康 ADVERTISEMENT. HE text of this edition of Spenser's Poetical Works is a careful verbatim reprint of that published in 1862 by the late Mr. J. Payne Collier, whose painstaking endeavours to render it the most correct text extant, have left little to be done in the way of corrections or emendations by any future editor. The Memoir is also substantially the same as Mr. Collier's, but is abridged by the omission of such portions as relate to the literary questions of Spenser's time, or refer to his contemporaries rather than to himself. It will be found, however, that care has been taken to retain all the facts and inferences relative to the Poet's life; many of which were given to the world for the first time in Mr. Collier's memoir. 1891. DMUND SPENSER, the author of "The Faerie Queene" and of the other poetical works contained in the ensuing volumes, was born in 1552, twelve years earlier than Shakespeare. It has been usual to fix this event in 1553; but Spenser himself tells us, in the sixtieth sonnet of his "Amoretti," printed in 1595, entered at Stationers' Hall in 1594, and, in all probability, written at the close of 1593, that he had already completed his fortieth year. His birth is thus carried back to 1552.1 Although he was unquestionably born in London, a point to which we shall more particularly advert presently, there is some reason to think that he may have spent his youth in Warwickshire, and that his father was resident in that county in 1569: an Edmund Spenser, who may have been the poet's father, 1 For Spenser's sixtieth sonnet, see vol. v. p. 185. He tells the lady whom he was then addressing, that the year of his courtship, just ended, appeared to him longer "Than all those forty which my life outwent." "This was in the end of the year 1593, so that he would appear to have been born in 1552."-Professor Craik. b |