarkable of these pieces is a satirical fable, _Mother
+Hubberd's Tale of the Ape and Fox_, which may take rank with the
+satirical writings of Chaucer and Dryden for keenness of touch, for
+breadth of treatment, for swing and fiery scorn, and sustained strength
+of sarcasm. By his visit to the Court, Spenser had increased his
+knowledge of the realities of life. That brilliant Court, with a goddess
+at its head, and full of charming swains and divine nymphs, had also
+another side. It was still his poetical heaven. But with that odd
+insensibility to anomaly and glaring contrasts, which is seen in his
+time, and perhaps exists at all times, he passed from the celebration of
+the dazzling glories of Cynthia's Court, into a fierce vein of invective
+against its treacheries, its vain shows, its unceasing and mean
+intrigues, its savage jealousies, its fatal rivalries, the scramble
+there for preferment in Church and State. When it is considered what
+great persons might easily and naturally have been identified at the
+time with the _Ape and the Fox_, the confederate impostors, charlatans,
+and bullying swindlers, who had stolen the lion's skin, and by it
+mounted to the high places of the State, it seems to be a proof of the
+indifference of the Court to the power of mere literature, that it
+should have been safe to write and publish so freely, and so cleverly.
+Dull Catholic lampoons and Puritan scurrilities did not pass thus
+unnoticed. They were viewed as dangerous to the State, and dealt with
+accordingly. The fable contains what we can scarcely doubt to be some of
+that wisdom which Spenser learnt by his experience of the Court.
+
+     So pitifull a thing is Suters state!
+     Most miserable man, whom wicked fate
+     Hath brought to Court, to sue for _had-ywist_,
+     That few have found, and manie one hath mist!
+     Full little knowest thou, that hast not tride,
+     What hell it is in suing long to bide:
+     To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;
+     To wast long nights in pensive discontent;
+     To speed to day, to be put back to morrow;
+     To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow;
+     To have thy Princes grace, yet want her Peeres;
+     To have thy asking, yet waite manie yeeres;
+     To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;
+     To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires;
+     To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,
+     To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.
+     Unhappie wight, borne to disastrous end,
+     That doth his life in so long tendance spend!
+       Who ever leaves sweete home, where meane estate
+     In safe assurance, without strife or hate,
+     Findes all things needfull for contentment meeke,
+     And will to Court for shadowes vaine to seeke,
+     Or hope to gaine, himselfe will a daw trie:
+     That curse God send unto mine enemie!
+
+Spenser probably did not mean his characters to fit too closely to
+living persons. That might have been dangerous. But it is difficult to
+believe that he had not distinctly in his eye a very great personage,
+the greatest in England next to the Queen, in the following picture of
+the doings of the Fox installed at Court.
+
+       But the false Foxe most kindly plaid his part;
+     For whatsoever mother-wit or arte
+     Could worke, he put in proofe: no practise slie,
+     No counterpoint of cunning policie,
+     No reach, no breach, that might him profit bring,
+     But he the same did to his purpose wring.
+     Nought suffered he the Ape to give or graunt,
+     But through his hand must passe the Fiaunt.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     He chaffred Chayres in which Churchmen were set,
+     And breach of lawes to privie ferme did let:
+     No statute so established might bee,
+     Nor ordinaunce so needfull, but that hee
+     Would violate, though not with violence,
+     Yet under colour of the confidence
+     The which the Ape repos'd in him alone,
+     And reckned him the kingdomes corner stone.
+     And ever, when he ought would bring to pas,
+     His long experience the platforme was:
+     And, when he ought not pleasing would put by
+     The cloke was care of thrift, and husbandry,
+     For to encrease the common treasures store;
+     But his owne treasure he encreased more,
+     And lifted up his loftie towres thereby,
+     That they began to threat the neighbour sky;
+     The whiles the Princes pallaces fell fast
+     To ruine (for what thing can ever last?)
+     And whilest the other Peeres, for povertie,
+     Were forst their auncient houses to let lie,
+     And their olde Castles to the ground to fall,
+     Which their forefathers, famous over-all,
+     Had founded for the Kingdome's ornament,
+     And for their memories long moniment:
+     But he no count made of Nobilitie,
+     Nor the wilde beasts whom armes did glorifie,
+     The Realmes chiefe strength and girlond of the crowne.
+     All these through fained crimes he thrust adowne,
+     Or made them dwell in darknes of disgrace;
+     For none, but whom he list, might come in place.
+       Of men of armes he had but small regard,
+     But kept them lowe, and streigned verie hard.
+     For men of learning little he esteemed;
+     His wisdome he above their learning deemed.
+     As for the rascall Commons, least he cared,
+     For not so common was his bountie shared.
+     Let God, (said he) if please, care for the manie,
+     I for my selfe must care before els anie.
+     So did he good to none, to manie ill,
+     So did he all the kingdome rob and pill;
+     Yet none durst speake, ne none durst of him plaine,
+     So groat he was in grace, and rich through gaine.
+     Ne would he anie let to have accesse
+     Unto the Prince, but by his owne addresse,
+     For all that els did come were sure to faile.
+
+Even at Court, however, the poet finds a contrast to all this: he had
+known Philip Sidney, and Ralegh was his friend.
+
+     Yet the brave Courtier, in whose beauteous thought
+     Regard of honour harbours more than ought,
+     Doth loath such base condition, to backbite
+     Anies good name for envie or despite:
+     He stands on tearmes of honourable minde,
+     Ne will be carried with the common winde
+     Of Courts inconstant mutabilitie,
+     Ne after everie tattling fable flie;
+     But heares and sees the follies of the rest,
+     And thereof gathers for himselfe the best.
+     He will not creepe, nor crouche with fained face,
+     But walkes upright with comely stedfast pace,
+     And unto all doth yeeld due curtesie;
+     But not with kissed hand belowe the knee,
+     As that same Apish crue is wont to doo:
+     For he disdaines himselfe t' embase theretoo.
+     He hates fowle leasings, and vile flatterie,
+     Two filthie blots in noble gentrie;
+     And lothefull idlenes he doth detest,
+     The canker worme of everie gentle brest.
+
+     Or lastly, when the bodie list to pause,
+     His minde unto the Muses he withdrawes:
+     Sweete Ladie Muses, Ladies of delight,
+     Delights of life, and ornaments of light!
+     With whom he close confers with wise discourse,
+     Of Natures workes, of heavens continuall course,
+     Of forreine lands, of people different,
+     Of kingdomes change, of divers gouvernment,
+     Of dreadfull battailes of renowned Knights;
+     With which he kindleth his ambitious sprights
+     To like desire and praise of noble fame,
+     The onely upshot whereto he doth ayme:
+     For all his minde on honour fixed is,
+     To which he levels all his purposis,
+     And in his Princes service spends his dayes,
+     Not so much for to gaine, or for to raise
+     Himselfe to high degree, as for his grace,
+     And in his liking to winne worthie place,
+     Through due deserts and comely carriage.
+
+The fable also throws light on the way in which Spenser regarded the
+religious parties, whose strife was becoming loud and threatening.
+Spenser is often spoken of as a Puritan. He certainly had the Puritan
+hatred of Rome; and in the Church system as it existed in England he saw
+many instances of ignorance, laziness, and corruption; and he agreed
+with the Puritans in denouncing them. His pictures of the "formal
+priest," with his excuses for doing nothing, his new-fashioned and
+improved substitutes for the ornate and also too lengthy ancient
+service, and his general ideas of self-complacent comfort, has in it an
+odd mixture of Roman Catholic irony with Puritan censure. Indeed, though
+Spenser hated with an Englishman's hatred all that he considered Roman
+superstition and tyranny, he had a sense of the poetical impressiveness
+of the old ceremonial, and the ideas which clung to it, its pomp, its
+beauty, its suggestiveness, very far removed from the iconoclastic
+temper of the Puritans. In his _View of the State of Ireland_, he notes
+as a sign of its evil condition the state of the churches, "most of them
+ruined and even with the ground," and the rest "so unhandsomely patched
+and thatched, that men do even shun the places, for the uncomeliness
+thereof." "The outward form (assure yourself)," he adds, "doth greatly
+draw the rude people to the reverencing and frequenting thereof,
+_whatever some of our late too nice fools may say_, that there is
+nothing in the seemly form and comely order of the church."
+
+     "Ah! but (said th' Ape) the charge is wondrous great,
+     To feede mens soules, and hath an heavie threat."
+     "To feed mens soules (quoth he) is not in man;
+     For they must feed themselves, doo what we can.
+     We are but charged to lay the meate before:
+     Eate they that list, we need to doo no more.
+     But God it is that feeds them with his grace,
+     The bread of life powr'd downe from heavenly place.
+     Therefore said he, that with the budding rod
+     Did rule the Jewes, _All shalbe taught of God_.
+     That same hath Jesus Christ now to him raught,
+     By whom the flock is rightly fed, and taught:
+     He is the Shepheard, and the Priest is hee;
+     We but his shepheard swaines ordain'd to bee.
+     Therefore herewith doo not your selfe dismay;
+     Ne is the paines so great, but beare ye may,
+     For not so great, as it was wont of yore,
+     It's now a dayes, ne halfe so streight and sore.
+     They whilome used duly everie day
+     Their service and their holie things to say,
+     At morne and even, besides their Anthemes sweete,
+     Their penie Masses, and their Complynes meete,
+     Their Diriges, their Trentals, and their shrifts,
+     Their memories, their singings, and their gifts.
+     Now all those needlesse works are laid away;
+     Now once a weeke, upon the Sabbath day,
+     It is enough to doo our small devotion,
+     And then to follow any merrie motion.
+     Ne are we tyde to fast, but when we list;
+     Ne to weare garments base of wollen twist,
+     But with the finest silkes us to aray,
+     That before God we may appeare more gay,
+     Resembling Aarons glorie in his place:
+     For farre unfit it is, that person bace
+     Should with vile cloaths approach Gods majestie,
+     Whom no uncleannes may approachen nie;
+     Or that all men, which anie master serve,
+     Good garments for their service should deserve;
+     But he that serves the Lord of hoasts most high,
+     And that in highest place, t' approach him nigh,
+     And all the peoples prayers to present
+     Before his throne, as on ambassage sent
+     Both too and fro, should not deserve to weare
+     A garment better than of wooll or heare.
+     Beside, we may have lying by our sides
+     Our lovely Lasses, or bright shining Brides:
+     We be not tyde to wilfull chastitie,
+     But have the Gospell of free libertie."
+
+But his weapon is double-edged, and he had not much more love for
+
+     That ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace.
+
+The first prescription which the Priest gives to the Fox who desires to
+rise to preferment in the Church is to win the favour of some great
+Puritan noble.
+
+     First, therefore, when ye have in handsome wise
+     Your selfe attyred, as you can devise,
+     Then to some Noble-man your selfe applye,
+     Or other great one in the worldes eye,
+     That hath a zealous disposition
+     To God, and so to his religion.
+     There must thou fashion eke a godly zeale,
+     Such as no carpers may contrayre reveale;
+     For each thing fained ought more warie bee.
+     There thou must walke in sober gravitee,
+     And seeme as Saintlike as Sainte Radegund:
+     Fast much, pray oft, looke lowly on the ground,
+     And unto everie one doo curtesie meeke:
+     These lookes (nought saying) doo a benefice seeke,
+     And be thou sure one not to lack or long.
+
+But he is impartial, and points out that there are other ways of
+rising--by adopting the fashions of the Court, "facing, and forging, and
+scoffing, and crouching to please," and so to "mock out a benefice;" or
+else, by compounding with a patron to give him half the profits, and in
+the case of a bishopric, to submit to the alienation of its manors to
+some powerful favourite, as the Bishop of Salisbury had to surrender
+Sherborn to Sir Walter Ralegh. Spenser, in his dedication of _Mother
+Hubberd's Tale_ to one of the daughters of Sir John Spencer, Lady
+Compton and Monteagle, speaks of it as "long sithence composed in the
+raw conceit of youth." But, whatever this may mean, and it was his way
+thus to deprecate severe judgments, his allowing the publication of it
+at this time, shows, if the work itself did not show it, that he was in
+very serious earnest in his bitter sarcasms on the base and evil arts
+which brought success at the Court.
+
+He stayed in England about a year and a half [1590-91], long enough
+apparently to make up his mind that he had not much to hope for from his
+great friends, Ralegh and perhaps Essex, who were busy on their own
+schemes. Ralegh, from whom Spenser might hope most, was just beginning
+to plunge into that extraordinary career, in the thread of which, glory
+and disgrace, far-sighted and princely public spirit and insatiate
+private greed, were to be so strangely intertwined. In 1592 he planned
+the great adventure which astonished London by the fabulous plunder of
+the Spanish treasure-ships; in the same year he was in the Tower, under
+the Queen's displeasure for his secret marriage, affecting the most
+ridiculous despair at her going away from the neighbourhood, and pouring
+forth his flatteries on this old woman of sixty as if he had no bride of
+his own to love:--"I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander,
+hunting like Diana, walking like Venus; the gentle wind blowing her fair
+hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph; sometimes, sitting in the shade
+like a goddess; sometimes, singing like an angel; sometimes, playing
+like Orpheus--behold the sorrow of this world--once amiss, hath bereaved
+me of all." Then came the exploration of Guiana, the expedition to
+Cadiz, the Island voyage [1595-1597]. Ralegh had something else to do
+than to think of Spenser's fortunes.
+
+Spenser turned back once more to Ireland, to his clerkship of the
+Council of Munster, which he soon resigned; to be worried with law-suits
+about "lands in Shanballymore and Ballingrath," by his time-serving and
+oppressive Irish neighbour, Maurice Roche, Lord Fermoy; to brood still
+over his lost ideal and hero, Sidney; to write the story of his visit in
+the pastoral supplement to the _Shepherd's Calendar_, _Colin Clout's
+come home again_; to pursue the story of Gloriana's knights; and to find
+among the Irish maidens another Elizabeth, a wife instead of a queen,
+whose wooing and winning were to give new themes to his imagination.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[107:1] _v. Colin Clout_, l. 31. _Astrophel_, l. 175.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE FAERY QUEEN.
+
+
+"_Uncouth_ [= unknown], _unkist_," are the words from Chaucer,[118:1]
+with which the friend, who introduced Spenser's earliest poetry to the
+world, bespeaks forbearance, and promises matter for admiration and
+delight in the _Shepherd's Calendar_. "You have to know my new poet, he
+says in effect: and when you have learned his ways, you will find how
+much you have to honour and love him." "I doubt not," he says, with a
+boldness of prediction, manifestly sincere, which is remarkable about an
+unknown man, "that so soon as his name shall come into the knowledge of
+men, and his worthiness be sounded in the trump of fame, but that he
+shall be not only kissed, but also beloved of all, embraced of the most,
+and wondered at of the best." Never was prophecy more rapidly and more
+signally verified, probably beyond the prophet's largest expectation.
+But he goes on to explain and indeed apologize for certain features of
+the new poet's work, which even to readers of that day might seem open
+to exception. And to readers of to-day, the phrase, _uncouth, unkist_,
+certainly expresses what many have to confess, if they are honest, as to
+their first acquaintance with the _Faery Queen_. Its place in
+literature is established beyond controversy. Yet its first and
+unfamiliar aspect inspires respect, perhaps interest, rather than
+attracts and satisfies. It is not the remoteness of the subject alone,
+nor the distance of three centuries which raises a bar between it and
+those to whom it is new. Shakespere becomes familiar to us from the
+first moment. The impossible legends of Arthur have been made in the
+language of to-day once more to touch our sympathies, and have lent
+themselves to express our thoughts. But at first acquaintance the _Faery
+Queen_ to many of us has been disappointing. It has seemed not only
+antique, but artificial. It has seemed fantastic. It has seemed, we
+cannot help avowing, tiresome. It is not till the early appearances have
+worn off, and we have learned to make many allowances and to surrender
+ourselves to the feelings and the standards by which it claims to affect
+and govern us, that we really find under what noble guidance we are
+proceeding, and what subtle and varied spells are ever round us.
+
+I. The _Faery Queen_ is the work of an unformed literature, the product
+of an unperfected art. English poetry, English language, in Spenser's,
+nay in Shakespere's day, had much to learn, much to unlearn. They never,
+perhaps, have been stronger or richer, than in that marvellous burst of
+youth, with all its freedom of invention, of observation, of reflection.
+But they had not that which only the experience and practice of eventful
+centuries could give them. Even genius must wait for the gifts of time.
+It cannot forerun the limitations of its day, nor anticipate the
+conquests and common possessions of the future. Things are impossible to
+the first great masters of art which are easy to their second-rate
+successors. The possibility, or the necessity of breaking through some
+convention, of attempting some unattempted effort, had not, among other
+great enterprises, occurred to them. They were laying the steps in a
+magnificent fashion on which those after them were to rise. But we ought
+not to shut our eyes to mistakes or faults to which attention had not
+yet been awakened, or for avoiding which no reasonable means had been
+found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognize, both what is
+still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is
+no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon,
+which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the
+scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But
+all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, is always
+limited and imperfect.
+
+The _Faery Queen_, as a whole, bears on its face a great fault of
+construction. It carries with it no adequate account of its own story;
+it does not explain itself, or contain in its own structure what would
+enable a reader to understand how it arose. It has to be accounted for
+by a prose explanation and key outside of itself. The poet intended to
+reserve the central event, which was the occasion of all the adventures
+of the poem, till they had all been related, leaving them as it were in
+the air, till at the end of twelve long books the reader should at last
+be told how the whole thing had originated, and what it was all about.
+He made the mistake of confounding the answer to a riddle with the
+crisis which unties the tangle of a plot and satisfies the suspended
+interest of a tale. None of the great model poems before him, however
+full of digression and episode, had failed to arrange their story with
+clearness. They needed no commentary outside themselves to say why they
+began as they did, and out of what antecedents they arose. If they
+started at once from the middle of things, they made their story, as it
+unfolded itself, explain, by more or less skilful devices, all that
+needed to be known about their beginnings. They did not think of rules
+of art. They did of themselves naturally what a good story-teller does,
+to make himself intelligible and interesting; and it is not easy to be
+interesting, unless the parts of the story are in their place.
+
+The defect seems to have come upon Spenser when it was too late to
+remedy it in the construction of his poem; and he adopted the somewhat
+clumsy expedient of telling us what the poem itself ought to have told
+us of its general story, in a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. Ralegh
+himself, indeed, suggested the letter: apparently (from the date, Jan.
+23, 1590), after the first part had gone through the press. And without
+this after-thought, as the twelfth book was never reached, we should
+have been left to gather the outline and plan of the story, from
+imperfect glimpses and allusions, as we have to fill up from hints and
+assumptions the gaps of an unskilful narrator, who leaves out what is
+essential to the understanding of his tale.
+
+Incidentally, however, this letter is an advantage: for we have in it
+the poet's own statement of his purpose in writing, as well as a
+necessary sketch of his story. His allegory, as he had explained to
+Bryskett and his friends, had a moral purpose. He meant to shadow forth,
+under the figures of twelve knights, and in their various exploits, the
+characteristics of "a gentleman or noble person," "fashioned in virtuous
+and gentle discipline." He took his machinery from the popular legends
+about King Arthur, and his heads of moral philosophy from the current
+Aristotelian catalogue of the Schools.
+
+     Sir, knowing how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed,
+     and this booke of mine, which I have entituled the Faery
+     Queene, being a continued Allegory, or darke conceit, I haue
+     thought good, as well for avoyding of gealous opinions and
+     misconstructions, as also for your better light in reading
+     thereof, (being so by you commanded,) to discover unto you the
+     general intention and meaning, which in the whole course
+     thereof I have fashioned, without expressing of any particular
+     purposes, or by accidents, therein occasioned. The generall
+     end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or
+     noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline: Which for that
+     I conceived shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being
+     coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part
+     of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter then for
+     profite of the ensample, I chose the historye of King Arthure,
+     as most fitte for the excellency of his person, being made
+     famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the
+     daunger of envy, and suspition of present time. In which I
+     have followed all the antique Poets historicall; first Homere,
+     who in the Persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a
+     good governour and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the
+     other in his Odysseis: then Virgil, whose like intention was
+     to doe in the person of Aeneas: after him Ariosto comprised
+     them both in his Orlando: and lately Tasso dissevered them
+     againe, and formed both parts in two persons, namely that part
+     which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a private
+     man, coloured in his Rinaldo; the other named Politice in his
+     Godfredo. By ensample of which excellente Poets, I labour to
+     pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a
+     brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues,
+     as Aristotle hath devised; the which is the purpose of these
+     first twelve bookes: which if I finde to be well accepted, I
+     may be perhaps encoraged to frame the other part of polliticke
+     vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king.
+
+Then, after explaining that he meant the _Faery Queen_ "for glory in
+general intention, but in particular" for Elizabeth, and his Faery Land
+for her kingdom, he proceeds to explain, what the first three books
+hardly explain, what the Faery Queen had to do with the structure of the
+poem.
+
+     But, because the beginning of the whole worke seemeth abrupte,
+     and as depending upon other antecedents, it needs that ye know
+     the occasion of these three knights seuerall adventures. For
+     the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an
+     Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of
+     affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the
+     times as the actions; but a Poet thrusteth into the middest,
+     even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the
+     thinges forepaste, and divining of thinges to come, maketh a
+     pleasing Analysis of all.
+
+     The beginning therefore of my history, if it were to be told
+     by an Historiographer should be the twelfth booke, which is
+     the last; where I devise that the Faery Queene kept her
+     Annuall feaste xii. dayes; uppon which xii. severall dayes,
+     the occasions of the xii. severall adventures hapned, which,
+     being undertaken by xii. severall knights, are in these xii.
+     books severally handled and discoursed. The first was this. In
+     the beginning of the feast, there presented him selfe a tall
+     clownishe younge man, who falling before the Queene of Faries
+     desired a boone (as the manner then was) which during that
+     feast she might not refuse; which was that hee might have the
+     atchievement of any adventure, which during that feaste should
+     happen: that being graunted, he rested him on the floore,
+     unfitte through his rusticity for a better place. Soone after
+     entred a faire Ladye in mourning weedes, riding on a white
+     Asse, with a dwarfe behinde her leading a warlike steed, that
+     bore the Armes of a knight, and his speare in the dwarfes
+     hand. Shee, falling before the Queene of Faeries, complayned
+     that her father and mother, an ancient King and Queene, had
+     beene by an huge dragon many years shut up in a brasen Castle,
+     who thence suffred them not to yssew; and therefore besought
+     the Faery Queene to assygne her some one of her knights to
+     take on him that exployt. Presently that clownish person,
+     upstarting, desired that adventure: whereat the Queene much
+     wondering, and the Lady much gainesaying, yet he earnestly
+     importuned his desire. In the end the Lady told him, that
+     unlesse that armour which she brought would serve him (that
+     is, the armour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul, vi.
+     Ephes.) that he could not succeed in that enterprise; which
+     being forthwith put upon him, with dewe furnitures thereunto,
+     he seemed the goodliest man in al that company, and was well
+     liked of the Lady. And eftesoones taking on him knighthood,
+     and mounting on that straunge courser, he went forth with her
+     on that adventure: where beginneth the first booke, viz.
+
+          A gentle knight was pricking on the playne, &c.
+
+That it was not without reason that this explanatory key was prefixed to
+the work, and that either Spenser or Ralegh felt it to be almost
+indispensable, appear from the concluding paragraph.
+
+     Thus much, Sir, I have briefly overronne to direct your
+     understanding to the wel-head of the History; that from thence
+     gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as in a
+     handfull gripe al the discourse, which otherwise may happily
+     seeme tedious and confused.
+
+According to the plan thus sketched out, we have but a fragment of the
+work. It was published in two parcels, each of three books, in 1590 and
+1596; and after his death two cantos, with two stray stanzas, of a
+seventh book were found and printed. Each perfect book consists of
+twelve cantos of from thirty-five to sixty of his nine-line stanzas. The
+books published in 1590 contain, as he states in his prefatory letter,
+the legends of _Holiness_, of _Temperance_, and of _Chastity_. Those
+published in 1596, contain the legends of _Friendship_, of _Justice_,
+and of _Courtesy_. The posthumous cantos are entitled, _Of Mutability_,
+and are said to be apparently parcel of a legend of _Constancy_. The
+poem which was to treat of the "politic" virtues was never approached.
+Thus we have but a fourth part of the whole of the projected work. It is
+very doubtful whether the remaining six books were completed. But it is
+probable that a portion of them was written, which, except the cantos
+_On Mutability_, has perished. And the intended titles or legends of the
+later books have not been preserved.
+
+Thus the poem was to be an allegorical story; a story branching out into
+twelve separate stories, which themselves would branch out again and
+involve endless other stories. It is a complex scheme to keep well in
+hand, and Spenser's art in doing so has been praised by some of his
+critics. But the art, if there is any, is so subtle that it fails to
+save the reader from perplexity. The truth is that the power of ordering
+and connecting a long and complicated plan was not one of Spenser's
+gifts. In the first two books, the allegorical story proceeds from point
+to point with fair coherence and consecutiveness. After them the attempt
+to hold the scheme together, except in the loosest and most general way,
+is given up as too troublesome or too confined. The poet prefixes indeed
+the name of a particular virtue to each book, but, with slender
+reference to it, he surrenders himself freely to his abundant flow of
+ideas, and to whatever fancy or invention tempts him, and ranges
+unrestrained over the whole field of knowledge and imagination. In the
+first two books, the allegory is transparent and the story connected.
+The allegory is of the nature of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. It starts
+from the belief that religion, purified from falsehood, superstition,
+and sin, is the foundation of all nobleness in man; and it portrays,
+under images and with names, for the most part easily understood, and
+easily applied to real counterparts, the struggle which every one at
+that time supposed to be going on, between absolute truth and
+righteousness on one side, and fatal error and bottomless wickedness on
+the other. Una, the Truth, the one and only Bride of man's spirit,
+marked out by the tokens of humility and innocence, and by her power
+over wild and untamed natures--the single Truth, in contrast to the
+counterfeit Duessa, false religion, and its actual embodiment in the
+false rival Queen of Scots--Truth, the object of passionate homage, real
+with many, professed with all, which after the impostures and scandals
+of the preceding age, had now become characteristic of that of
+Elizabeth--Truth, its claims, its dangers, and its champions, are the
+subject of the first book: and it is represented as leading the manhood
+of England, in spite, not only of terrible conflict, but of defeat and
+falls, through the discipline of repentance, to holiness and the
+blessedness which comes with it. The Red Cross Knight, St. George of
+England, whose name Georgos, the Ploughman, is dwelt upon, apparently to
+suggest that from the commonalty, the "tall clownish young men," were
+raised up the great champions of the Truth,--though sorely troubled by
+the wiles of Duessa, by the craft of the arch-sorcerer, by the force and
+pride of the great powers of the Apocalyptic Beast and Dragon, finally
+overcomes them, and wins the deliverance of Una and her love.
+
+The second book, _Of Temperance_, pursues the subject, and represents
+the internal conquests of self-mastery, the conquests of a man over his
+passions, his violence, his covetousness, his ambition, his despair, his
+sensuality. Sir Guyon, after conquering many foes of goodness, is the
+destroyer of the most perilous of them all, Acrasia, licentiousness, and
+her ensnaring Bower of Bliss. But after this, the thread at once of
+story and allegory, slender henceforth at the best, is neglected and
+often entirely lost. The third book, the _Legend of Chastity_, is a
+repetition of the ideas of the latter part of the second, with a
+heroine, Britomart, in place of the Knight of the previous book, Sir
+Guyon, and with a special glorification of the high-flown and romantic
+sentiments about purity, which wore the poetic creed of the courtiers of
+Elizabeth, in flagrant and sometimes in tragic contrast to their
+practical conduct of life. The loose and ill-compacted nature of the
+plan becomes still more evident in the second instalment of the work.
+Even the special note of each particular virtue becomes more faint and
+indistinct. The one law to which the poet feels bound is to have twelve
+cantos in each book; and to do this he is sometimes driven to what in
+later times has been called padding. One of the cantos of the third book
+is a genealogy of British kings from Geoffrey of Monmouth; one of the
+cantos of the _Legend of Friendship_ is made up of an episode,
+describing the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, with an elaborate
+catalogue of the English and Irish rivers, and the names of the
+sea-nymphs. In truth, he had exhausted his proper allegory, or he got
+tired of it. His poem became an elastic framework, into which he could
+fit whatever interested him and tempted him to composition. The gravity
+of the first books disappears. He passes into satire and caricature. We
+meet with Braggadochio and Trompart, with the discomfiture of Malecasta,
+with the conjugal troubles of Malbecco and Helenore, with the imitation
+from Ariosto of the Squire of Dames. He puts into verse a poetical
+physiology of the human body; he translates Lucretius, and speculates on
+the origin of human souls; he speculates, too, on social justice, and
+composes an argumentative refutation of the Anabaptist theories of right
+and equality among men. As the poem proceeds, he seems to feel himself
+more free to introduce what he pleases. Allusions to real men and events
+are sometimes clear, at other times evident, though they have now ceased
+to be intelligible to us. His disgust and resentment breaks out at the
+ways of the Court in sarcastic moralizing, or in pictures of dark and
+repulsive imagery. The characters and pictures of his friends furnish
+material for his poem; he does not mind touching on the misadventures of
+Ralegh, and even of Lord Grey, with sly humour or a word of candid
+advice. He becomes bolder in the distinct introduction of contemporary
+history. The defeat of Duessa was only figuratively shown in the first
+portion; in the second the subject is resumed. As Elizabeth is the "one
+form of many names," Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, so
+"under feigned colours shading a true case" he deals with her rival.
+Mary seems at one time the false Florimel, the creature of enchantment,
+stirring up strife, and fought for by the foolish knights whom she
+deceives, Blandamour and Paridell, the counterparts of Norfolk and the
+intriguers of 1571. At another, she is the fierce Amazonian queen,
+Radegund, by whom for a moment, even Arthegal is brought into
+disgraceful thraldom, till Britomart, whom he has once fought against,
+delivers him. And finally the fate of the typical Duessa is that of the
+real Mary Queen of Scots described in great detail--a liberty in dealing
+with great affairs of state for which James of Scotland actually desired
+that he should be tried and punished.[128:2] So Philip II. is at one
+time the Soldan, at another the Spanish monster Geryoneo, at another the
+fosterer of Catholic intrigues in France and Ireland, Grantorto. But
+real names are also introduced with scarcely any disguise: Guizor, and
+Burbon, the Knight who throws away his shield, Henry IV., and his Lady
+Flourdelis, the Lady Beige, and her seventeen sons: the Lady Irena, whom
+Arthegal delivers. The overthrow of the Armada, the English war in the
+Low Countries, the apostasy of Henry IV., the deliverance of Ireland
+from the "great wrong" of Desmond's rebellion, the giant Grantorto,
+form, under more or less transparent allegory, great part of the _Legend
+of Justice_. Nay, Spenser's long fostered revenge on the lady who had
+once scorned him, the _Rosalind_ of the _Shepherd's Calendar_, the
+_Mirabella_ of the _Faery Queen_, and his own late and happy marriage in
+Ireland, are also brought in to supply materials for the _Legend of
+Courtesy_. So multifarious is the poem, full of all that he thought, or
+observed, or felt; a receptacle, without much care to avoid repetition,
+or to prune, correct, and condense, for all the abundance of his ideas,
+as they welled forth in his mind day by day. It is really a collection
+of separate tales and allegories, as much as the _Arabian Nights_, or,
+as its counterpart and rival of our own century, the _Idylls of the
+King_. As a whole it is confusing: but we need not treat it as a whole.
+Its continued interest soon breaks down. But it is probably best that
+Spenser gave his mind the vague freedom which suited it, and that he did
+not make efforts to tie himself down to his pre-arranged but too
+ambitious plan. We can hardly lose our way in it, for there is no way to
+lose. It is a wilderness in which we are left to wander. But there may
+be interest and pleasure in a wilderness, if we are prepared for the
+wandering.
+
+Still, the complexity, or rather, the uncared-for and clumsy arrangement
+of the poem is matter which disturbs a reader's satisfaction, till he
+gets accustomed to the poet's way, and resigns himself to it. It is a
+heroic poem, in which the heroine, who gives her name to it, never
+appears: a story, of which the basis and starting-point is whimsically
+withheld for disclosure in the last book, which was never written. If
+Ariosto's jumps and transitions are more audacious, Spenser's intricacy
+is more puzzling. Adventures begin which have no finish. Actors in them
+drop from the clouds, claim an interest, and we ask in vain what has
+become of them. A vein of what are manifestly contemporary allusions
+breaks across the moral drift of the allegory, with an apparently
+distinct yet obscured meaning, and one of which it is the work of
+dissertations to find the key. The passion of the age was for ingenious
+riddling in morality as in love. And in Spenser's allegories we are not
+seldom at a loss to make out what and how much was really intended, amid
+a maze of overstrained analogies and over-subtle conceits, and attempts
+to hinder a too close and dangerous identification.
+
+Indeed Spenser's mode of allegory, which was historical as well as
+moral, and contains a good deal of history, if we knew it, often seems
+devised to throw curious readers off the scent. It was purposely
+baffling and hazy. A characteristic trait was singled out. A name was
+transposed in anagram, like Irena, or distorted, as if by imperfect
+pronunciation, like Burbon and Arthegal, or invented to express a
+quality, like Una, or Gloriana, or Corceca, or Fradubio, or adopted with
+no particular reason from the _Morte d'Arthur_, or any other old
+literature. The personage is introduced with some feature, or amid
+circumstances which seem for a moment to fix the meaning. But when we
+look to the sequence of history being kept up in the sequence of the
+story, we find ourselves thrown out. A character which fits one person
+puts on the marks of another: a likeness which we identify with one real
+person passes into the likeness of some one else. The real, in person,
+incident, institution, shades off into the ideal; after showing itself
+by plain tokens, it turns aside out of its actual path of fact, and
+ends, as the poet thinks it ought to end, in victory or defeat, glory or
+failure. Prince Arthur passes from Leicester to Sidney, and then back
+again to Leicester. There are double or treble allegories; Elizabeth is
+Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, perhaps Amoret; her rival is
+Duessa, the false Florimel, probably the fierce temptress, the Amazon
+Radegund. Thus, what for a moment was clear and definite, fades like the
+changing fringe of a dispersing cloud. The character which we identified
+disappears in other scenes and adventures, where we lose sight of all
+that identified it. A complete transformation destroys the likeness
+which was begun. There is an intentional dislocation of the parts of the
+story, when they might make it imprudently close in its reflection of
+facts or resemblance in portraiture. A feature is shown, a manifest
+allusion made, and then the poet starts off in other directions, to
+confuse and perplex all attempts at interpretation, which might be too
+particular and too certain. This was no doubt merely according to the
+fashion of the time, and the habits of mind into which the poet had
+grown. But there were often reasons for it, in an age so suspicious, and
+so dangerous to those who meddled with high matters of state.
+
+2. Another feature which is on the surface of the _Faery Queen_, and
+which will displease a reader who has been trained to value what is
+natural and genuine, is its affectation of the language and the customs
+of life belonging to an age which is not its own. It is indeed redolent
+of the present: but it is almost avowedly an imitation of what was
+current in the days of Chaucer: of what were supposed to be the words,
+and the social ideas and conditions, of the age of chivalry. He looked
+back to the fashions and ideas of the Middle Ages, as Pindar sought his
+materials in the legends and customs of the Homeric times, and created a
+revival of the spirit of the age of the Heroes in an age of tyrants and
+incipient democracies.[132:3] The age of chivalry, in Spenser's day far
+distant, had yet left two survivals, one real, the other formal. The
+real survival was the spirit of armed adventure, which was never
+stronger or more stirring than in the gallants and discoverers of
+Elizabeth's reign, the captains of the English companies in the Low
+Countries, the audacious sailors who explored unknown oceans and
+plundered the Spaniards, the scholars and gentlemen equally ready for
+work on sea and land, like Ralegh and Sir Richard Grenville, of the
+"Revenge." The formal survival was the fashion of keeping up the
+trappings of knightly times, as we keep up Judge's wigs, court dresses,
+and Lord Mayor's shows. In actual life it was seen in pageants and
+ceremonies, in the yet lingering parade of jousts and tournaments, in
+the knightly accoutrements still worn in the days of the bullet and the
+cannon-ball. In the apparatus of the poet, as all were shepherds, when
+he wanted to represent the life of peace and letters, so all were
+knights or the foes and victims of knights, when his theme was action
+and enterprise. It was the custom that the Muse masked, to use Spenser's
+word, under these disguises; and this conventional masquerade of
+pastoral poetry or knight errantry was the form under which the poetical
+school that preceded the dramatists naturally expressed their ideas. It
+seems to us odd that peaceful sheepcotes and love-sick swains should
+stand for the world of the Tudors and Guises, or that its cunning
+statecraft and relentless cruelty should be represented by the generous
+follies of an imaginary chivalry. But it was the fashion which Spenser
+found, and he accepted it. His genius was not of that sort which breaks
+out from trammels, but of that which makes the best of what it finds.
+And whatever we may think of the fashion, at least he gave it new
+interest and splendour by the spirit with which he threw himself into
+it.
+
+The condition which he took as the groundwork of his poetical fabric
+suggested the character of his language. Chaucer was then the "God of
+English poetry;" his was the one name which filled a place apart in the
+history of English verse. Spenser was a student of Chaucer, and borrowed
+as he judged fit, not only from his vocabulary, but from his grammatical
+precedents and analogies, with the object of giving an appropriate
+colouring to what was to be raised as far as possible above familiar
+life. Besides this, the language was still in such an unsettled state
+that from a man with resources like Spenser's, it naturally invited
+attempts to enrich and colour it, to increase its flexibility and power.
+The liberty of reviving old forms, of adopting from the language of the
+street and market homely but expressive words or combinations, of
+following in the track of convenient constructions, of venturing on new
+and bold phrases, was rightly greater in his time than at a later stage
+of the language. Many of his words, either invented or preserved, are
+happy additions; some which have not taken root in the language, we may
+regret. But it was a liberty which he abused. He was extravagant and
+unrestrained in his experiments on language. And they were made not
+merely to preserve or to invent a good expression. On his own authority,
+he cuts down, or he alters a word, or he adopts a mere corrupt
+pronunciation, to suit a place in his metre, or because he wants a rime.
+Precedents, as Mr. Guest has said, may no doubt be found for each one of
+these sacrifices to the necessities of metre or rime, in some one or
+other living dialectic usage, or even in printed books--"_blend_" for
+"_blind_," "_misleeke_" for "_mislike_," "_kest_" for "_cast_,"
+"_cherry_" for "_cherish_," "_vilde_" for "_vile_," or even "_wawes_"
+for "_waves_," because it has to rime to "_jaws_." But when they are
+profusely used as they are in Spenser, they argue, as critics of his own
+age such as Puttenham, remarked,--either want of trouble, or want of
+resource. In his impatience he is reckless in making a word which he
+wants--"fortunize," "mercified," "unblindfold," "relive"--he is reckless
+in making one word do the duty of another, interchanging actives and
+passives, transferring epithets from their proper subjects. The "humbled
+grass," is the grass on which a man lies humbled: the "lamentable eye,"
+is the eye which laments. "His treatment of words," says Mr. Craik, "on
+such occasions"--occasions of difficulty to his verse--"is like nothing
+that ever was seen, unless it might be Hercules breaking the back of the
+Nemean lion. He gives them any sense and any shape that the case may
+demand. Sometimes he merely alters a letter or two; sometimes he twists
+off the head or the tail of the unfortunate vocable altogether. But this
+fearless, lordly, truly royal style makes one only feel the more how
+easily, if he chose, he could avoid the necessity of having recourse to
+such outrages."
+
+His own generation felt his licence to be extreme. "In affecting the
+ancients," said Ben Jonson, "he writ no language." Daniel writes
+sarcastically, soon after the _Faery Queen_ appeared, of those who
+
+     Sing of knights and Palladines,
+     In aged accents and untimely words.
+
+And to us, though students of the language must always find interest in
+the storehouse of ancient or invented language to be found in Spenser,
+this mixture of what is obsolete or capriciously new is a bar, and not
+an unreasonable one, to a frank welcome at first acquaintance. Fuller
+remarks with some slyness, that "the many Chaucerisms used (for I will
+not say, affected) by him, are thought by the ignorant to be blemishes,
+known by the learned to be beauties, in his book; which notwithstanding
+had been more saleable, if more conformed to our modern language." The
+grotesque, though it has its place as one of the instruments of poetical
+effect, is a dangerous element to handle. Spenser's age was very
+insensible to the presence and the dangers of the grotesque, and he was
+not before his time in feeling what was unpleasing in incongruous
+mixtures. Strong in the abundant but unsifted learning of his day, a
+style of learning, which in his case was strangely inaccurate, he not
+only mixed the past with the present, fairyland with politics, mythology
+with the most serious Christian ideas, but he often mixed together the
+very features which are most discordant, in the colours, forms, and
+methods by which he sought to produce the effect of his pictures.
+
+3. Another source of annoyance and disappointment is found in the
+imperfections and inconsistencies of the poet's standard of what is
+becoming to say and to write about. Exaggeration, diffuseness,
+prolixity, were the literary diseases of the age; an age of great
+excitement and hope, which had suddenly discovered its wealth and its
+powers, but not the rules of true economy in using them. With the
+classics open before it, and alive to much of the grandeur of their
+teaching, it was almost blind to the spirit of self-restraint,
+proportion, and simplicity which governed the great models. It was left
+to a later age to discern these and appreciate them. This unresisted
+proneness to exaggeration produced the extravagance and the horrors of
+the Elizabethan Drama, full, as it was, nevertheless, of insight and
+originality. It only too naturally led the earlier Spenser astray. What
+Dryden, in one of his interesting critical prefaces says of himself, is
+true of Spenser; "Thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast
+upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject; to run them
+into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose." There was in
+Spenser a facility for turning to account all material, original or
+borrowed, an incontinence of the descriptive faculty, which was ever
+ready to exercise itself on any object, the most unfitting and
+loathsome, as on the noblest, the purest, or the most beautiful. There
+are pictures in him which seem meant to turn our stomach. Worse than
+that there are pictures which for a time rank the poet of _Holiness_ or
+_Temperance_, with the painters who used their great art to represent at
+once the most sacred and holiest forms, and also scenes which few people
+now like to look upon in company--scenes and descriptions which may
+perhaps from the habits of the time may have been playfully and
+innocently produced, but which it is certainly not easy to dwell upon
+innocently now. And apart from these serious faults, there is
+continually haunting us, amid incontestable richness, vigour, and
+beauty, a sense that the work is over-done. Spenser certainly did not
+want for humour and an eye for the ridiculous. There is no want in him,
+either, of that power of epigrammatic terseness, which, in spite of its
+diffuseness, his age valued and cultivated. But when he gets on a story
+or a scene, he never knows where to stop. His duels go on stanza after
+stanza till there is no sound part left in either champion. His palaces,
+landscapes, pageants, feasts, are taken to pieces in all their parts,
+and all these parts are likened to some other things. "His abundance,"
+says Mr. Craik, "is often oppressive; _it is like wading among unmown
+grass_." And he drowns us in words. His abundant and incongruous
+adjectives may sometimes, perhaps, startle us unfairly, because their
+associations and suggestions have quite altered; but very often they are
+the idle outpouring of an unrestrained affluence of language. The
+impression remains that he wants a due perception of the absurd, the
+unnatural, the unnecessary; that he does not care if he makes us smile,
+or does not know how to help it, when he tries to make us admire or
+sympathize.
+
+Under this head comes a feature which the "charity of history" may lead
+us to treat as simple exaggeration, but which often suggests something
+less pardonable, in the great characters, political or literary, of
+Elizabeth's reign. This was the gross, shameless, lying flattery paid to
+the Queen. There is really nothing like it in history. It is unique as a
+phenomenon that proud, able, free-spoken men, with all their high
+instincts of what was noble and true, with all their admiration of the
+Queen's high qualities, should have offered it, even as an unmeaning
+custom; and that a proud and free-spoken people should not, in the very
+genuineness of their pride in her and their loyalty, have received it
+with shouts of derision and disgust. The flattery of Roman emperors and
+Roman Popes, if as extravagant, was not so personal. Even Louis XIV. was
+not celebrated in his dreary old age, as a model of ideal beauty and a
+paragon of romantic perfection. It was no worship of a secluded
+and distant object of loyalty: the men who thus flattered knew
+perfectly well, often by painful experience, what Elizabeth was:
+able, indeed, high-spirited, successful, but ungrateful to her
+servants, capricious, vain, ill-tempered, unjust, and in her old age,
+ugly. And yet the Gloriana of the _Faery Queen_, the Empress of
+all nobleness,--Belphoebe, the Princess of all sweetness and
+beauty,--Britomart, the armed votaress of all purity,--Mercilla, the
+lady of all compassion and grace,--were but the reflections of the
+language in which it was then agreed upon by some of the greatest of
+Englishmen to speak, and to be supposed to think, of the Queen.
+
+II. But when all these faults have been admitted, faults of design and
+faults of execution--and when it is admitted, further, that there is a
+general want of reality, substance, distinctness, and strength in the
+personages of the poem--that, compared with the contemporary drama,
+Spenser's knights and ladies and villains are thin and ghostlike, and
+that, as Daniel says, he
+
+     Paints shadows in imaginary lines--
+
+it yet remains that our greatest poets since his day have loved him and
+delighted in him. He had Shakespere's praise. Cowley was made a poet by
+reading him. Dryden calls Milton "the poetical son of Spenser:"
+"Milton," he writes, "has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his
+original." Dryden's own homage to him is frequent and generous. Pope
+found as much pleasure in the _Faery Queen_ in his later years as he had
+found in reading it when he was twelve years old: and what Milton,
+Dryden, and Pope admired, Wordsworth too found full of nobleness,
+purity, and sweetness. What is it that gives the _Faery Queen_ its hold
+on those who appreciate the richness and music of English language, and
+who in temper and moral standard are quick to respond to English
+manliness and tenderness? The spell is to be found mainly in three
+things--(1) in the quaint stateliness of Spenser's imaginary world and
+its representatives; (2) in the beauty and melody of his numbers, the
+abundance and grace of his poetic ornaments, in the recurring and
+haunting rhythm of numberless passages, in which thought and imagery and
+language and melody are interwoven in one perfect and satisfying
+harmony; and (3) in the intrinsic nobleness of his general aim, his
+conception of human life, at once so exacting and so indulgent, his high
+ethical principles and ideals, his unfeigned honour for all that is pure
+and brave and unselfish and tender, his generous estimate of what is due
+from man to man of service, affection, and fidelity. His fictions
+embodied truths of character which with all their shadowy incompleteness
+were too real and too beautiful to lose their charm with time.
+
+1. Spenser accepted from his age the quaint stateliness which is
+characteristic of his poem. His poetry is not simple and direct like
+that of the Greeks. It has not the exquisite finish and felicity of the
+best of the Latins. It has not the massive grandeur, the depth, the
+freedom, the shades and subtle complexities of feeling and motive, which
+the English dramatists found by going straight to nature. It has the
+stateliness of highly artificial conditions of society, of the Court,
+the pageant, the tournament, as opposed to the majesty of the great
+events in human life and history, its real vicissitudes, its
+catastrophes, its tragedies, its revolutions, its sins. Throughout the
+prolonged crisis of Elizabeth's reign, her gay and dashing courtiers,
+and even her serious masters of affairs, persisted in pretending to look
+on the world in which they lived, as if through the side-scenes of a
+masque, and relieved against the background of a stage-curtain. Human
+life, in those days, counted for little; fortune, honour, national
+existence hung in the balance; the game was one in which the heads of
+kings and queens and great statesmen were the stakes,--yet the players
+could not get out of their stiff and constrained costume, out of their
+artificial and fantastic figments of thought, out of their conceits and
+affectations of language. They carried it, with all their sagacity, with
+all their intensity of purpose, to the council-board, and the
+judgment-seat. They carried it to the scaffold. The conventional
+supposition was that at the Court, though every one knew better, all was
+perpetual sunshine, perpetual holiday, perpetual triumph, perpetual
+love-making. It was the happy reign of the good and wise and lovely. It
+was the discomfiture of the base, the faithless, the wicked, the
+traitors. This is what is reflected in Spenser's poem; at once, its
+stateliness, for there was no want of grandeur and magnificence in the
+public scene ever before Spenser's imagination; and its quaintness,
+because the whole outward apparatus of representation was borrowed from
+what was past, or from what did not exist, and implied surrounding
+circumstances in ludicrous contrast with fact, and men taught themselves
+to speak in character, and prided themselves on keeping it up by
+substituting for the ordinary language of life and emotion a cumbrous
+and involved indirectness of speech.
+
+And yet that quaint stateliness is not without its attractions. We have
+indeed to fit ourselves for it. But when we have submitted to its
+demands on our imagination, it carries us along as much as the fictions
+of the stage. The splendours of the artificial are not the splendours of
+the natural; yet the artificial has its splendours, which impress and
+captivate and repay. The grandeur of Spenser's poem is a grandeur like
+that of a great spectacle, a great array of the forces of a nation, a
+great series of military effects, a great ceremonial assemblage of all
+that is highest and most eminent in a country, a coronation, a royal
+marriage, a triumph, a funeral. So, though Spenser's knights and ladies
+do what no men ever could do, and speak what no man ever spoke, the
+procession rolls forward with a pomp which never forgets itself, and
+with an inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and incident.
+Nor is it always solemn and high-pitched. Its gravity is relieved from
+time to time with the ridiculous figure or character, the ludicrous
+incident, the jests and antics of the buffoon. It has been said that
+Spenser never smiles. He not only smiles, with amusement or sly irony;
+he wrote what he must have laughed at as he wrote, and meant us to laugh
+at. He did not describe with a grave face the terrors and misadventures
+of the boaster Braggadochio and his Squire, whether or not a caricature
+of the Duke of Alencon and his "gentleman," the "petit singe," Simier.
+He did not write with a grave face the Irish row about the false
+Florimel (IV. 5),--
+
+       Then unto Satyran she was adjudged,
+     Who was right glad to gaine so goodly meed:
+     But Blandamour thereat full greatly grudged,
+     And litle prays'd his labours evill speed,
+     That for to winne the saddle lost the steed.
+     Ne lesse thereat did Paridell complaine,
+     And thought t'appeale from that which was decreed
+     To single combat with Sir Satyrane:
+     Thereto him Ate stird, new discord to maintaine.
+
+       And eke, with these, full many other Knights
+     She through her wicked working did incense
+     Her to demaund and chalenge as their rights,
+     Deserved for their perils recompense.
+     Amongst the rest, with boastfull vaine pretense,
+     Stept Braggadochio forth, and as his thrall
+     Her claym'd, by him in battell wonne long sens:
+     Whereto her selfe he did to witnesse call:
+     Who, being askt, accordingly confessed all.
+
+       Thereat exceeding wroth was Satyran;
+     And wroth with Satyran was Blandamour;
+     And wroth with Blandamour was Erivan;
+     And at them both Sir Paridell did loure.
+     So all together stird up strifull stoure,
+     And readie were new battell to darraine.
+     Each one profest to be her paramoure,
+     And vow'd with speare and shield it to maintaine;
+     Ne Judges powre, ne reasons rule, mote them restraine.
+
+Nor the behaviour of the "rascal many" at the sight of the dead Dragon
+(I. 12),--
+
+       And after all the raskall many ran,
+     Heaped together in rude rablement,
+     To see the face of that victorious man,
+     Whom all admired as from heaven sent,
+     And gazd upon with gaping wonderment;
+     But when they came where that dead Dragon lay,
+     Stretcht on the ground in monstrous large extent,
+     The sight with ydle feare did them dismay,
+     Ne durst approch him nigh to touch, or once assay.
+
+       Some feard, and fledd; some feard, and well it fayned;
+     One, that would wiser seeme then all the rest,
+     Warnd him not touch, for yet perhaps remaynd
+     Some lingring life within his hollow brest,
+     Or in his wombe might lurke some hidden nest
+     Of many Dragonettes, his fruitfull seede:
+     Another saide, that in his eyes did rest
+     Yet sparckling fyre, and badd thereof take heed;
+     Another said, he saw him move his eyes indeed.
+
+       One mother, whenas her foolehardy chyld
+     Did come too neare, and with his talants play,
+     Halfe dead through feare, her litle babe revyld,
+     And to her gossibs gan in counsell say;
+     'How can I tell, but that his talants may
+     Yet scratch my sonne, or rend his tender hand?'
+     So diversly them selves in vaine they fray;
+     Whiles some more bold to measure him nigh stand,
+     To prove how many acres he did spred of land.
+
+And his humour is not the less real that it affects serious argument, in
+the excuse which he urges for his fairy tales (II. 1).
+
+       Right well I wote, most mighty Soveraine,
+     That all this famous antique history
+     Of some th' aboundance of an ydle braine
+     Will judged be, and painted forgery,
+     Rather then matter of just memory;
+     Sith none that breatheth living aire dees know
+     Where is that happy land of Faery,
+     Which I so much doe vaunt, yet no where show,
+     But vouch antiquities, which no body can know.
+
+       But let that man with better sence advize,
+     That of the world least part to us is red;
+     And daily how through hardy enterprize
+     Many great Regions are discovered,
+     Which to late age were never mentioned
+     Who ever heard of th' Indian Peru?
+     Or who in venturous vessell measured
+     The Amazon huge river, now found trew
+     Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?
+
+       Yet all these were, when no man did them know,
+     Yet have from wisest ages hidden beene;
+     And later times thinges more unknowne shall show.
+     Why then should witlesse man so much misweene,
+     That nothing is but that which he hath seene?
+     What if within the Moones fayre shining spheare,
+     What if in every other starre unseene
+     Of other worldes he happily should heare,
+     He wonder would much more; yet such to some appeare.
+
+The general effect is almost always lively and rich: all is buoyant and
+full of movement. That it is also odd, that we see strange costumes and
+hear a language often formal and obsolete, that we are asked to take for
+granted some very unaccustomed supposition and extravagant assumption,
+does not trouble us more than the usages and sights, so strange to
+ordinary civil life, of a camp, or a royal levee. All is in keeping,
+whatever may be the details of the pageant; they harmonize with the
+effect of the whole, like the gargoyles and quaint groups in a Gothic
+building harmonize with its general tone of majesty and subtle
+beauty;--nay, as ornaments, in themselves of bad taste, like much of the
+ornamentation of the Renaissance styles, yet find a not unpleasing place
+in compositions grandly and nobly designed:
+
+     So discord oft in music makes the sweeter lay.
+
+Indeed, it is curious how much of real variety is got out of a limited
+number of elements and situations. The spectacle, though consisting only
+of knights, ladies, dwarfs, pagans, "salvage men," enchanters, and
+monsters, and other well-worn machinery of the books of chivalry, is
+ever new, full of vigour and fresh images, even if, as sometimes
+happens, it repeats itself. There is a majestic unconsciousness of all
+violations of probability, and of the strangeness of the combinations
+which it unrolls before us.
+
+2. But there is not only stateliness: there is sweetness and beauty.
+Spenser's perception of beauty of all kinds was singularly and
+characteristically quick and sympathetic. It was one of his great gifts;
+perhaps the most special and unstinted. Except Shakespere, who had it
+with other and greater gifts, no one in that time approached to Spenser,
+in feeling the presence of that commanding and mysterious idea,
+compounded of so many things, yet of which, the true secret escapes us
+still, to which we give the name of beauty. A beautiful scene, a
+beautiful person, a beautiful poem, a mind and character with that
+combination of charms, which, for want of another word, we call by that
+half-spiritual, half-material word "beautiful," at once set his
+imagination at work to respond to it and reflect it. His means of
+reflecting it were as abundant as his sense of it was keen. They were
+only too abundant. They often betrayed him by their affluence and
+wonderful readiness to meet his call. Say what we will, and a great deal
+may be said, of his lavish profusion, his heady and uncontrolled excess,
+in the richness of picture and imagery in which he indulges,--still
+there it lies before us, like the most gorgeous of summer gardens, in
+the glory and brilliancy of its varied blooms, in the wonder of its
+strange forms of life, in the changefulness of its exquisite and
+delicious scents. No one who cares for poetic beauty can be insensible
+to it. He may criticize it. He may have too much of it. He may prefer
+something more severe and chastened. He may observe on the waste of
+wealth and power. He may blame the prodigal expense of language, and the
+long spaces which the poet takes up to produce his effect. He may often
+dislike or distrust the moral aspect of the poet's impartial
+sensitiveness to all outward beauty,--the impartiality which makes him
+throw all his strength into his pictures of Acrasia's Bower of Bliss,
+the Garden of Adonis, and Busirane's Masque of Cupid. But there is no
+gainsaying the beauty which never fails and disappoints, open the poem
+where you will. There is no gainsaying its variety, often so unexpected
+and novel. Face to face with the Epicurean idea of beauty and pleasure
+is the counter-charm of purity, truth, and duty. Many poets have done
+justice to each one separately. Few have shown, with such equal power,
+why it is that both have their roots in man's divided nature, and
+struggle, as it were, for the mastery. Which can be said to be the most
+exquisite in all beauty of imagination, of refined language, of
+faultless and matchless melody, of these two passages, in which the same
+image is used for the most opposite purposes;--first, in that song of
+temptation, the sweetest note in that description of Acrasia's Bower of
+Bliss, which, as a picture of the spells of pleasure, has never been
+surpassed; and next, to represent that stainless and glorious purity
+which is the professed object of his admiration and homage. In both the
+beauty of the rose furnishes the theme of the poet's treatment. In the
+first, it is the "lovely lay" which meets the knight of Temperance amid
+the voluptuousness which he is come to assail and punish.
+
+       The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay:
+     Ah! see, whoso fayre thing doest faine to see,
+     In springing flowre the image of thy day.
+     Ah! see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee
+     Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestee,
+     That fairer seemes the lesse ye see her may.
+     Lo! see soone after how more bold and free
+     Her bared bosome she doth broad display;
+     Lo! see soone after how she fades and falls away.
+
+       So passeth, in the passing of a day,
+     Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre;
+     Ne more doth florish after first decay,
+     That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre
+     Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre.
+     Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime,
+     For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre;
+     Gather the Rose of love whilest yet is time,
+     Whilest loving thou mayst loved be with equall crime.
+
+In the other, it images the power of the will--that power over
+circumstance and the storms of passion, to command obedience to reason
+and the moral law, which Milton sung so magnificently in _Comus_:--
+
+       That daintie Rose, the daughter of her Morne,
+     More deare then life she tendered, whose flowre
+     The girlond of her honour did adorne:
+     Ne suffred she the Middayes scorching powre,
+     Ne the sharp Northerne wind thereon to showre;
+     But lapped up her silken leaves most chayre,
+     When so the froward skye began to lowre;
+     But, soone as calmed was the christall ayre,
+     She did it fayre dispred and let to florish fayre.
+
+       Eternall God, in his almightie powre,
+     To make ensample of his heavenly grace,
+     In Paradize whylome did plant this flowre;
+     Whence he it fetcht out of her native place,
+     And did in stocke of earthly flesh enrace,
+     That mortall men her glory should admyre.
+     In gentle Ladies breste, and bounteous race
+     Of woman kind, it fayrest Flowre doth spyre,
+     And beareth fruit of honour and all chast desyre.
+
+     Fayre ympes of beautie, whose bright shining beames
+     Adorne the worlde with like to heavenly light,
+     And to your willes both royalties and Reames
+     Subdew, through conquest of your wondrous might,
+     With this fayre flowre your goodly girlonds dight
+     Of chastity and vertue virginall,
+     That shall embellish more your beautie bright,
+     And crowne your heades with heavenly coronall,
+     Such as the Angels weare before Gods tribunall!
+
+This sense of beauty, and command of beautiful expression is not seen
+only in the sweetness of which both these passages are examples. Its
+range is wide. Spenser had in his nature besides sweetness, his full
+proportion of the stern and high manliness of his generation; indeed, he
+was not without its severity, its hardness, its unconsidering and cruel
+harshness, its contemptuous indifference to suffering and misery when on
+the wrong side. Noble and heroic ideals captivate him by their
+attractions. He kindles naturally and genuinely at what proves and draws
+out men's courage, their self-command, their self-sacrifice. He
+sympathizes as profoundly with the strangeness of their condition, with
+the sad surprises in their history and fate, as he gives himself up with
+little restraint to what is charming and even intoxicating in it. He can
+moralize with the best in terse and deep-reaching apophthegms of
+melancholy or even despairing experience. He can appreciate the
+mysterious depths and awful outlines of theology--of what our own age
+can see nothing in, but a dry and scholastic dogmatism. His great
+contemporaries were, more perhaps than the men of any age, many-sided.
+He shared their nature; and he used all that he had of sensitiveness and
+of imaginative and creative power, in bringing out its manifold aspects,
+and sometimes contradictory feelings and aims. Not that beauty, even
+varied beauty, is the uninterrupted attribute of his work. It alternates
+with much that no indulgence can call beautiful. It passes but too
+easily into what is commonplace, or forced, or unnatural, or
+extravagant, or careless and poor, or really coarse and bad. He was a
+negligent corrector. He only at times gave himself the trouble to
+condense and concentrate. But for all this, the _Faery Queen_ glows and
+is ablaze with beauty; and that beauty is so rich, so real, and so
+uncommon, that for its sake the severest readers of Spenser have
+pardoned much that is discordant with it, much that in the reading has
+wasted their time and disappointed them.
+
+There is one portion of the beauty of the _Faery Queen_, which in its
+perfection and fulness had never yet been reached in English poetry.
+This was the music and melody of his verse. It was this wonderful,
+almost unfailing sweetness of numbers which probably as much as anything
+set the _Faery Queen_ at once above all contemporary poetry. The English
+language is really a musical one, and say what people will, the English
+ear is very susceptible to the infinite delicacy and suggestiveness of
+musical rhythm and cadence. Spenser found the secret of it. The art has
+had many and consummate masters since, as different in their melody as
+in their thoughts from Spenser. And others at the time, Shakespere
+pre-eminently, heard, only a little later, the same grandeur, and the
+same subtle beauty in the sounds of their mother-tongue, only waiting
+the artist's skill to be combined and harmonized into strains of
+mysterious fascination. But Spenser was the first to show that he had
+acquired a command over what had hitherto been heard only in exquisite
+fragments, passing too soon into roughness and confusion. It would be
+too much to say that his cunning never fails, that his ear is never dull
+or off its guard. But when the length and magnitude of the composition
+are considered, with the restraints imposed by the new nine-line stanza,
+however convenient it may have been, the vigour, the invention, the
+volume and rush of language, and the keenness and truth of ear amid its
+diversified tasks are indeed admirable, which could keep up so prolonged
+and so majestic a stream of original and varied poetical melody. If his
+stanzas are monotonous, it is with the grand monotony of the seashore,
+where billow follows billow, each swelling diversely, and broken into
+different curves and waves upon its mounting surface, till at last it
+falls over, and spreads and rushes up in a last long line of foam upon
+the beach.
+
+3. But all this is but the outside shell and the fancy framework in
+which the substance of the poem is enclosed. Its substance is the poet's
+philosophy of life. It shadows forth, in type and parable, his ideal of
+the perfection of the human character, with its special features, its
+trials, its achievements. There were two accepted forms in poetry in
+which this had been done by poets. One was under the image of warfare.
+The other was under the image of a journey or voyage. Spenser chose the
+former, as Dante and Bunyan chose the latter. Spenser looks on the scene
+of the world as a continual battle-field. It was such in fact to his
+experience in Ireland, testing the mettle of character, its loyalty, its
+sincerity, its endurance. His picture of character is by no means
+painted with sentimental tenderness. He portrays it in the rough work of
+the struggle and the toil, always hardly tested by trial, often
+overmatched, deceived, defeated, and even delivered by its own default
+to disgrace and captivity. He had full before his eyes what abounded in
+the society of his day, often in its noblest representatives--the
+strange perplexing mixture of the purer with the baser elements, in the
+high-tempered and aspiring activity of his time. But it was an ideal of
+character which had in it high aims and serious purposes, which was
+armed with fortitude and strength, which could recover itself after
+failure and defeat.
+
+The unity of a story, or an allegory--that chain and backbone of
+continuous interest, implying a progress and leading up to a climax,
+which holds together the great poems of the world, the _Iliad_ and
+_Odyssey_, the _AEneid_, the _Commedia_, the _Paradise Lost_, the
+_Jerusalem Delivered_--this is wanting in the _Faery Queen_. The unity
+is one of character and its ideal. That character of the completed man,
+raised above what is poor and low, and governed by noble tempers and
+pure principles, has in Spenser two conspicuous elements. In the first
+place, it is based on manliness. In the personages which illustrate the
+different virtues, Holiness, Justice, Courtesy, and the rest, the
+distinction is not in nicely discriminated features or shades of
+expression, but in the trials and the occasions which call forth a
+particular action or effort: yet the manliness which is at the
+foundation of all that is good in them is a universal quality common to
+them all, rooted and imbedded in the governing idea or standard of moral
+character in the poem. It is not merely courage, it is not merely
+energy, it is not merely strength. It is the quality of soul which
+frankly accepts the conditions in human life, of labour, of obedience,
+of effort, of unequal success, which does not quarrel with them or evade
+them, but takes for granted with unquestioning alacrity that man is
+called--by his call to high aims and destiny--to a continual struggle
+with difficulty, with pain, with evil, and makes it the point of honour
+not to be dismayed or wearied out by them. It is a cheerful and serious
+willingness for hard work and endurance, as being inevitable and very
+bearable necessities, together with even a pleasure in encountering
+trials which put a man on his mettle, an enjoyment of the contest and
+the risk, even in play. It is the quality which seizes on the paramount
+idea of duty, as something which leaves a man no choice; which despises
+and breaks through the inferior considerations and motives--trouble,
+uncertainty, doubt, curiosity--which hang about and impede duty; which
+is impatient with the idleness and childishness of a life of mere
+amusement, or mere looking on, of continued and self-satisfied levity,
+of vacillation, of clever and ingenious trifling. Spenser's manliness is
+quite consistent with long pauses of rest, with intervals of change,
+with great craving for enjoyment--nay, with great lapses from its ideal,
+with great mixtures of selfishness, with coarseness, with
+licentiousness, with injustice and inhumanity. It may be fatally
+diverted into bad channels; it may degenerate into a curse and scourge
+to the world. But it stands essentially distinct from the nature which
+shrinks from difficulty, which is appalled at effort, which has no
+thought of making an impression on things around it, which is content
+with passively receiving influences and distinguishing between emotions,
+which feels no call to exert itself, because it recognizes no aim
+valuable enough to rouse it, and no obligation strong enough to command
+it. In the character of his countrymen round him, in its highest and in
+its worst features, in its noble ambition, its daring enterprise, its
+self-devotion, as well as in its pride, its intolerance, its fierce
+self-will, its arrogant claims of superiority, moral, political,
+religious, Spenser saw the example of that strong and resolute
+manliness, which, once set on great things, feared nothing--neither toil
+nor disaster nor danger, in their pursuit. Naturally and unconsciously,
+he laid it at the bottom of all his portraitures of noble and virtuous
+achievement in the _Faery Queen_.
+
+All Spenser's "virtues" spring from a root of manliness. Strength,
+simplicity of aim, elevation of spirit, courage are presupposed as their
+necessary conditions. But they have with him another condition as
+universal. They all grow and are nourished from the soil of love; the
+love of beauty, the love and service of fair women. This of course, is a
+survival from the ages of chivalry, an inheritance bequeathed from the
+minstrels of France, Italy, and Germany to the rising poetry of Europe.
+Spenser's types of manhood are imperfect without the idea of an
+absorbing and overmastering passion of love; without a devotion, as to
+the principal and most worthy object of life, to the service of a
+beautiful lady, and to winning her affection and grace. The influence of
+this view of life comes out in numberless ways. Love comes on the scene
+in shapes which are exquisitely beautiful, in all its purity, its
+tenderness, its unselfishness. But the claims of its all-ruling and
+irresistible might are also only too readily verified in the passions of
+men; in the follies of love, its entanglements, its mischiefs, its
+foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never
+absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the
+poem. The picture of life held up before us is the literal rendering of
+Coleridge's lines:--
+
+     All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
+     Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
+     Are all but ministers of Love,
+           And feed his sacred flame.
+
+We still think with Spenser about the paramount place of manliness, as
+the foundation of all worth in human character. We have ceased to think
+with him about the rightful supremacy of love, even in the imaginative
+conception of human life. We have ceased to recognize in it the public
+claims of almost a religion, which it has in Spenser. Love will ever
+play a great part in human life to the end of time. It will be an
+immense element in its happiness, perhaps a still greater one in its
+sorrows, its disasters, its tragedies. It is still an immense power in
+shaping and colouring it, both in fiction and reality; in the family, in
+the romance, in the fatalities and the prosaic ruin of vulgar fact. But
+the place given to it by Spenser is to our thoughts and feelings even
+ludicrously extravagant. An enormous change has taken place in the ideas
+of society on this point: it is one of the things which make a wide
+chasm between centuries and generations which yet are of "the same
+passions," and have in temper, tradition and language, so much in
+common. The ages of the Courts of Love, whom Chaucer reflected and whose
+ideas passed on through him to Spenser, are to us simply strange and
+abnormal states through which society has passed, to us beyond
+understanding and almost belief. The perpetual love-making, as one of
+the first duties and necessities of a noble life, the space which it
+must fill in the cares and thoughts of all gentle and high-reaching
+spirits, the unrestrained language of admiration and worship, the
+unrestrained yielding to the impulses, the anxieties, the pitiable
+despair and agonies of love, the subordination to it of all other
+pursuits and aims, the weeping and wailing and self-torturing which it
+involves, all this is so far apart from what we know of actual life, the
+life not merely of work and business, but the life of affection, and
+even of passion, that it makes the picture of which it is so necessary a
+part, seem to us in the last degree, unreal, unimaginable, grotesquely
+ridiculous. The quaint love sometimes found among children, so quickly
+kindled, so superficial, so violent in its language and absurd in its
+plans, is transferred with the utmost gravity to the serious proceedings
+of the wise and good. In the highest characters it is chastened,
+refined, purified: it appropriates, indeed, language due only to the
+divine, it almost simulates idolatry; yet it belongs to the best part of
+man's nature. But in the lower and average characters, it is not so
+respectable; it is apt to pass into mere toying pastime and frivolous
+love of pleasure: it astonishes us often by the readiness with which it
+displays an affinity for the sensual and impure, the corrupting and
+debasing sides of the relations between the sexes. But however it
+appears, it is throughout a very great affair, not merely with certain
+persons, or under certain circumstances, but with every one: it obtrudes
+itself in public, as the natural and recognized motive of plans of life
+and trials of strength; it is the great spur of enterprise, and its
+highest and most glorious reward. A world of which this is the law, is
+not even in fiction a world which we can conceive possible, or with
+which experience enables us to sympathize.
+
+It is, of course, a purely artificial and conventional reading of the
+facts of human life and feeling. Such conventional readings and
+renderings belong in a measure to all art; but in its highest forms they
+are corrected, interpreted, supplemented by the presence of interspersed
+realities which every one recognizes. But it was one of Spenser's
+disadvantages, that two strong influences combined to entangle him in
+this fantastic and grotesque way of exhibiting the play and action of
+the emotions of love. This all-absorbing, all-embracing passion of love,
+at least, this way of talking about it, was the fashion of the Court.
+Further, it was the fashion of poetry, which he inherited; and he was
+not the man to break through the strong bands of custom and authority.
+In very much he was an imitator. He took what he found; what was his
+own was his treatment of it. He did not trouble himself with
+inconsistencies, or see absurdities and incongruities. Habit and
+familiar language made it not strange that in the Court of Elizabeth,
+the most high-flown sentiments should be in every one's mouth about the
+sublimities and refinements of love, while every one was busy with keen
+ambition, and unscrupulous intrigue. The same blinding power kept him
+from seeing the monstrous contrast between the claims of the queen to be
+the ideal of womanly purity--claims recognized and echoed in ten
+thousand extravagant compliments--and the real licentiousness common all
+round her among her favourites. All these strange contradictions, which
+surprise and shock us, Spenser assumed as natural. He built up his
+fictions on them, as the dramatist built on a basis, which, though more
+nearly approaching to real life, yet differed widely from it in many of
+its preliminary and collateral suppositions; or as the novelist builds
+up his on a still closer adherence to facts and experience. In this
+matter Spenser appears with a kind of double self. At one time he speaks
+as one penetrated and inspired by the highest and purest ideas of love,
+and filled with aversion and scorn for the coarser forms of passion--for
+what is ensnaring and treacherous, as well as for what is odious and
+foul. At another, he puts forth all his power to bring out its most
+dangerous and even debasing aspects in highly coloured pictures, which
+none could paint without keen sympathy with what he takes such pains to
+make vivid and fascinating. The combination is not like anything modern,
+for both the elements are in Spenser so unquestionably and simply
+genuine. Our modern poets are, with all their variations in this
+respect, more homogeneous; and where one conception of love and beauty
+has taken hold of a man, the other does not easily come in. It is
+impossible to imagine Wordsworth dwelling with zest on visions and
+imagery, on which Spenser has lavished all his riches. There can be no
+doubt of Byron's real habits of thought and feeling on subjects of this
+kind, even when his language for the occasion is the chastest; we detect
+in it the mood of the moment, perhaps spontaneous, perhaps put on, but
+in contradiction to the whole movement of the man's true nature. But
+Spenser's words do not ring hollow. With a kind of unconsciousness and
+innocence, which we now find hard to understand, and which perhaps
+belongs to the early childhood or boyhood of a literature, he passes
+abruptly from one standard of thought and feeling to another; and is
+quite as much in earnest when he is singing the pure joys of chastened
+affections, as he is when he is writing with almost riotous luxuriance
+what we are at this day ashamed to read. Tardily, indeed, he appears to
+have acknowledged the contradiction. At the instance of two noble ladies
+of the Court, he composed two Hymns of Heavenly Love and Heavenly
+Beauty, to "retract" and "reform" two earlier ones composed in praise of
+earthly love and beauty. But, characteristically, he published the two
+pieces together, side by side in the same volume.
+
+In the _Faery Queen_, Spenser has brought out, not the image of the
+great Gloriana, but in its various aspects, a form of character which
+was then just coming on the stage of the world, and which has played a
+great part in it since. As he has told us, he aimed at presenting before
+us, in the largest sense of the word, the English gentleman. It was as a
+whole a new character in the world. It had not really existed in the
+days of feudalism and chivalry, though features of it had appeared, and
+its descent was traced from those times: but they were too wild and
+coarse, too turbulent and disorderly, for a character which, however
+ready for adventure and battle, looked to peace, refinement, order, and
+law as the true conditions of its perfection. In the days of Elizabeth
+it was beginning to fill a large place in English life. It was formed
+amid the increasing cultivation of the nation, the increasing varieties
+of public service, the awakening responsibilities to duty and calls to
+self-command. Still making much of the prerogative of noble blood and
+family honours, it was something independent of nobility and beyond it.
+A nobleman might have in him the making of a gentleman: but it was the
+man himself of whom the gentleman was made. Great birth, even great
+capacity, were not enough; there must be added a new delicacy of
+conscience, a new appreciation of what is beautiful and worthy of
+honour, a new measure of the strength and nobleness of self-control, of
+devotion to unselfish interests. This idea of manhood, based not only on
+force and courage, but on truth, on refinement, on public spirit, on
+soberness and modesty, on consideration for others, was taking
+possession of the younger generation of Elizabeth's middle years. Of
+course the idea was very imperfectly apprehended, still more imperfectly
+realized. But it was something which on the same scale had not been yet,
+and which was to be the seed of something greater. It was to grow into
+those strong, simple, noble characters, pure in aim and devoted to duty,
+the Falklands, the Hampdens, who amid so much evil form such a
+remarkable feature in the Civil Wars, both on the Royalist and the
+Parliamentary sides. It was to grow into that high type of cultivated
+English nature, in the present and the last century, common both to its
+monarchical and its democratic embodiments, than which, with all its
+faults and defects, our western civilization has produced few things
+more admirable.
+
+There were three distinguished men of that time, who one after another
+were Spenser's friends and patrons, and who were men in whom he saw
+realized his conceptions of human excellence and nobleness. They were
+Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Grey of Wilton, and Sir Walter Ralegh: and the
+_Faery Queen_ reflects, as in a variety of separate mirrors and
+spiritualized forms, the characteristics of these men and of such as
+they. It reflects their conflicts, their temptations, their weaknesses,
+the evils they fought with, the superiority with which they towered over
+meaner and poorer natures. Sir Philip Sidney may be said to have been
+the first typical example in English society of the true gentleman. The
+charm which attracted men to him in life, the fame which he left behind
+him, are not to be accounted for simply by his accomplishments as a
+courtier, a poet, a lover of literature, a gallant soldier; above all
+this there was something not found in the strong or brilliant men about
+him, a union and harmony of all high qualities differing from any of
+them separately, which gave a fire of its own to his literary
+enthusiasm, and a sweetness of its own to his courtesy. Spenser's
+admiration for that bright but short career was strong and lasting.
+Sidney was to him a verification of what he aspired to and imagined; a
+pledge that he was not dreaming, in portraying Prince Arthur's greatness
+of soul, the religious chivalry of the Red Cross Knight of Holiness, the
+manly purity and self-control of Sir Guyon. It is too much to say that
+in Prince Arthur, the hero of the poem, he always intended Sidney. In
+the first place, it is clear that under that character Spenser in places
+pays compliments to Leicester, in whose service he began life, and
+whose claims on his homage he ever recognized. Prince Arthur is
+certainly Leicester, in the historical passages in the Fifth Book
+relating to the war in the Low Countries in 1576: and no one can be
+meant but Leicester in the bold allusion in the First Book (ix. 17) to
+Elizabeth's supposed thoughts of marrying him. In the next place,
+allegory, like caricature, is not bound to make the same person and the
+same image always or perfectly coincide; and Spenser makes full use of
+this liberty. But when he was painting the picture of the Kingly
+Warrior, in whom was to be summed up in a magnificent unity the
+diversified graces of other men, and who was to be ever ready to help
+and support his fellows in their hour of need, and in their conflict
+with evil, he certainly had before his mind the well-remembered
+lineaments of Sidney's high and generous nature. And he further
+dedicated a separate book, the last that he completed, to the
+celebration of Sidney's special "virtue" of Courtesy. The martial strain
+of the poem changes once more to the pastoral of the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ to describe Sidney's wooing of Frances Walsingham, the fair
+Pastorella; his conquests by his sweetness and grace over the
+churlishness of rivals; and his triumphant war against the monster
+spirit of ignorant and loud-tongued insolence, the "Blatant Beast" of
+religious, political, and social slander.
+
+Again, in Lord Grey of Wilton, gentle by nature, but so stern in the
+hour of trial, called reluctantly to cope not only with anarchy, but
+with intrigue and disloyalty, finding selfishness and thanklessness
+everywhere, but facing all and doing his best with a heavy heart, and
+ending his days prematurely under detraction and disgrace, Spenser had
+before him a less complete character than Sidney, but yet one of grand
+and severe manliness, in which were conspicuous a religious hatred of
+disorder, and an unflinching sense of public duty. Spenser's admiration
+of him was sincere and earnest. In his case the allegory almost becomes
+history. Arthur, Lord Grey, is Sir Arthegal, the Knight of Justice. The
+story touches apparently on some passages of his career, when his
+dislike of the French marriage placed him in opposition to the Queen,
+and even for a time threw him with the supporters of Mary. But the
+adventures of Arthegal mainly preserve the memory of Lord Grey's
+terrible exploits against wrong and rebellion in Ireland. These exploits
+are represented in the doings of the iron man Talus, his squire, with
+his destroying flail, swift, irresistible, inexorable; a figure,
+borrowed and altered, after Spenser's wont, from a Greek legend. His
+overthrow of insolent giants, his annihilation of swarming "rascal
+routs," idealize and glorify that unrelenting policy, of which, though
+condemned in England, Spenser continued to be the advocate. In the story
+of Arthegal, long separated by undeserved misfortunes from the favour of
+the armed lady, Britomart, the virgin champion of right, of whom he was
+so worthy, doomed in spite of his honours to an early death, and
+assailed on his return from his victorious service by the furious
+insults of envy and malice, Spenser portrays almost without a veil, the
+hard fate of the unpopular patron whom he to the last defended and
+honoured.
+
+Ralegh, his last protector, the Shepherd of the Ocean, to whose judgment
+he referred the work of his life, and under whose guidance he once more
+tried the quicksands of the Court, belonged to a different class from
+Sidney or Lord Grey; but of his own class he was the consummate and
+matchless example. He had not Sidney's fine enthusiasm and nobleness; he
+had not either Sidney's affectations. He had not Lord Grey's
+single-minded hatred of wrong. He was a man to whom his own interests
+were much; he was unscrupulous; he was ostentatious; he was not above
+stooping to mean, unmanly compliances with the humours of the Queen. But
+he was a man with a higher ideal than he attempted to follow. He saw,
+not without cynical scorn, through the shows and hollowness of the
+world. His intellect was of that clear and unembarrassed power which
+takes in as wholes things which other men take in part by part. And he
+was in its highest form a representative of that spirit of adventure
+into the unknown and the wonderful of which Drake was the coarser and
+rougher example, realizing in serious earnest, on the sea and in the New
+World, the life of knight-errantry feigned in romances. With Ralegh, as
+with Lord Grey, Spenser comes to history; and he even seems to have been
+moved, as the poem went on, partly by pity, partly by amusement, to
+shadow forth in his imaginary world, not merely Ralegh's brilliant
+qualities, but also his frequent misadventures and mischances in his
+career at Court. Of all her favourites Ralegh was the one whom his
+wayward mistress seemed to find most delight in tormenting. The offence
+which he gave by his secret marriage suggested the scenes describing the
+utter desolation of Prince Arthur's squire, Timias, at the jealous wrath
+of the Virgin Huntress, Belphoebe,--scenes, which extravagant as they
+are, can hardly be called a caricature of Ralegh's real behaviour in the
+Tower in 1593. But Spenser is not satisfied with this one picture. In
+the last Book Timias appears again, the victim of slander and ill-usage,
+even after he had recovered Belphoebe's favour; he is baited like a
+wild bull, by mighty powers of malice, falsehood, and calumny; he is
+wounded by the tooth of the Blatant Beast; and after having been cured,
+not without difficulty, and not without significant indications on the
+part of the poet that his friend had need to restrain and chasten his
+unruly spirit, he is again delivered over to an ignominious captivity,
+and the insults of Disdain and Scorn.
+
+       Then up he made him rise, and forward fare,
+     Led in a rope which both his hands did bynd;
+     Ne ought that foole for pity did him spare,
+     But with his whip, him following behynd,
+     Him often scourg'd, and forst his feete to fynd:
+     And other-whiles with bitter mockes and mowes
+     He would him scorne, that to his gentle mynd
+     Was much more grievous then the others blowes:
+     Words sharpely wound, but greatest griefe of scorning growes.
+
+Spenser knew Ralegh only in the promise of his adventurous prime--so
+buoyant and fearless, so inexhaustible in project and resource, so
+unconquerable by checks and reverses. The gloomier portion of Ralegh's
+career was yet to come: its intrigues, its grand yet really gambling and
+unscrupulous enterprises, the long years of prison and authorship, and
+its not unfitting close, in the English statesman's death by the
+headsman--so tranquil though violent, so ceremoniously solemn, so
+composed, so dignified;--such a contrast to all other forms of capital
+punishment, then or since.
+
+Spenser has been compared to Pindar, and contrasted with Cervantes. The
+contrast, in point of humour, and the truth that humour implies, is
+favourable to the Spaniard: in point of moral earnestness and sense of
+poetic beauty, to the Englishman. What Cervantes only thought
+ridiculous Spenser used, and not in vain, for a high purpose. The ideas
+of knight-errantry were really more absurd than Spenser allowed himself
+to see. But that idea of the gentleman which they suggested, that
+picture of human life as a scene of danger, trial, effort, defeat,
+recovery, which they lent themselves to image forth, was more worth
+insisting on, than the exposure of their folly and extravagance. There
+was nothing to be made of them, Cervantes thought; and nothing to be
+done, but to laugh off what they had left, among living Spaniards, of
+pompous imbecility or mistaken pretensions. Spenser, knowing that they
+must die, yet believed that out of them might be raised something nobler
+and more real, enterprise, duty, resistance to evil, refinement, hatred
+of the mean and base. The energetic and high-reaching manhood which he
+saw in the remarkable personages round him he shadowed forth in the
+_Faery Queen_. He idealized the excellences and the trials of this first
+generation of English gentlemen, as Bunyan afterwards idealized the
+piety, the conflicts, and the hopes of Puritan religion. Neither were
+universal types; neither were perfect. The manhood in which Spenser
+delights, with all that was admirable and attractive in it, had still
+much of boyish incompleteness and roughness: it had noble aims, it had
+generosity, it had loyalty, it had a very real reverence for purity and
+religion; but it was young in experience of a new world, it was wanting
+in self-mastery, it was often pedantic and self-conceited; it was an
+easier prey than it ought to have been to discreditable temptations. And
+there is a long interval between any of Spenser's superficial and thin
+conceptions of character, and such deep and subtle creations as Hamlet
+or Othello, just as Bunyan's strong but narrow ideals of religion, true
+as they are up to a certain point, fall short of the length and breadth
+and depth of what Christianity has made of man, and may yet make of him.
+But in the ways which Spenser chose, he will always delight and teach
+us. The spectacle of what is heroic and self-devoted, of honour for
+principle and truth, set before us with so much insight and sympathy,
+and combined with so much just and broad observation on those accidents
+and conditions of our mortal state which touch us all, will never appeal
+to English readers in vain, till we have learned a new language, and
+adopted new canons of art, of taste, and of morals. It is not merely
+that he has left imperishable images which have taken their place among
+the consecrated memorials of poetry and the household thoughts of all
+cultivated men. But he has permanently lifted the level of English
+poetry by a great and sustained effort of rich and varied art, in which
+one main purpose rules, loyalty to what is noble and pure, and in which
+this main purpose subordinates to itself every feature and every detail,
+and harmonizes some that by themselves seem least in keeping with it.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[118:1]
+
+     "Unknow, unkyst; and lost, that is unsoght."
+
+                                  _Troylus and Cryseide_, lib. i.
+
+[128:2] Hales' _Life_, Globe Edition.
+
+[132:3] _Vid._ Keble, _Praelect. Acad._, xxiv. p. 479, 480.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+SECOND PART OF THE FAERY QUEEN.--SPENSER'S LAST YEARS (1590-1599).
+
+
+The publication of the _Faery Queen_ in 1590 had made the new poet of
+the _Shepherd's Calendar_ a famous man. He was no longer merely the
+favourite of a knot of enthusiastic friends, and outside of them only
+recognized and valued at his true measure by such judges as Sidney and
+Ralegh. By the common voice of all the poets of his time he was now
+acknowledged as the first of living English poets. It is not easy for
+us, who live in these late times and are familiar with so many literary
+masterpieces, to realize the surprise of a first and novel achievement
+in literature; the effect on an age, long and eagerly seeking after
+poetical expression, of the appearance at last of a work of such power,
+richness, and finished art.
+
+It can scarcely be doubted, I think, from the bitter sarcasms
+interspersed in his later poems, that Spenser expected more from his
+triumph than it brought him. It opened no way of advancement for him in
+England. He continued for a while in that most ungrateful and
+unsatisfactory employment, the service of the State in Ireland; and that
+he relinquished in 1593.[166:1] At the end of 1591 he was again at
+Kilcolman. He had written and probably sent to Ralegh, though he did not
+publish it till 1595, the record already quoted of the last two year's
+events, _Colin Clout's come home again_,--his visit, under Ralegh's
+guidance, to the Court, his thoughts and recollections of its great
+ladies, his generous criticisms on poets, the people and courtiers whom
+he had seen and heard of; how he had been dazzled, how he had been
+disenchanted, and how he was come home to his Irish mountains and
+streams and lakes, to enjoy their beauty, though in a "salvage" and
+"foreign" land; to find in this peaceful and tranquil retirement
+something far better than the heat of ambition and the intrigues of
+envious rivalries; and to contrast with the profanations of the name of
+love which had disgusted him in a dissolute society, the higher and
+purer ideal of it which he could honour and pursue in the simplicity of
+his country life.
+
+And in Ireland, the rejected adorer of the Rosalind of the _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ found another and still more perfect Rosalind, who, though she
+was at first inclined to repeat the cruelty of the earlier one, in time
+relented, and received such a dower of poetic glory as few poets have
+bestowed upon their brides. It has always appeared strange that
+Spenser's passion for the first Rosalind should have been so lasting,
+that in his last pastoral, _Colin Clout's come home again_, written so
+late as 1591, and published after he was married, he should end his poem
+by reverting to this long-past love passage, defending her on the ground
+of her incomparable excellence and his own unworthiness, against the
+blame of friendly "shepherds," witnesses of the "languors of his too
+long dying," and angry with her hard-heartedness. It may be that,
+according to Spenser's way of making his masks and figures suggest but
+not fully express their antitypes,[168:2] Rosalind here bears the image
+of the real mistress of this time, the "country lass," the Elizabeth of
+the sonnets, who was, in fact, for a while as unkind as the earlier
+Rosalind. The history of this later wooing, its hopes and anguish, its
+varying currents, its final unexpected success, is the subject of a
+collection of Sonnets, which have the disadvantage of provoking
+comparison with the Sonnets of Shakespere. There is no want in them of
+grace and sweetness, and they ring true with genuine feeling and warm
+affection, though they have of course their share of the conceits then
+held proper for love poems. But they want the power and fire, as well as
+the perplexing mystery, of those of the greater master. His bride was
+also immortalized as a fourth among the three Graces, in a
+richly-painted passage in the last book of the _Faery Queen_. But the
+most magnificent tribute to her is the great Wedding Ode, the
+_Epithalamion_, the finest composition of its kind, probably, in any
+language: so impetuous and unflagging, so orderly and yet so rapid in
+the onward march of its stately and varied stanzas; so passionate, so
+flashing with imaginative wealth, yet so refined and self-restrained. It
+was always easy for Spenser to open the floodgates of his inexhaustible
+fancy. With him,--
+
+     The numbers flow as fast as spring doth rise.
+
+But here he has thrown into his composition all his power of
+concentration, of arrangement, of strong and harmonious government over
+thought and image, over language and measure and rhythm; and the result
+is unquestionably one of the grandest lyrics in English poetry. We have
+learned to think the subject unfit for such free poetical treatment;
+Spenser's age did not.
+
+Of the lady of whom all this was said, and for whom all this was
+written, the family name has not been thought worth preserving. We know
+that by her Christian name she was a namesake of the great queen, and of
+Spenser's mother. She is called a country lass, which may mean anything;
+and the marriage appears to have been solemnized in Cork, on what was
+then Midsummer Day, "Barnaby the Bright," the day when "the sun is in
+his cheerful height," June 11/22, 1594. Except that she survived
+Spenser, that she married again, and had some legal quarrels with one of
+her own sons about his lands, we know nothing more about her. Of two of
+the children whom she brought him, the names have been preserved, and
+they indicate that in spite of love and poetry, and the charms of
+Kilcolman, Spenser felt as Englishmen feel in Australia or in India. To
+call one of them _Sylvanus_, and the other _Peregrine_, reveals to us
+that Ireland was still to him a "salvage land," and he a pilgrim and
+stranger in it; as Moses called his firstborn Gershom, a stranger
+here--"for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land."
+
+In the year after his marriage, he sent over these memorials of it to be
+published in London, and they were entered at Stationers' Hall in
+November, 1595. The same year he came over himself, bringing with him
+the second instalment of the _Faery Queen_, which was entered for
+publication the following January, 1595/6. Thus the half of the
+projected work was finished; and finished, as we know from one of the
+Sonnets (80), before his marriage. After his long "race through Fairy
+land," he asks leave to rest, and solace himself with his "love's sweet
+praise;" and then "as a steed refreshed after toil," he will "stoutly
+that second worke assoyle." The first six books were published together
+in 1596. He remained most of the year in London, during which _The Four
+Hymns on Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly_, were published; and
+also a Dirge (_Daphnaida_) on Douglas Howard, the wife of Arthur Gorges,
+the spirited narrator of the Island Voyage of Essex and Ralegh, written
+in 1591; and a "spousal verse" (_Prothalamion_), on the marriage of the
+two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, late in 1596. But he was only a
+visitor in London. The _Prothalamion_ contains a final record of his
+disappointments in England.
+
+                   I, (whom sullein care,
+     Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay
+     In Princes Court, and expectation vayne
+     Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away,
+     Like empty shaddowes, did afflict my brayne,)
+     Walkt forth to ease my payne
+     Along the shoare of silver streaming Themmes--
+
+His marriage ought to have made him happy. He professed to find the
+highest enjoyment in the quiet and retirement of country life. He was in
+the prime of life, successful beyond all his fellows in his special
+work, and apparently with unabated interest in what remained to be done
+of it. And though he could not but feel himself at a distance from the
+"sweet civility" of England, and socially at disadvantage compared to
+those whose lines had fallen to them in its pleasant places, yet
+nature, which he loved so well, was still friendly to him, if men were
+wild and dangerous. He is never weary of praising the natural advantages
+of Ireland. Speaking of the North, he says,--
+
+     And sure it is yet a most beautifull and sweet countrey as any
+     is under heaven, seamed throughout with many goodly rivers,
+     replenished with all sortes of fish, most aboundantly
+     sprinckled with many sweet Ilandes, and goodly lakes, like
+     litle Inland Seas, that will carry even ships upon theyr
+     waters, adorned with goodly woodes fitt for building of howses
+     and shippes, soe comodiously, as that yf some princes in the
+     world had them, they would soone hope to be lordes of all the
+     seas, and ere long of all the world; also full of good portes
+     and havens opening upon England and Scotland, as inviting us
+     to come to them, to see what excellent comodityes that
+     countrey can affoord, besides the soyle it self most fertile,
+     fitt to yeeld all kind of fruite that shal be comitted
+     therunto. And lastly, the heavens most milde and temperat,
+     though somewhat more moyst then the part toward the West.
+
+His own home at Kilcolman charmed and delighted him. It was not his
+fault that its trout streams, its Mulla and Fanchin, are not as famous
+as Walter Scott's Teviot and Tweed, or Wordsworth's Yarrow and Duddon,
+or that its hills, Old Mole, and Arlo Hill, have not kept a poetic name
+like Helvellyn and "Eildon's triple height." They have failed to become
+familiar names to us. But the beauties of his home inspired more than
+one sweet pastoral picture in the _Faery Queen_; and in the last
+fragment remaining to us of it, he celebrates his mountains and woods
+and valleys as once the fabled resort of the Divine Huntress and her
+Nymphs, and the meeting-place of the Gods.
+
+There was one drawback to the enjoyment of his Irish country life, and
+of the natural attractiveness of Kilcolman. "Who knows not Arlo Hill?"
+he exclaims, in the scene just referred to from the fragment on
+_Mutability_. "Arlo, the best and fairest hill in all the holy island's
+heights." It was well known to all Englishmen who had to do with the
+South of Ireland. How well it was known in the Irish history of the
+time, may be seen in the numerous references to it, under various forms,
+such as Aharlo, Harlow, in the Index to the Irish Calendar of Papers of
+this troublesome date, and to continual encounters and ambushes in its
+notoriously dangerous woods. He means by it the highest part of the
+Galtee range, below which to the north, through a glen or defile, runs
+the "river Aherlow." Galtymore, the summit, rises, with precipice and
+gully, more than 3000 feet, above the plains of Tipperary, and is seen
+far and wide. It was connected with the "great wood," the wild region of
+forest, mountain, and bog which stretched half across Munster from the
+Suir to the Shannon. It was the haunt and fastness of Irish outlawry and
+rebellion in the South, which so long sheltered Desmond and his
+followers. Arlo and its "fair forests," harbouring "thieves and wolves,"
+was an uncomfortable neighbour to Kilcolman. The poet describes it as
+ruined by a curse pronounced on the lovely land by the offended goddess
+of the Chase,--
+
+     Which too too true that land's in-dwellers since have found.
+
+He was not only living in an insecure part, on the very border of
+disaffection and disturbance, but like every Englishman living in
+Ireland, he was living amid ruins. An English home in Ireland, however
+fair, was a home on the sides of AEtna or Vesuvius: it stood where the
+lava flood had once passed, and upon not distant fires. Spenser has left
+us his thoughts on the condition of Ireland, in a paper written between
+the two rebellions, some time between 1595 and 1598, after the twelve
+or thirteen years of so-called peace which followed the overthrow of
+Desmond, and when Tyrone's rebellion was becoming serious. It seems to
+have been much copied in manuscript, but though entered for publication
+in 1598, it was not printed till long after his death in 1633. A copy of
+it among the Irish papers of 1598 shows that it had come under the eyes
+of the English Government. It is full of curious observations, of shrewd
+political remarks, of odd and confused ethnography; but more than all
+this, it is a very vivid and impressive picture of what Sir Walter
+Ralegh called "the common woe of Ireland." It is a picture of a noble
+realm, which its inhabitants and its masters did not know what to do
+with; a picture of hopeless mistakes, misunderstandings, misrule; a
+picture of piteous misery and suffering on the part of a helpless and
+yet untameable and mischievous population--of unrelenting and scornful
+rigour on the part of their stronger rulers, which yet was absolutely
+ineffectual to reclaim or subdue them. "Men of great wisdom," Spenser
+writes, "have often wished that all that land were a sea-pool."
+Everything, people thought, had been tried, and tried in vain.
+
+     Marry, soe there have beene divers good plottes and wise
+     counsells cast alleready about reformation of that realme; but
+     they say, it is the fatall desteny of that land, that noe
+     purposes, whatsoever are meant for her good, will prosper or
+     take good effect, which, whether it proceede from the very
+     GENIUS of the soyle, or influence of the starres, or that
+     Allmighty God hath not yet appoynted the time of her
+     reformation, or that He reserveth her in this unquiett state
+     still for some secrett scourdge, which shall by her come unto
+     England, it is hard to be knowen, but yet much to be feared.
+
+The unchanging fatalities of Ireland appear in Spenser's account in all
+their well-known forms; some of them, as if they were what we were
+reading of yesterday. Throughout the work there is an honest zeal for
+order, an honest hatred of falsehood, sloth, treachery, and disorder.
+But there does not appear a trace of consideration for what the Irish
+might feel or desire or resent. He is sensible indeed of English
+mismanagement and vacillation, of the way in which money and force were
+wasted by not being boldly and intelligently employed; he enlarges on
+that power of malignity and detraction which he has figured in the
+Blatant Beast of the _Faery Queen_: but of English cruelty, of English
+injustice, of English rapacity, of English prejudice, he is profoundly
+unconscious. He only sees that things are getting worse and more
+dangerous; and though he, like others, has his "plot" for the
+subjugation and pacification of the island, and shrinks from nothing in
+the way of severity, not even, if necessary, from extermination, his
+outlook is one of deep despair. He calculates the amount of force, of
+money, of time, necessary to break down all resistance: he is minute and
+perhaps skilful in building his forts and disposing his garrisons; he is
+very earnest about the necessity of cutting broad roads through the
+woods, and building bridges in place of fords; he contemplates restored
+churches, parish schools, a better order of clergy. But where the spirit
+was to come from of justice, of conciliation, of steady and firm
+resistance to corruption and selfishness, he gives us no light. What it
+comes to is, that with patience, temper, and public spirit, Ireland
+might be easily reformed and brought into order: but unless he hoped for
+patience, temper, and public spirit from Lord Essex, to whom he seems to
+allude as the person "on whom the eye of England is fixed, and our last
+hopes now rest," he too easily took for granted what was the real
+difficulty. His picture is exact and forcible, of one side of the
+truth; it seems beyond the thought of an honest, well-informed, and
+noble-minded Englishman that there was another side.
+
+But he was right in his estimate of the danger, and of the immediate
+evils which produced it. He was right in thinking that want of method,
+want of control, want of confidence, and an untimely parsimony,
+prevented severity from having a fair chance of preparing a platform for
+reform and conciliation. He was right in his conviction of the
+inveterate treachery of the Irish Chiefs, partly the result of ages of
+mismanagement, but now incurable. While he was writing, Tyrone, a
+craftier and bolder man than Desmond, was taking up what Desmond had
+failed in. He was playing a game with the English authorities which as
+things then were is almost beyond belief. He was outwitting or cajoling
+the veterans of Irish government, who knew perfectly well what he was,
+and yet let him amuse them with false expectations--men like Sir John
+Norreys, who broke his heart when he found out how Tyrone had baffled
+and made a fool of him. Wishing to gain time for help from Spain, and to
+extend the rebellion, he revolted, submitted, sued for pardon but did
+not care to take it when granted, fearlessly presented himself before
+the English officers while he was still beleaguering their posts, led
+the English forces a chase through mountains and bogs, inflicted heavy
+losses on them, and yet managed to keep negotiations open as long as it
+suited him. From 1594 to 1598, the rebellion had been gaining ground; it
+had crept round from Ulster to Connaught, from Connaught to Leinster,
+and now from Connaught to the borders of Munster. But Munster, with its
+English landlords and settlers, was still on the whole quiet. At the end
+of 1597, the Council at Dublin reported home that "Munster was the best
+tempered of all the rest at this present time; for that though not long
+since sundry loose persons" (among them the base sons of Lord Roche,
+Spenser's adversary in land suits) "became Robin Hoods and slew some of
+the undertakers, dwelling scattered in thatched houses and remote places
+near to woods and fastnesses, yet now they are cut off, and no known
+disturbers left who are like to make any dangerous alteration on the
+sudden." But they go on to add that they "have intelligence that many
+are practised withal from the North, to be of combination with the rest,
+and stir coals in Munster, whereby the whole realm might be in a general
+uproar." And they repeat their opinion that they must be prepared for a
+"universal Irish war, intended to shake off all English government."
+
+In April, 1598, Tyrone received a new pardon; in the following August,
+he surprised an English army near Armagh, and shattered it with a
+defeat, the bloodiest and most complete ever received by the English in
+Ireland. Then the storm burst. Tyrone sent a force into Munster: and
+once more Munster rose. It was a rising of the dispossessed proprietors
+and the whole native population against the English undertakers; a
+"ragged number of rogues and boys," as the English Council describes
+them; rebel kernes, pouring out of the "great wood," and from Arlo, the
+"chief fastness of the rebels." Even the chiefs, usually on good terms
+with the English, could not resist the stream. Even Thomas Norreys, the
+President, was surprised, and retired to Cork, bringing down on himself
+a severe reprimand from the English Government. "You might better have
+resisted than you did, considering the many defensible houses and
+castles possessed by the undertakers, who, for aught we can hear, were
+by no means comforted nor supported by you, but either from lack of
+comfort from you, or out of mere cowardice, fled away from the rebels on
+the first alarm." "Whereupon," says Cox, the Irish historian, "the
+Munsterians, generally, rebel in October, and kill, murder, ravish and
+spoil without mercy; and Tyrone made James Fitz-Thomas, Earl of Desmond,
+on condition to be tributary to him; he was the handsomest man of his
+time, and is commonly called the _Sugan_ Earl."
+
+On the last day of the previous September (Sept. 30, 1598), the English
+Council had written to the Irish Government to appoint Edmund Spenser,
+Sheriff of the County of Cork, "a gentleman dwelling in the County of
+Cork, who is so well known unto you all for his good and commendable
+parts, being a man endowed with good knowledge in learning, and not
+unskilful or without experience in the wars." In October, Munster was in
+the hands of the insurgents, who were driving Norreys before them, and
+sweeping out of house and castle the panic-stricken English settlers. On
+December 9th, Norreys wrote home a despatch about the state of the
+province. This despatch was sent to England by Spenser, as we learn from
+a subsequent despatch of Norreys of December 21.[177:3] It was received
+at Whitehall, as appears from Robert Cecil's endorsement, on the 24th of
+December. The passage from Ireland seems to have been a long one. And
+this is the last original document which remains about Spenser.
+
+What happened to him in the rebellion we learn generally from two
+sources, from Camden's _History_, and from Drummond of Hawthornden's
+Recollections of Ben Jonson's conversations with him in 1619. In the
+Munster insurrection of October, the new Earl of Desmond's followers did
+not forget that Kilcolman was an old possession of the Desmonds. It was
+sacked and burnt. Jonson related that a little new-born child of
+Spenser's perished in the flames. Spenser and his wife escaped, and he
+came over to England, a ruined and heart-broken man. He died Jan. 16,
+1598/9; "he died," said Jonson, "for lack of bread in King Street
+[Westminster], and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of
+Essex, saying that he had no time to spend them." He was buried in the
+Abbey, near the grave of Chaucer, and his funeral was at the charge of
+the Earl of Essex. Beyond this we know nothing; nothing about the
+details of his escape, nothing of the fate of his manuscripts, or the
+condition in which he left his work, nothing about the suffering he went
+through in England. All conjecture is idle waste of time. We only know
+that the first of English poets perished miserably and prematurely, one
+of the many heavy sacrifices which the evil fortune of Ireland has cost
+to England; one of many illustrious victims to the madness, the evil
+customs, the vengeance of an ill-treated and ill-governed people.
+
+One Irish rebellion brought him to Ireland, another drove him out of it.
+Desmond's brought him to pass his life there, and to fill his mind with
+the images of what was then Irish life, with its scenery, its
+antipathies, its tempers, its chances, and necessities. Tyrone's swept
+him from Ireland, beggared and hopeless. Ten years after his death, a
+bookseller, reprinting the six books of the _Faery Queen_, added two
+cantos and a fragment, _On Mutability_, supposed to be part of the
+_Legend of Constancy_. Where and how he got them he has not told us. It
+is a strange and solemn meditation, on the universal subjection of all
+things to the inexorable conditions of change. It is strange, with its
+odd episode and fable which Spenser cannot resist about his neighbouring
+streams, its borrowings from Chaucer, and its quaint mixture of
+mythology with sacred and with Irish scenery, Olympus and Tabor, and his
+own rivers and mountains. But it is full of his power over thought and
+imagery; and it is quite in a different key from anything in the first
+six books. It has an undertone of awe-struck and pathetic sadness.
+
+     What man that sees the ever whirling wheel
+     Of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway,
+     But that thereby doth find and plainly feel
+     How Mutability in them doth play
+     Her cruel sports to many men's decay.
+
+He imagines a mighty Titaness, sister of Hecate and Bellona, most
+beautiful and most terrible, who challenges universal dominion over all
+things in earth and heaven, sun and moon, planets and stars, times and
+seasons, life and death; and finally over the wills and thoughts and
+natures of the gods, even of Jove himself; and who pleads her cause
+before the awful Mother of all things, figured as Chaucer had already
+imagined her:--
+
+     Great Nature, ever young, yet full of eld;
+     Still moving, yet unmoved from her stead;
+     Unseen of any, yet of all beheld,
+     Thus sitting on her throne.
+
+He imagines all the powers of the upper and nether worlds assembled
+before her on his own familiar hills, instead of Olympus, where she
+shone like the Vision which "dazed" those "three sacred saints" on
+"Mount Thabor." Before her pass all things known of men, in rich and
+picturesque procession; the Seasons pass, and the Months, and the
+Hours, and Day and Night, Life, as "a fair young lusty boy," Death, grim
+and grisly;--
+
+     Yet is he nought but parting of the breath,
+     Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene,
+     Unbodied, unsoul'd, unheard, unseene--
+
+and on all of them the claims of the Titaness, Mutability, are
+acknowledged. Nothing escapes her sway in this present state, except
+Nature which, while seeming to change, never really changes her ultimate
+constituent elements, or her universal laws. But when she seemed to have
+extorted the admission of her powers, Nature silences her. Change is
+apparent, and not real; and the time is coming when all change shall end
+in the final changeless change.
+
+       "I well consider all that ye have said,
+     And find that all things stedfastnesse do hate
+     And changed be; yet, being rightly wayd,
+     They are not changed from their first estate;
+     But by their change their being do dilate,
+     And turning to themselves at length againe,
+     Do worke their owne perfection so by fate:
+     Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne,
+     But they raigne over Change, and do their states maintaine.
+
+       "Cease therefore, daughter, further to aspire,
+     And thee content thus to be rul'd by mee,
+     For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire;
+     But time shall come that all shall changed bee,
+     And from thenceforth none no more change shal see."
+     So was the Titanesse put downe and whist,
+     And Jove confirm'd in his imperiall see.
+     Then was that whole assembly quite dismist,
+     And Natur's selfe did vanish, whither no man wist.
+
+What he meant--how far he was thinking of those daring arguments of
+religious and philosophical change of which the world was beginning to
+be full, we cannot now tell. The allegory was not finished: at least it
+is lost to us. We have but a fragment more, the last fragment of his
+poetry. It expresses the great commonplace which so impressed itself on
+the men of that time, and of which his works are full. No words could be
+more appropriate to be the last words of one who was so soon to be in
+his own person such an instance of their truth. They are fit closing
+words to mark his tragic and pathetic disappearance from the high and
+animated scene in which his imagination worked. And they record, too,
+the yearning hope of rest not extinguished by terrible and fatal
+disaster:--
+
+       When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare
+     Of Mutabilitie, and well it way,
+     Me seemes, that though she all unworthy were
+     Of the Heav'ns Rule; yet, very sooth to say,
+     In all things else she beares the greatest sway:
+     Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle,
+     And love of things so vaine to cast away;
+     Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle,
+     Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.
+
+       Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
+     Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
+     But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd
+     Upon the pillours of Eternity,
+     That is contrayr to Mutabilitie;
+     For all that moveth doth in Change delight:
+     But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
+     With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight:
+     O! that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabaoths sight.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[166:1] Who is _Edmondus Spenser, Prebendary of Effin_ (Elphin)? in a
+list of arrears of first fruits; Calendar of State Papers, _Ireland_,
+Dec. 8, 1586, p. 222. Church preferments were under special
+circumstances allowed to be held by laymen. See the Queen's
+"Instructions," 1579; in Preface to Calendar of Carew MSS. 1589-1600, p.
+ci.
+
+[168:2] "In these kind of historical allusions Spenser usually perplexes
+the subject: he leads you on, and then designedly misleads you."--Upton,
+quoted by Craik, iii. 92.
+
+[177:3] I am indebted for this reference to Mr. Hans Claude Hamilton.
+See also his Preface to Calendar of Irish Papers, 1574-85, p. lxxvi.
+
+
+                               LONDON:
+                   GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, PRINTERS,
+                          ST. JOHN'S SQUARE.
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.
+
+EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.
+
+
+_These Short Books are addressed to the general public with a view both
+to stirring and satisfying an interest in literature and its great
+topics in the minds of those who have to run as they read. An immense
+class is growing up, and must every year increase, whose education will
+have made them alive to the importance of the masters of our literature,
+and capable of intelligent curiosity as to their performances. The
+Series is intended to give the means of nourishing this curiosity, to an
+extent that shall be copious enough to be profitable for knowledge and
+life, and yet be brief enough to serve those whose leisure is scanty._
+
+_The following are arranged for:_--
+
+     _SPENSER_      _The Dean of St. Paul's._      [_Ready._
+     _HUME_         _Professor Huxley._            [_Ready._
+     _BUNYAN_       _James Anthony Froude._
+     _JOHNSON_      _Leslie Stephen._              [_Ready._
+     _GOLDSMITH_    _William Black._               [_Ready._
+     _MILTON_       _Mark Pattison._
+     _COWPER_       _Goldwin Smith._
+     _SWIFT_        _John Morley._
+     _BURNS_        _Principal Shairp._            [_Ready._
+     _SCOTT_        _Richard H. Hutton._           [_Ready._
+     _SHELLEY_      _J. A. Symonds._               [_Ready._
+     _GIBBON_       _J. C. Morison._               [_Ready._
+     _BYRON_        _Professor Nichol._
+     _DEFOE_        _W. Minto._                    [_Ready._
+     _BURKE_        _John Morley._                 [_In the Press._
+     _HAWTHORNE_    _Henry James._
+     _CHAUCER_      _A. W. Ward._
+     _THACKERAY_    _Anthony Trollope._            [_Ready._
+     _ADAM SMITH_   _Leonard H. Courtney, M.P._
+     _BENTLEY_      _Professor R. C. Jebb._
+     _LANDOR_       _Professor Sidney Calvin._
+     _POPE_         _Leslie Stephen._
+     _WORDSWORTH_   _F. W. H. Myers._
+     _SOUTHEY_      _Prof. E. Dowden._
+
+[_OTHERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED._]
+
+
+OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
+
+     "The new series opens well with Mr. Leslie Stephen's sketch of
+     Dr. Johnson. It could hardly have been done better; and it
+     will convey to the readers for whom it is intended a juster
+     estimate of Johnson than either of the two essays of Lord
+     Macaulay."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+     "We have come across few writers who have had a clearer
+     insight into Johnson's character, or who have brought to the
+     study of it a better knowledge of the time in which Johnson
+     lived and the men whom he knew."--_Saturday Review._
+
+     "We could not wish for a more suggestive introduction to Scott
+     and his poems and novels."--_Examiner._
+
+     "The tone of the volume is excellent throughout."--_Athenaeum_
+     Review of "Scott."
+
+     "As a clear, thoughtful, and attractive record of the life and
+     works of the greatest among the world's historians, it
+     deserves the highest praise."--_Examiner_ Review of "Gibbon."
+
+     "The lovers of this great poet (Shelley) are to be
+     congratulated at having at their command so fresh, clear, and
+     intelligent a presentment of the subject written by a man of
+     adequate and wide culture."--_Athenaeum._
+
+     "It may fairly be said that no one now living could have
+     expounded Hume with more sympathy or with equal
+     perspicuity."--_Athenaeum._
+
+     "Of the charm of Mr. Black's style we have often spoken. In
+     this little volume he shows that he is as capable of
+     penetrating and expounding the character of an historical
+     person of a past time as he is of giving life to persons of
+     the present time invented by himself."--_Saturday Review._
+
+     "Mr. Minto's book is careful and accurate in all that it
+     states, and fruitful in all that it suggests. It will repay
+     reading more than once."--_Athenaeum._
+
+
+
+
+MACMILLAN'S GLOBE LIBRARY.
+
+_Price 3s. 6d. per volume, in cloth. Also kept in a variety of calf and
+morocco bindings, at moderate prices._
+
+     _The SATURDAY REVIEW says: "The Globe Editions are admirable
+     for their scholarly editing, their typographical excellence,
+     their compendious form, and their cheapness." The BRITISH
+     QUARTERLY REVIEW says: "In compendiousness, elegance, and
+     scholarliness the Globe Editions of Messrs. Macmillan surpass
+     any popular series of our classics hitherto given to the
+     public. As near an approach to miniature perfection as has
+     ever been made._"
+
+
++Shakespeare's Complete Works.+ Edited by W. G. CLARK, M.A., and W.
+ALDIS WRIGHT, M.A., Editors of the "Cambridge Shakespeare." With
+Glossary. pp. 1075.
+
+     _The ATHENAEUM says this edition is "a marvel of beauty,
+     cheapness, and compactness. . . . For the busy man, above all
+     for the working student, this is the best of all existing
+     Shakespeares._"
+
+
++Spenser's Complete Works.+ Edited from the Original Editions and
+Manuscripts, by R. MORRIS, with a Memoir by J. W. HALES, M.A. With
+Glossary. pp. lv., 736.
+
+     "_Worthy--and higher praise it needs not--of the beautiful
+     'Globe Series.'_"--DAILY NEWS.
+
+
++Sir Walter Scott's Poetical Works.+ Edited, with a Biographical and
+Critical Memoir, by FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE, and Copious Notes. pp.
+xliii., 559.
+
+     "_We can almost sympathise with a middle-aged grumbler, who,
+     after reading Mr. Palgrave's Memoir and Introduction, should
+     exclaim, 'Why was there not such an edition of Scott when I
+     was a school-boy?'_"--GUARDIAN.
+
+
++Complete Works of Robert Burns.+ Edited from the best Printed and
+Manuscript authorities, with Glossarial Index, Notes, and a Biographical
+Memoir by ALEXANDER SMITH. pp. lxii., 636.
+
+     "_Admirable in all respects._"--SPECTATOR.
+
+
++Robinson Crusoe.+ Edited after the Original Editions, with a
+Biographical Introduction by HENRY KINGSLEY. pp. xxxi., 607.
+
+     "_A most excellent and in every way desirable
+     edition._"--COURT CIRCULAR.
+
+
++Goldsmith's Miscellaneous Works.+ Edited with Biographical
+Introduction, by Professor MASSON. pp. lx., 695.
+
+     "_Such an admirable compendium of the facts of Goldsmith's
+     life, and so careful and minute a delineation of the mixed
+     traits of his peculiar character as to be a very model of a
+     literary biography in little._"--SCOTSMAN.
+
+
++Pope's Poetical Works.+ Edited, with Notes, and Introductory Memoir by
+A. W. WARD, M.A., Professor of History in Owens College Manchester. pp.
+lii., 508.
+
+     _The LITERARY CHURCHMAN remarks: "The Editor's own notes and
+     introductory memoir are excellent, the memoir alone would be
+     cheap and well worth buying at the price of the whole
+     volume._"
+
+
++Dryden's Poetical Works.+ Edited, with a Memoir, Revised Text, and
+Notes, by W. D. CHRISTIE, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge. pp.
+lxxxvii., 662.
+
+     "_An admirable edition, the result of great research and of a
+     careful revision of the text._"--PALL MALL GAZETTE.
+
+
++Cowper's Poetical Works.+ Edited, with Notes and Biographical
+Introduction, by WILLIAM BENHAM, Vicar of Margate. pp. lxxiii., 536.
+
+     "_Mr. Benham's edition of Cowper is one of permanent
+     value._"--SATURDAY REVIEW.
+
+
++Morte d'Arthur.+--SIR THOMAS MALORY'S BOOK OF KING ARTHUR AND OF HIS
+NOBLE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE. The original Edition of CAXTON,
+revised for Modern Use. With an Introduction by Sir EDWARD STRACHEY,
+Bart. pp. xxxvii., 509.
+
+     "_It is with perfect confidence that we recommend this edition
+     of the old romance to every class of readers._"--PALL MALL
+     GAZETTE.
+
+
++The Works of Virgil.+ Rendered into English Prose, with Introductions,
+Notes, Running Analysis, and an Index. By JAMES LONSDALE, M.A., and
+SAMUEL LEE, M.A. pp. 228.
+
+     "_A more complete Edition of Virgil in English it is scarcely
+     possible to conceive than the scholarly work before
+     us._"--GLOBE.
+
+
++The Works of Horace.+ Rendered into English Prose, with Introductions,
+Running Analysis, Notes, and Index. By JAMES LONSDALE, M.A., and SAMUEL
+LEE, M.A.
+
+     _The STANDARD says, "To classical and non-classical readers
+     it will be invaluable._"
+
+
++Milton's Poetical Works.+--Edited, with Introductions, by Professor
+MASSON.
+
+     "_In every way an admirable book._"--PALL MALL GAZETTE.
+
+
+MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+The following words use an oe ligature in the original:
+
+     Belphoebe
+     Belphoebe's
+     Phoebus
+
+The following corrections have been made to the text:
+
+     Page 6: dust was raised.[6:5][anchor missing in original
+
+     Page 41: scenery on which the poet's sweetness[original has
+     sweetnesss]
+
+     Page 42: "[quotation mark missing in original]Shepherd that
+     did fetch
+
+     Page 48: Discourse[original has Discouse] of English Poetrie
+
+     Page 76: as deputy for the said Briskett)[ending parenthesis
+     missing in original]
+
+     Page 83: [original has extraneous quotation mark]In the meane
+     while I must struggle
+
+     Page 105: looselie scattered abroad,[original has comma]
+
+     Page 122: as most fitte[original has fittte] for the
+     excellency
+
+     Page 151: standard of moral character[original has charater]
+
+     Page 173: "Men of great wisdom," Spenser writes[original has
+     writers]
+
+     Page 174: Throughout the work there is an[original has a]
+     honest zeal
+
+     Page 178: through in England.[original has comma] All
+     conjecture
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Spenser, by R. W. Church
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #31101 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31101)
author	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-14 19:55:07 -0700
committer	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-14 19:55:07 -0700
commit	ca2d1255cca77a28cb2e609cf81a98e9fbc5be11 (patch)
tree	8cfeaa3954c56690e4263e4da00f8e9e01250114