change of speech to testify that he was at a bay: as if from hot pursuit of their enemie, they were sodainly come to a parley. (Book i. chap. 10.) Shipwracke. But by that the next morning began to make a guilden shewe of a good meaning, there arose even with the sun a vaile of darke cloudes before his face, which shortly (like inck powred into water) had blacked over all the face of heaven, preparing (as it were) a mourneful stage for a Tragedie to be plaied on. For forthwith the windes began to speake lowder, and as in a tumultuous kingdome to thinke themselves fittest instruments of commaundement; and blowing whole stormes of hayle and raine upon them, they were sooner in daunger then they coulde almost bethinke themselves of chaunge. For then the traiterous Sea began to swell in pride against the afflicted Navie, under which (while the heaven favoured them) it had layne so calmely; making mountaines of it selfe, over which the tossed and tottring ship shoulde clime, to the streight carried downe againe to a pit of hellish darkenesse, with such cruell blowes against the sides of the shippe that which way soever it went was still in his malice, that there was left neither power to stay nor way to escape. And shortly had it so dissevered the loving companie, which the daie before had tarried together, that most of them never met againe, but were swallowed up in his never-satisfied mouth. (Book ii. chap. 7.) The prayer of the Princess Pamela was a favourite prayer of King Charles I., whom Milton reproached for 'having stolen a prayer word for word from the mouth of a heathen woman praying to a heathen god': O all-seeing Light and eternal Life of all things, to whom nothing is either so great, that it may resist; or so small, that it is contemned: looke vpon my miserie with thine eye of mercie, and let thine infinite power vouchsafe to limite out some proportion of deliuerance vnto me, as to thee shall seem most conuenient. Let not iniurie, O Lord, triumphe ouer me, and let my faultes by thy handes be corrected, and make not mine vniuste enemie the minister of thy Iustice. But yet, my God, if in thy wisdome this be the aptest chastizement for my inexcusable follie; if this low bondage be fittest for my ouer-hie desires; if the pride of my not-inough humble harte be thus to be broken, O Lord, I yeeld vnto thy will, and ioyfully embrace what sorrow thou wilt have me suffer. Onely thus much let me craue of thee, (let my crauing, O Lord, be accepted of thee, since euen that proceeds from thee,) let me craue, euen by the noblest title, which in my greatest affliction I may giue my selfe, that I am thy creature, and by thy goodnes (which is thy self) that thou wilt suffer some beame of thy Maiestie so to shine into my mind, that it may still depende confidently vpon thee. Let calamitie be the exercise but not the ouerthrowe of my vertue : let their power preuaile, but preuaile not to destruction: let my greatnes be their praie: let my paine be the sweetnes of their reuenge: let them (if so it seem good vnto thee) vexe me with more and more punishment. But, O Lord, let neuer their wickednes haue such a hand, but that I may carie a pure minde in a pure bodie. (And pausing a while) And O, most gracious Lord (said she) what euer become of me, preserue the vertuous Musidorus. (Book iii. chap. 6.) 'In these my not old yeres and idelest times, having slipt into the title of a Poet, I am provoked to say somthing unto you in defence of that my unelected vocation,' says Sidney in the Apologie ; 'I have just cause to make a pittiful defence of poore Poetry, which from almost the highest estimation of learning is fallen to be the laughingstocke of children.' And he thus compares poetry and philosophy : The philosopher sheweth you the way, hee informeth you of the particularities, as well of the tediousnes of the way, as of the pleasant lodging you shall have when your journey is ended, as of the many by-turnings that may divert you from your way. But this is to no man but to him that will read him, and read him with attentive studious painfulnes. Which constant desire whosoever hath in him, hath already passed halfe the hardnes of the way, and therefore is beholding to the Philosopher but for the other halfe. Nay, truely, learned men have learnedly thought that where once reason hath so much over-mastred passion, as that the minde hath a free desire to doe well, the inward light each minde hath in it selfe is as good as a Philosophers book; since in nature we know it is well to do well, and what is well and what is evile, although not in the words of Arte which Philosophers bestowe upon us; for out of naturall conceit the Philosophers drew it. But to be moved to doe that which we know, or to be moved with desire to knowe, Hoc opus: Hic labor est. Nowe therein of all sciences (I speak still of humane and according to the humane conceit) is our Poet the Monarch. For he dooth not only shew the way, but giveth so sweete a prospect into the way, as will intice any man to enter into it. Nay, he dooth, as if your journey should lye through a fayr Vineyard, at the very firste, give you a cluster of Grapes; that, full of that taste, you may long to passe further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions; which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulnesse; but he commeth to you with words set in delightfull proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-inchaunting skill of musicke; with a tale forsooth he commeth unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner. And pretending no more, doth intende}, the winning of the mind from wickednesse to vertue; even as the childe is often brought to take most wholsom things, by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste; which if one should beginne to tell them the nature of the Aloes or Rubarb they shoulde receive, would sooner take their Phisicke at their eares then their mouth. So is it in men (most of which are childish in the best things) till they bee cradled in their graves; glad they will be to hear the tales of Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, Æneas; and hearing them, must needs heare the right description of wisdom, valure, and justice; which if they had been barely, that is to say philosophically, set out, they would sweare they bee brought to schoole againe. Sidney never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas but he found his heart stirred as with the sound of a trumpet,' and said 'they aren ever alone who are accompanied with noble thoughts;' 'there will be the time to die nobly when you cannot live nobly;' 'there is nothing more terrible to a guilty heart than the eye of a respected friend,' Sonnets from 'Astrophel and Stella.' With how sad steps, O Moone, thou clim'st the skies, How silently, and with how wanne a face! What, may it be, that even in heavenly place That busie Archer his sharpe arrowes tries? Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case; I read it in thy lookes, thy languisht grace To me that feele the like thy state discries. Then, even of fellowship, O Moone, tell me, Is constant love deemed there but want of wit? Are beauties there as proud as here they be? Do they above love to be loved, and yet Those lovers scorne whom that love doth possesse ? Do they call vertue there ungratefulnesse ? O happie Thames, that didst my Stella beare! I saw thee with full many a smiling line I never dranke of Aganippe well, But, God wot, wot not what they meane by it; I am no pick-purse of another's wit. How falles it then, that with so smooth an ease My thoughts I speake; and what I speake doth flow In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please? Come, Sleepe, O Sleepe, the certaine knot of peace, Take thou of me smooth pillowes, sweetest bed A rosie garland, and a weary hed. ; Whether the Turkish new moone minded be If French can yet three parts in one agree? Song: 'Love is dead.' Ring out your belles, let mourning shewes be spread; For Love is dead : All Love is dead, infected With plague of deep disdaine : Worth, as nought worth, rejected, Weepe, neighbours, weepe; do you not heare it said His death-bed, peacock's follie; His winding-sheete is shame ; His will, false-seeming holie ; From so ungrateful fancie, Good Lord, deliver us! My True Love hath my Heart. (From the Arcadia.) 'Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother' (c.15551621), was not merely the friend and patron of Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Nicholas Breton, and other poets and literary men. She edited the Arcadia her brother had dedicated to her, had a share with him in the translation of the Psalms translated from the French A Discourse of Life and Death by her brother's friend Plessis du Mornay, and rendered into English blank verse Garnier's French tragedy, Antonie. She was the wife of the second Earl of Pembroke, and mother of the Earl to whom it has been supposed (and denied) that Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets. Sidney's poems and Apologie have been edited, the first by Grosart (1877), the second by Arber (1868), Flügel (1889), Cook (1890), and Shuckburgh (1891); Astrophel and Stella by Gray, Arber, Flügel (1889), and Pollard (1891). The Arcadia was reproduced in facsimile by Professor Sommer in 1891. The Life by Fulke Greville (1652) was re-edited by Sir E. Brydges (1816); and there are Lives by Zouch (1808), J. A. Symonds (1886), and Fox Bourne (1862 and 1892). See Philip Sidney's Memoirs of the Sidney Family (1899), and his edition of the Sonnets and Songs (1900). Edmund Spenser. In a passage which has been often quoted Gibbon says, 'The nobility of the Spensers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider the Faerie Queene as the most precious jewel of their coronet.' It is not, however, by any means certain that they have the right to claim him. He sprang from a family of Spensers settled at Hurstwood, in the north-east of Lancashire, and it is believed that his father was a certain John Spenser, a journeyman clothmaker, who came up to London before 1550. If so, his mother's name was Elizabeth, but her family is not known. He was born, about 1552, at East Smithfield, in 'merry London, my most kindly nurse,' as he says in the Prothalamion. From the Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell,' it appears that he was sent, as a 'poor scholar,' to Merchant Taylors' School when it was opened in 1561. It is supposed that he was a foundation scholar, and that he stayed at the school until 1569. Lancelot Andrewes was his schoolfellow, and their head-master was Dr Mulcaster. Before he left school Spenser had 'commenced author,' for early in 1569 a Dutch refugee, Dr Jan van der Noodt, published a miscellany called A Theatre for Worldlings, in which were included certain translations from Petrarch and from Joachim du Bellay, which, though anonymous at the time, were afterwards in a modified form claimed by Spenser. These translations, in blank verse and rhyme, have created a great deal of discussion; but there is no reasonable doubt that they came from the hand of Spenser, and they already display some of the characteristics of his style. On the 20th of May 1569 Spenser passed directly from Merchant Taylors' School to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he matriculated as a sizar. We have evidence of his great poverty and of repeated illnesses while at college; he succeeded B.A. in 1573 and commenced M.A. in 1576, the year that he left Cambridge. He mentions the university in the Faerie Queene: My mother Cambridge, whom as with a crown We know nothing of his academic life, but he formed at the university certain friendships which had an influence upon him. Edward Kirke, who afterwards edited the Shepherd's Calendar, and Gabriel Harvey, a poetaster and criticaster who assumed a position of authority at Cambridge, were his principal associates, and Harvey is the Hobbinol of Spenser's eclogues. As late as 1586 | Spenser was still Harvey's 'devoted friend, during life.' Harvey was the chief of those who promulgated the heresy that the rhythms and rhymes of normal English verse were to be swept away in favour of accentuated rhymeless measures closely modelled on Greek and Latin prosody. There is no doubt that by too modestly acceding to all this nonsense Spenser was delayed in the development of his genius. Spenser took his degree of M.A. in 1576 and left Cambridge. He went to his own people in Lancashire, and here, as has been suggested, met the Rosalind of his sonnets and pastorals. In the next year, Gabriel Harvey urging him to 'forsake his shire' and come south, Spenser seems to have paid a short visit to Ireland, and in 1578 or 1579 to have settled in London. Here he seems to have been early presented to Sir Philip Sidney and his brother-in-law, the Earl of Leicester, and to have taken up his abode in Leicester House. He wrote a series of poems which have been lost, called Stemmata Dudleiana. A correspondence with Gabriel Harvey, who addresses Spenser as 'Immerito,' has been preserved, and is full of bad advice about hexameters and trimeters. In this winter of 1579-80 Spenser had other poetical works ready-Dreams, The Dying Pelican, and Nine Comedies. All these have disappeared; but on the 5th of December 1579 was entered at Stationers' Hall a poem, the effect of which on the expansion of English literature was astounding. This is, of course, The Shepherd's Calendar. The publication of this famous collection of pastorals placed Spenser, at a bound, in front of all The English poets since Chaucer. The originality and mastery of the 'new poet,' as Spenser began immediately to be styled, was admitted at once. Shepherd's Calendar was anonymous, and consisted of twelve eclogues, as they may all be roughly styled, distinguished from one another in their metre, subject, and treatment. In adopting the Arcadian device of 'goatherds' tales' Spenser was yielding to the fashion of the hour, and to the practice of the followers of Sannazaro. The whole of England was supposed to be a sheep-farm, under the sway of the queen of shepherds, fair Elisa, daughter of Pan, the god of shepherds. This setting of bucolic allegory offers many inconveniences to the fancy of the poet, especially as he wishes to treat questions of Puritan religious discipline, which have remarkably little to do with Pan and Syrinx. Under the general denomination of 'eclogues,' moreover, are included fables, satires, amatory lyrics, and other forms of current verse, so that the Shepherd's Calendar is really to be looked upon as a sort of miscellany. To his contemporaries the most daring thing about the new poet was his diction, which Spenser enriched, or attempted to enrich, with a multitude of obsolete and rural forms. Sidney, who was one of the earliest admirers of the Calendar, and who put the new poet on a level with Theocritus, Virgil, and Sannazaro, 'dared not allow that same framing of his style in an old rustic language.' Spenser's object, however, no doubt was by this diction to accentuate the English character of his verses and to lessen their Italian aspect. Moreover, in the Shepherd's Calendar Spenser shows himself still related to the primitive and rural poets of the English middle ages-allegorical and alliterative. Indeed, it is not to be denied that many critics, coming upon these poems after traversing the wastes of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, have applauded them with excess, since, after all, in comparison with what the English poets, and Spenser himself, were almost immediately afterwards to produce, the greater part of the Shepherd's Calendar is but tame, colourless, and experimental. In the eclogues for May and August we see 'the new poet' at his best, and that is far ahead of any of his immediate predecessors, except Sackville. In the summer of 1580 Lord Grey de Wilton, on being appointed the Queen's Deputy in Ireland, took Spenser over to Dublin as his secretary, and it is supposed that he was an eye-witness of the horrible scenes enacted in the province of Munster a little later, when the Rebellion of Desmond broke out. Long afterwards, in his prose View of Ireland, the poet recounted many of his experiences. In 1581 he was appointed Registrar of Chancery in Ireland, and got a lease or grant of the abbey and castle of Enniscorthy, in county Wexford; these were succeeded by various employments and residences, and Spenser probably made Dublin his headquarters from 1580 to 1588. In the latter he seems to have settled at Kilcolman, year an abandoned peel-tower of the Desmonds, in a then wooded glen of the Galtee Hills, in the north of county Cork, some thirty miles south of Limerick; this, with its 3000 or 4000 acres of land, was Spenser's share of the spoil Here, in 1589, Sir Walter Raleigh visited him, and here Spenser read to his friend the early cantos of the great poem which had now for so many years been occupying his thoughts and leisure. The 'Shepherd of the Ocean,' as Raleigh was called, perceived in a moment that this romance of fairyland rose immeasurably high above anything that had called itself poetry in England before. In the very interesting autobiographical poem called Colin Ciout's Come Home Again, first published in 1595, Spenser gives a minute account of the conversations of the two friends. Raleigh, on his part, read his own poem of Cynthia, the greater portion of which is now lost, and urged Spenser to come with him to court, so that they might in unison lay their songs before Elizabeth. This Spenser immediately agreed to do ; it would appear that he accompanied Raleigh to England, and was presented to the queen. She gave him a pension of £50 a year, and in December 1589 the first three books of that epoch-making poem, the Faerie Queene, were entered in the registers of the Stationers' Company. It was announced as 'disposed into twelve books.' but when it was published early in 1590 only three books were produced, and it is probable that no more was at this time completed. It was dedicated, in words which seem blown through a golden trumpet, to 'the most high, mighty and magnificent Empress,' Elizabeth, 'to live with the eternity of her fame,' as was added in a later edition. The reception of the Faerie Queene was more than enthusiastic. All England responded to the opinion attributed to Shakespeare, that Spenser's 'deep conceit was such as, passing all conceit, needed no defence.' He was accepted, in that age of glorious singers, as the first of English poets. Caressed and congratulated by all the court, Spenser stayed in England until far on into 1591, enjoying to the full, no doubt, these the most vivid and agreeable months of his existence. He was obliged at length to return to his duties, for he was now Clerk of the Council of Munster, and he had his poems to write, which no doubt were better encouraged by the solitude of Kilcolman than by the excitements of London. He was troubled, however, by a law-suit with his crazy neighbour, Lord Roche, but the importance of this has perhaps been exaggerated. We may believe that Spenser's life was now for some years comfortable, and of a nature to encourage him in the prosecution of his noble poetical labours. We may leave him at Kilcolman for the moment, and consider the scheme of his great romantic masterpiece. The plan of the Faerie Queene was confessedly allegorical, and the author has left us no chance of miscomprehending his intention. By the 'Elvish' Monarch, Gloriana, who is kept out of sight throughout, but who animates the whole idea, he meant national splendour as embodied in Elizabeth. The Knight of the Red Cross was emblematical of Holiness, Sir Guyon of Temperance, the Lady Britomart of Chastity. The plot of the Faerie Queene was intended to be this: The Queen Gloriana keeps her annual festival upon twelve consecutive days, on each of which there occur adventures, undertaken by twelve successive knights, and these form the subjects of the books of the poem, eked out by such episodes as the overthrow of Marinell and the resistance of Belphoebe. Such is the scheme of the Faerie Queene as Spenser himself unfolded it to Raleigh. It was to be a great chivalrous epic after the Italian fashion of Boiardo and Ariosto, but with this distinction, that allegory was to be predominant in the outline of it, and that the conduct of the sentiment was to be uniformly splendid, with none of the descents to playfulness and even triviality which the Italians allowed themselves. Since Pulci had enjoyed so facile a success with the Morgante Maggiore, there had been a growing tendency to introduce burlesque, and even pantomimic absurdity, into the chivalrous epic, which, indeed, was now dying in the south of Europe. Spenser came just in time to lift it again to an incomparable magnificence, in a poem of extreme dignity and gravity. We do not know how Spenser would have rounded forth his plan, for he did not live to complete the Faerie Queene. Only six of the twelve promised books were finished. But nothing that he might have added could have removed one basal fault; as Dean Church says, the poem '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.' There seems to have been planned yet another parallel epic, celebrating the 'politic virtues,' also, no doubt, to be in twelve books. What we possess, therefore, is but a fragment; and yet, beautiful as this is, no one has ever wished for more. Spenser did not possess constructive gifts; he was more prolix, if possible, than his Italian predecessors; and it is better to enjoy the actual texture of what he gives us in such gorgeous profusion than to attempt to realise what it was which he intended to supply. As he wrote on he used the Faerie Queene as a receptacle into which to pour whatever he had felt or suffered, dreamed or longed for; it became his constant haunting vision of life, now dropped for a while, now taken up anew, fused in nothing but in its uniformity of delicious music and radiant colour. The form of the Faerie Queene deserves our attention. Spenser chose the ottava rima, as it had been used by Boiardo and was still being used by Tasso, but he altered it by adding a line between the Italian fourth and fifth, by modifying the arrangements of rhymes, and by adding a foot to the last line, which became an Alexandrine. This was a real metrical invention of high importance, and it has been claimed for Spenser that it is the only one which can be traced home to an English poet. It was little appreciated in Spenser's own age, or at least little and incorrectly imitated; but from the central years of the eighteenth century, when it was resuscitated by Akenside and Thomson, onwards to Tennyson and later, it was the characteristic metre of English romance; to Byron, Shelley, and Keats, in particular, it proved irresistibly attractive. None of these poets have used it with more complete success than its founder, in whose hands its sinuous and voluptuous melody, so subtle, so long-drawn, so majestic, presents to us something which is the very type and emblem of sustained poetic expression. The difficulty of handling this metre, especially in the group of four identical rhymes, is, however, greater than Spenser, who seems strangely breathless and hurried, can give himself time to overcome. He constantly forces sound, sense, and grammar to the exigencies of rhyme, satisfied if, without positively tripping, he can close his stanza in a rich Alexandrine. Before Spenser returned to Ireland, he published in London a collection of nine of his miscellaneous poems, which appeared early in 1591 under the general title of Complaints. One of these, Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly, had already been issued in 1590; this is a lyrical narrative of the loves of a winged fay, Clarion, treated with extreme delicacy and lightness of touch. The Ruins of Time is an exquisite series of elegies, prolonged in several measures, and closing with a lament for Sir Philip Sidney, who had died on the 17th of October 1586, which doubtless indicates the date of composition of the poem. In The Tears of the Muses the poet calls upon Clio and her sisters to sing the degradation and sloth of England and her rulers in jeremiads which have little appropriateness or value beyond their verbal music ; this is one of the poorest of Spenser's compositions. Virgil's Gnat appears to be a very early production, touched up by the more practised hand of the poet just before publication; little is to be said regarding this fluent paraphrase. Vastly more important is Prosopopoia, or, as it is more usually named, 'Mother Hubbard's Tale.' This satire, we are told by the poet himself, was 'long sithens composed in the raw conceit of my youth.' It is interesting to see Spenser here deliberately competing with Chaucer. Two central ideas run through Mother Hubbard's Tale ;' it is a sarcastic picture of the English court, in its political conditions, and it is a satire of the contest proceeding between the Catholic and the Reformed Church under Elizabeth. It has been observed that Spenser's picture of society is obscured by his inability to touch life directly; Spenser must always be either romancing or allegorising. The rest of the miscellaneous volume entitled |