ions 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 Faerie Queene, 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 favorable 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 overfaint 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 honored 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 neighboring 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 humors 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 para. phrase, a homily. But about all that it treated it sought to throw more or less the color 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 sccond 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 doggerel 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 Poètrie (1586), and the more elaborate work ascribed to George Puttenham (1589), works of tame and artificial learning without Sidney's fire, revealed equally the poverty, as a whole, of what had been as yet produced in England as poetry, in spite of the wide-spread 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 pretentious 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 twohand 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 Faerie Queene, 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 Defence in 1581, and Puttenham's treatise in 1589, I do not say with Shakspeare, 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 pretry has made; we see that a new spring-time of power and purpose and 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 disreptuable, their coarse excitement, their buffoonery, license, and taste for the monstrous and horrible-denounced not without reason as corrupters 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 Shakspeare 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, anyhow, 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 colors, 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 honors 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 Shakspeare. 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 judgment and advice, a portion of the Faerie Queene 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 Ariosta 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 judgment of her indeed? To be plain, I am void of all judgment, if your Nine Comedies, whereunto, in imitation of Herodotus, you give the name 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 Faerie 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 judgment 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 Faerie Queene 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 Faerie Queene.

But the Faerie Queene, 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