of Warwick interceding for John Udall. Raleigh caused word to be sent to Udall that his opinions had been represented to the queen in a way that strongly affected her against him : "If you will write half a dozen lines to Sir Walter Raleigh concerning those opinions, that he may show it to her Majesty, he hopes to save your life. I know it is very easy for you to answer all these things, therefore do it with speed; and in your writing to Sir Walter take knowledge that he hath sent. you such word." Udall's life was, as we have seen, saved from the gallows, but he died soon afterwards in prison. Raleigh's intercession was prompted by the soul of religion, that had drawn him, with Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville, into generous friendship with Giordano Bruno. His mind was against persecution of opinion, and he had weak faith in the plea of necessity from danger to the State. When there was question of hanging all the Brownists, he said, "Yes, and what will you do for their widows and orphans? There will be thousands of them." Spenser's goodwill was to the higher aspirations of the Puritans, but he did not share their prejudices. This sojourn of more than a year about the Court in London, without deadening his quick sense of religion, may have confirmed a certain change that we feel as we pass from the earlier to the later books of "The Faerie Queene." The tone changes, so to speak, from the zeal of youth for reformation to the conservatism of middle age. It is true that, in the very outset, Error's "vomit full of books and papers was"; but this half-suggestion of an evil in the freedom of discussion—a suggestion then in accordance with the faith of statesmen-grows in the Fifth Book into an intolerance of speculation that seeks change in the established order of society. We feel in it an intolerance much more uncompromising than was in the poet's mind. when first the gentle knight was pricking on the plain, yclad in mighty arms and silver shield. Spenser's religious life. remained unchanged. His opposition to Catholicism never softened. But official life, a year or more at Court, and large evidence of the unseemliness of conflicts poisoned by excess of an unreasoning zeal, made him resolute against all schemes of speculative innovation. He was Milton's forerunner. Milton looked back to Spenser as Spenser to Chaucer; yet it may be, that had Spenser lived in Milton's time, he would have sided with the King. In February, 1591, a patent was signed granting a pension of fifty pounds a year, equal to more than three hundred in present value, to the author of "The Faerie Queene." Spenser must soon afterwards have returned to Ireland, richer for his visit by the strong friends he had made, and this addition to his means. Spenser's 66 The point of view for all the poems in the little book arranged by Spenser in 1591 is expressed by their common title. They are, in different ways, all, as the Complaints." printer said of them to the gentle reader, Complaints and Meditations of the World's Vanity." Thus there is harmony in their variety, and Spenser limited his choice from among earlier writings of his own by this endeavour to produce a group of pieces all tuned to one music, all uniting for the various expression of one religious thought. The printer named as other pieces of like strain, versions by Spenser of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs, "A Sennight's Slumber," "The Hell of Lovers," and his "Purgatory," all dedicated to ladies. He named also, as other scattered pamphlets which he hoped some day to print, "The Dying Pelican," "The Hours of the Lord," "The Sacrifice of a Sinner," "The Seven Penitential Psalms," &c.* The published volume contained Spenser's "Ruines of Time," "Teares of the Muses," "Virgil's Gnat," "Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberd's Tale," "The Ruines of Rome," by Bellay, "Muiopotmos, or the Tale of the Butterflie," "Visions of the World's *E. W." ix. 66, 68, 70, 72. Vanitie," "Bellaye's Visions," and "Petrarche's Visions." "The Ruines of Time," dedicated to Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, was a series of mournful visions, forming a poem, in Chaucer's stanza, upon recent deaths in the Dudley family, and chiefly on the deaths of Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney. The genius of the Roman city of Verulam weeps by the Thames near the ruins of her city, and joining to her lament the praise of Camden, who preserves the knowledge of the past, deplores the ruins made by Time of human glory. Spenser probably used in this piece. thoughts from the "Stemmata Dudleiana,”* inscribed in his youth to the Earl of Leicester, whose death here is lamented. Perhaps, also, Spenser did point in more than one passage of this poem to Burghley as an antagonist of Leicester's who reversed his policy, and was no friend to the poet. Burghley is likely to have thought the pension given for "The Faerie Queene" too liberal. Whether or not he did say, "All this for a song!" the thought of Burghley may have prompted the lines "O let the man of whom the Muse is scorned, He counts Walsingham happy in having Thomas Watson to give him poet's praise. † Sir Francis Walsingham was newly dead, he died in 1590, "Since whose decease, learning lies unregarded, And men of armes doo wander unrewarded." But Burghley, the Lord High Treasurer, lived until 1598. the spirit of the whole poem of the "Ruines of Time" is expressed in its lines "O trustlesse state of miserable men, That builde your blis on hope of earthly thing!" *"E. W." ix. 69. "E. W." ix. 163. and all suggestion of particular example is subordinated to the universal truth. The piece closes with a dozen images, as visions of power and of beauty passed away, inscribed to Sidney's memory. In the "Teares of the Muses," each Muse in turn lamented, in the six-lined "common verse," the decay of her just rule, decay of honour to the highest utterances of the mind, "whilst Ignorance the Muses doth possess." This poem Spenser dedicated to the Lady Strange, with whom he claimed kindred, and whom we shall meet again. She was Alice, youngest daughter of Sir John Spencer, of Althorpe, then married to Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby by the death of his father, in September, 1593. He died himself in the following April, leaving his widow Countess Dowager of Derby, and the mother of two girls. The Muses had less to complain of than the poet fancied, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.* Shakespeare, in 1591, was on the point of beginning his career, and, for all the clouds about, the sun was rising on Apollo's Day. But the poem was written ten years or more before the date of publication, and before the break of day. "Virgil's Gnat," done into octave rhyme, was said to have been long since "dedicated to the most noble and excellent lord, the Earl of Leicester, late deceased." It is a free version of a poem--"Culex "-that used to be ascribed to Virgil. A shepherd sleeping in fair pastures is threatened by danger from a serpent. A gnat rouses him with sting upon the eyelid. He wakes, brushes his hand over the sting, so kills the gnat; then sees his danger, and as 66 * Polyhymnia flattered courageously when she addressed Elizabeth "Most peerless Prince, most peerless Poetress." The pleasant Willy," whose death Thalia lamented, in terms that would have suited Shakespeare two or three years later, could hardly have meant, as some suppose, John Lyly, who was not then dead. destroys the serpent. The gnat comes to the shepherd in a dream. His plaint is heard, and the shepherd builds to the gnat a rustic monument on the spot where he was saved. Spenser indicates that in this one of his earlier poems, he refers to a time when he was the gnat made to suffer, Leicester was the shepherd whom he warned. In the gnat's recital of its companions among the shades, the sad suggestions follow swiftly on each other. Prosopopoia; or Mother Hubberd's Tale, Spenser dedicated to the Lady Compton and Monteagle, who was Anne, another of the daughters of Sir John Spencer, of Althorpe. It is a pleasant satirical fable, in Chaucer's rhyming ten-syllabled lines, "long since composed in the raw concept of my youth," and written designedly in Chaucer's manner, showing how the Fox and the Ape, his neighbour and gossip, went disguised into the world to mend their fortunes, To begin, they would not be of any occupation, but the free men called beggars. But what warrant should they have for their free life? They would protect themselves by the name of soldiers-"That now is thought a civil begging sect. The Ape, as likest for manly semblance, was to act the poor soldier; the Fox to wait on him and help as occasion served. Spenser having cried shame on this common abuse of an honorable name, next made the Ape a shepherd, with the Fox for sheepdog. In this character "Not a lamb of all their flockes supply Had they to shew; but ever as they bred They slue them, and upon their fleshes fed." The Fox and the Ape, having escaped after a great slaughter of the flock entrusted to their care, set up a new calling "much like to begging, but much better named." They got gown and cassock, and as poor clerks begged of a priest, who reproached them for not seeking some good estate in the Church. Through the counsel given by this priest when the Fox and the Ape asked for advice, Spenser satirised the too easy lives of an indolent, well-to-do clergy : "By that he ended had his ghostly sermon, |