lovers; and a very little of this is enough to break a true Arcadian's heart and level him to the earth with woe. It would be difficult to argue altogether in favour of the merits of a kind of poetry which holds in disdain the axioms of science and common sense, and which absolutely precludes the poet from dealing with much that is most beautiful and poetical in the lives of men. But we must not be led into the opposite error of condemning pastoralism merely because it is artificial and unscientific. When Spenser began to write, he was, more than almost any man of his time, intimately acquainted with the works of English and foreign poets. He had a filial tenderness for Chaucer and the old English school. But he was discontented with much in the literature of his own age; and, at the very outset, in the preface to his Shepherd's Calendar, he announced, or allowed his friends to announce for him, that his Eclogues were in some sense an innovation, and were intended to improve, if not to remodel, English taste in non-dramatic verse. That he deliberately selected the form of Eclogues for this purpose, quoting as his precedents the examples of Theocritus, Virgil, Mantuan, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Marot, Sannazaro, and "divers other excellent both Italian and French poets," is of itself a powerful apology for the pastoral form. But it is necessary to look into the writings of Spenser's contemporaries and successors in order to estimate fully the beneficial effect of the introduction of this form into English poetry. In his Tears of the Muses, published after the first instalment of the Faerie Queen in 1591, but probably written much earlier, and known for many years in manuscript before it was printed, Spenser reviews with sorrow the lamentable state in which he found the condition of literature, learning, and the arts in this country. The criticism, though poetically expressed, was, we cannot doubt, both accurate and wise. But how different would have been his judgment had he come upon the age with the same passionate sympathies of youth some fifteen years later! Nay, even when this criticism was published, in 1591, it was already out of date. Had the Muses re-strung their harps then to suit the time, we should have heard, not mournful plaints and yelling shrieks of disapproval, but such a chorus of triumph as had never yet resounded by the "sacred springs of horsefoot Helicon.” Although born in London, educated at Cambridge University, and bred up amid associations peculiarly and affectionately English, Spenser was fated to spend many years of his life in Ireland, in various official posts, among a race of people with whom he had but few interests in common. Not the romantic beauty of Kilcolman Castle in county Cork, with its three thousand surrounding acres of forfeited lands of the Earls of Desmond granted to him by Queen Elizabeth, could altogether compensate the poet for the loss of more familiar, if less lovely, English scenes; and a prevailing melancholy and discontent may be observed in most of Spenser's allusions to his own life-story. In 1589, when he had been resident in Ireland for nine years, Spenser returned to England in company with Sir Walter Raleigh, who had been lately his guest at Kilcolman Castle; and he brought with him the first three Books of the Faerie Queene for publication. Accordingly, during this visit, which lasted for a year and a half, and was memorable besides for his introduction by Raleigh to the Queen, and his consequent pension, he did make his second appearance in print in this new venture. Nor was the reception of his poem affected, as one might have surmised it would be at that date, by the growing bulk and popularity of dramatic poetry. Between the brilliant but ephemeral performances of the early Elizabethan dramatists and such a laboriously executed poem as Spenser's there was but little chance of rivalry. The three books of the Faerie Queene, published in 1590, had been the continuous work of ten years of the poet's life, and were at once hailed as the greatest English poem produced since the days of Chaucer. The population of London did not in the sixteenth century exceed 250,000; the central life of the city nestled much more closely along its glittering river-banks and among its "bricky towers" than it now does; and the proud, pensive face of Spenser, as he walked along the Strand, where were the houses of his noble friends, or in St. Paul's and Fleet Street among the book-shops, might easily become familiar to the Londoners during his eighteen months' stay among them. In the pastoral poem called Colin Clout's Come Home Again, written upon his return to Ireland in 1591, there are allusions to many of his contemporary fellow-poets; but there is no proof that Spenser counted Shakespeare among his friends, or that they ever met. We may dream what we like; but it is not improbable that differences of age, of occupation, of social position, were sufficient to keep them apart, even when they were, for the time, living within a walk of one-another's dwellings. And, when Spenser looked across the river, spanned by its one cumbrous bridge, towards the less populated district of the "painted theatres" and the pleasure gardens, it was not of the young Shakespeare, but of Sir Philip Sidney, his dear Astrophel, that he thought,— dead four years ago,—whose 66 'Sports were fair, his joyance innocent, Spenser's second visit to London was in 1595. In the interval between the two visits his London publisher collected some of his early poems and translations, and printed them in a 4to volume, with the title, Complaints: containing sundry small poems of the World's Vanity. Among these "small poems" were The Tears of the Muses and Mother Hubbard's Tale. The Amoretti and Epithalamium were published in November, 1594, within six months of the poet's marriage, which they commemorate; and in 1595, during his second stay in London, were published, Colin Clout's Come Home Again, written five years before, and containing much interesting autobiographic matter, and also the Four Hymns in honour of Beauty and Love. During this visit of 1595 were likewise published the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of the Faerie Queene, together with a re-issue of the first, second, and third. Of the remaining six books needed to complete the work, only one canto and a fragment of another canto exist. Spenser had long been upon il terms with his Irish neighbours. There had been law-pleas against him by the original owners of certain plough-lands about Kilcolman; and, among the native Irish who knew him only as one Edmond Spenser, gentleman," he was not loved. On the contrary, he was bitterly hated, as an interloper, “a heavy adversary,” and an able advocate of hard measures. His View of the Present State of Ireland, written in 1595, was, although not printed, already in wide circulation when Spenser returned to Kilcolman in 1597, and into the immediate district of that arch-rebel, the Earl of Tyrone, to whom Spenser had asked in that pamphlet that no mercy, even upon surrender, should be shown. The insurrection which he had foreseen and dreaded broke out in his own neighbourhood; and his house, the ancient home of Irish earls, was made a principal point of attack. Kilcolman Castle was burnt by the rebels in the autumn of 1598; and in the confusion of flight an infant child of the poet was left behind to perish in the flames. This cruel disaster drove Spenser, with his wife and remaining children, once more to England; where, in King Street, Westminster, he died on January 16th, 1599. He was buried with much honour in the Abbey, near to Chaucer's tomb. The Faerie Queene, like the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, remained unfinished at its author's death; but, from a letter to Raleigh by Spenser which accompanies the poem, we learn that it was meant, if completed, to represent, in the form of allegory, the education of a noble soul in quest of glory. The prevailing "note" of the poem is that of Arcadianism developed into what may be called Arthurianism. The scene is in a land geographically hazy, boundless, and bewilderingly beautiful, yet which is somehow all the time our own familiar Britain. The heroic Arthur, representing Magnanimity, wanders abroad over this ideal land; he meets with knights of Queen Gloriana, who are doing her errands of chivalry; and be becomes entangled with them in their adventures and enchantments. That is the outline of the story; but what a filling-up! Then the verse in which it is told, that magical "Spenserian stanza" which seems to wile us on so fitly through the quiet luscious labyrinths and the measureless gleamings and openings of the wood-embosomed dream! FROM THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR. COLIN CLOUT,1 or JANUARY. A shepherd's boy, (no better do him call,) Led forth his flock that had been long y-pent :2 All as the sheep, such was the shepherd's look, And thus him plained, the while his sheep there fed :— "Ye gods of love, that pity lovers' pain, (If any gods the pain of lovers pity!) Look from above where you in joys remain, And bow your ears unto my doleful ditty! And Pan, thou shepherd's god, that once didst love, "Thou barren ground, whom winter's wrath hath wasted, Art made a mirror to behold my plight : Whilom thy fresh spring flowered; and after hasted And now is come thy winter's stormy state, "Such rage as Winter's reigneth in my heart, 1 This rustic_name, which Spenser adopted for himself in his pastorals, was borrowed from Skelton.-(See p. 149.) 5 Could. 4 Scarcely. 2 In fold. |