money we shall find that it was quite equal to £250 a year at present. Surely this gift from a parsimonious sovereign, who was generally guided by a more parsimonious Lord Treasurer, does not deserve to be spoken of with the severe and contemptuous epithets that have been ordinarily applied to it. We are not to forget, likewise, that, besides his manor and castle of Kilcolman, Spenser in 1590 was in receipt of the emoluments, whatever they might be, belonging to his office of Secretary to the Council of Munster, if not of those derived from the situation he held in the Irish Court of Chancery. In the patent for the pension preserved in the usual depository, the Chapel of the Rolls, Spenser is not styled Laureat, so that there is no ground for stating that he had that official appointment: the error has been to mistake a laureat poet for a poet laureat. Elizabeth, during her reign, had many laureat poets, but no Poet Laureat.

Sir Walter Raleigh, having induced Spenser, near the end of 1589, to leave Ireland for a time, and having then been the means of making him personally known to Elizabeth, when the first part of" The Faerie Queene" appeared in print in the 4to. 1590, prefixed to it one of the finest laudatory sonnets in our language: it is headed, “ A vision upon this conceipt of the Faery Queene;" while fourteen other lines, in couplets, entitled, " Another of the same," certainly of very inferior merit, are subscribed W. R., and we must attribute both to the same pen. Gabriel Harvey, too, under his pastoral name of Hobbinol, apparently forgetting the slight he had ten years earlier put upon Spenser's noble imaginative and descriptive poem, which he then derisively called “The Elvish Queen," contributed six stanzas (the best he ever wrote) in praise of "The Faerie Queene," entitling them "To the learned Shepeheard," and actually congratulating him on the manner in which he had elevated his style above the early themes

to which his rustic pipe had been devoted: he also mentions our poet's youthful attachment to Rosalind, who "seemed now forlorne," just as if he were not acquainted with the fact that Spenser had been married before 1587, as we may gather from the parish registers of St. Clement Danes. Excepting for poetical purposes, Rosalind seems to have been relinquished by Spenser within a year after he had celebrated her in his " Shepheardes Calender;" for, taking the expressions literally, it is clear from a passage which Spenser inserted in Latin in his letter dated "quarto nonas Aprilis, 1580," that he had then a sweetheart who earnestly desired to be commended to Gabriel Harvey, and wondered that he had said nothing in answer to her letters :- "Meum corculum tibi se ex animo commendat plurimùm : jamdiu mirata te nihil ad literas suas responsi dedisse." Harvey, also in Latin, in his Letter in reply to Spenser, praises her hair, capillos semiaureos, semiargenteos, semigemmeos, and then adds significantly, Quid quæris? Per tuam Venerem, altera Rosalindula est. We know not how any other interpretation can be put upon these expressions than that in April, 1580, Spenser was in love with another lady, altera Rosalindula, and that the original Rosalind of the north of England had been even then supplanted. It is just possible that both Spenser and Harvey addressed each other in the absurd and extravagant terms of friendship, then sometimes in fashion, and spoke ambiguously of their mutual attachment, as if they were of different and doting sexes: still, this far-fetched view of the matter could hardly apply to the altera Rosalindula of Harvey; and, for aught that is known to the contrary, the phrases we have quoted may have been intended by the writers for a lady whom Spenser subsequently married, and who may have been the mother of Florence Spenser, baptized in 1587.

The whole, in the absence of farther information,

d

seems an inextricable riddle, especially in the face of what Spenser says, at the end of his "Colin Clout's come Home again," of his still ardent and unalterable affection for Rosalind. This, indeed, may have been a portion of the poem which our poet had written long before its date; or we ought possibly to treat it as a poetic fiction, which it answered his purpose to introduce, just in the same way as, in his " Elegy on the death of Sidney," he imagined Stella unmarried (though she was then the wife of Lord Rich), and actually expiring with the wounded lover who had paid his early, but ineffectual addresses to her.

Besides Raleigh's admirable sonnet and poor couplets, and Gabriel Harvey's excellent stanzas, there are four other ordinary commendatory poems annexed to the impression of " The Faerie Queene," in 1590, subscribed respectively R. S., H. B., W. L., and Ignoto (the last a signature supposed at some other times, but not here, to belong to Raleigh), which we shall not pretend to assign to any owners: such guesses can be of no value. Spenser's seventeen dedicatory sonnets to his especial friends and patrons, and to certain of the nobility and others about the Court, seem to have set an example in this respect, which was not unfrequently followed, was probably never equalled, and certainly never exceeded.1

The date of the entry of the first three books of "The Faerie Queene" at Stationers' Hall has long been known; but we are not aware that the precise form of the memorandum has ever been furnished to the readers of Spenser: it stands exactly thus :"Primo Die Decembris [1589] Mr Ponsonbye. Entred for his Copy a booke intytuled the fayrye Queene, dysposed into xii bookes, &c. Aucthorised under thandes of the Archb. of Cante, and bothe the wardens vjd...

One of the most fascinating of these, beyond question, is that to Sir Walter Raleigh, where, in the first line, he is called "the summer's Nightingale," a designation by which Spenser's zealous friend was afterwards recognized.

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The imprint on the title-page," for William Ponsonbie, 1590," was nearly four months in anticipation of the commencement of the new year, as it was then calculated, the 26th of March being considered as the opening of it, and so reckoned in the books of the Stationers' Company. The Poet's Letter to Raleigh, expounding his whole intention," bears date nearly two months subsequent to the date of the entry, viz. "23 January, 1589," that is, in fact, 1590. There is little doubt that this letter was written last (because some explanation of the kind was thought by Raleigh to be necessary), and printed, with the seventeen sonnets to the leaders of the aristocracy, &c., after the whole body of the poem had been worked off in the press.

It was, as we have said, in the autumn of 1589 that Raleigh had brought Spenser to London, and introduced him to the Queen; and before 25th March, 1590, the whole of the 589 pages had gone through the process of typography, a rapid proceeding for that time. Two additional sheets were placed after p. 589, which sheets are occupied by the Poet's letter to Raleigh, and by the propitiatory sonnets; and these, we take it, were printed after the completion of the bulk of the volume.

Whatever might be the sale and success of the work, no second edition of the first three books of "The Faerie Queene" was published, until the author had written the fourth, fifth, and sixth books, when the three preceding books were reprinted, with the date of 1596 on the title-page, like the remaining three books, William Ponsonby being still the stationer who was employed.

He was not at this date a printer, but a stationer― a bookseller and publisher—and he appears to have engaged John Wolfe to put in type the first three books of "The Faerie Queene," as they came out in 1590. The reprint of the whole six books, as they

appeared in 1596, was entrusted to Richard Field, a native of Stratford-upon-Avon, who had already obtained the distinction of having been the fellowtownsman employed by Shakespeare, in 1593 and 1594, to print the first editions of " Venus and Adonis," and of "Lucrece."

Nobody, in the present state of our information, can be at all prepared to decide when Spenser resumed the great and complicated subject, which, we know, he had commenced before 1580, and three books of which were published in 1590. After the publication of those three books it is supposed, and it may be declared with some degree of certainty, that he spent more than a year and a quarter in England, chiefly near the Court, and doubtless much in the society of Sir Walter Raleigh and his friends. A collected volume of miscellaneous pieces, of which we shall speak more presently, came out in 1591, and "London, the first of Januarie, 1591," is the date of Spenser's dedication of his " Daphnaida,” though it was not published until five years afterwards.

On the other hand, we are sure that our poet was in Ireland on "27 December, 1591," when “ Colin Clout's come Home again" is dated from Kilcolman. We must, therefore, of necessity, take "the first of Januarie, 1591," not to mean 1591-2, but five days more than twelve months prior to the date of " Colin Clout's come Home again." According to this mode of reckoning Spenser came to London with Raleigh early in the autumn of 1589; wrote his "Daphnaida” there in 1590, and, having printed his "Faerie Queene" as far as it was finished, returned to Ireland. In Ireland he wrote his " Colin Clout's come Home again," which he dedicated to Raleigh on " 27 December, 1591," though it did not pass the press until 1595.

Some biographers of Spenser would have us believe that "27 December, 1591," was a mistake for