tune aspects of the eternal Providence; and arguing that, though the Scriptures are the only true fountains of knowledge, yet much may be learnt from these pagan writers when rightly interpreted. The following is part of the moral of Phaeton :

"This fable also doth advise all parents and all such

As bring up youth to take good heed of cockering them too much."

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CHAPTER IV.

EDMUND SPENSER.

(1552-1598.)

I. HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER.

ALTHOUGH, in Dryden's phrase, "Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body," there can be no doubt that Spenser's chief impulse in the composition of his principal poem was derived from Ariosto and Tasso. It is, indeed, not difficult to adduce passages from the 'Faery Queen,' founded on Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory. Spenser was a most learned poet, more so probably than any great English poet, except Mr Swinburne; and he assimilated and incorporated material from many predecessors-English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. "E. K.," the inspired commentator on his 'Shepherd's Calendar,' after enumerating as writers of pastoral poetry Theocritus, Virgil, Mantuanus, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, comes finally to Marot, Sanazarro, "and also divers other excellent both Italian and French poets," and adds "whose footing this author everywhere followeth, yet so as few, but they be well scented, can trace him out." Our poet laid all under contribution, not stealing clumsily and mechanically, but using the products of other imaginations as food for his own. The Italian masters, undoubtedly, were his chief models and exemplars, although he never followed them to the oppression, still less to the suppression, of his own spirit. The 'Faery Queen' is of the same

kindred with the 'Orlando Furioso' and the 'Gerusalemme Liberata.' In Spenser's poem, perhaps, the allegory had greater generative force: but all three agree in the essential respect of being the elements of chivalrous romance used by great artists for purely artistic purposes.

The translations of Ariosto and Tasso executed about the time of the appearance of the 'Faery Queen,' are a proof of the interest then prevailing in these poems of chivalry. A translation of Ariosto's 'Orlando Furioso,' by Sir John Harrington, was published in 1591: one translation of Tasso's 'Godfrey of Bulloigne,' or 'Jerusalem Delivered,' by Richard Carew, in 1594, and another, more celebrated, by Sir Edward Fairfax, in 1600. Both Harrington's and Fairfax's are smooth and copious, and supplied 'England's Parnassus' with many choice extracts. They are in ottava rima, and are far from having Spenser's inimitable music; yet, if an unobservant reader were set down to some of those extracts, the general resemblance of strain, of matter and imagery, is such that he would probably refer them at once to Spenser.1

Spenser's lineage and life have been made subjects for laborious inquiry and nice speculation. He was born in London, and is supposed to have belonged to a Lancashire branch of the ennobled family of Spencer. The date of his birth is generally fixed about 1552. He entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar, in 1569: became

1 Sir John Harrington might be taken as a typical Elizabethan courtier -a handsome young fellow, possessed of a keen eye for fun as well as for beauty, and a very ready command of language. Besides translating 'Orlando Furioso,' which the Queen is said to have imposed upon him as a punishment for translating the episode of Alcina and Ruggiero,' he wrote Epigrams, composed 'Polindor and Flostella,' a mock-heroic poem in couplets, full of fresh feeling and cleverness, and expounded the merits of one of the most valuable sanitary contrivances of civilised life in a prose treatise Ajax Metamorphosed-boiling over with gross Rabelaisian humour. Fairfax was a quieter man, of secluded studious habits. Dryden, in the preface to his Fables, is loud in praise of the beauty of Fairfax's numbers, which, he says, Waller himself owned to have been his model. "Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr Waller of Fairfax."

B.A. in 1573, M.A. in 1576. After his residence at Cambridge, he is believed to have gone to the north of England; to have returned south in 1578 by the advice of his college friend Gabriel Harvey; and to have been introduced by Harvey to Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney and the Earl of Leicester took him by the hand and advanced his fortunes.

In 1579 he dedicated to Sidney his first poetical effort, 'The Shepherd's Calendar,' containing twelve pastorals, one for each month, classified as moral, plaintive, and recreative. About this time, in his correspondence with Harvey, mention is made of various works now lost, but probably, with the exception of his 'Nine Comedies,' partially embodied in what he afterwards published. By that time, also, he had begun the 'Faery Queen.'

In 1580, at the age of twenty-seven, he entered upon official life: in that year he went to Ireland as secretary to the viceroy, Lord Grey. He is usually said to have returned to England in 1582, when Lord Grey was recalled: and his business employment for the rest of his life is ignored. Only three facts are known, but they are significant. In 1581 he was appointed clerk to the Irish Court of Chancery. In 1588 he resigned that appointment for the office of Clerk to the Council of Munster. In 1598 he was recommended by the Queen as a suitable person to be Sheriff of Cork; but had to flee the country in less than a month afterwards. For eighteen years, therefore, with the exception of two brief ascertained visits to England, the author of the 'Faery Queen' remained in Ireland, nominally at least, as an official clerk and the last appointment would seem to show that his duties were more than nominal, and were efficiently discharged.

In 1586 his friends obtained for him a grant of three thousand acres of forfeited land at Kilcolman, near Cork. It being a condition of the grant that the holder should cultivate the soil, our poet probably at once went into residence. There, on the borders of a lake, amid beautiful scenery, with easy official duties, and with occasional visits from his friends-Sir Walter Raleigh among the number

he placidly elaborated his 'Faery Queen.' In 1590 he crossed St George's Channel in Raleigh's company, with three Books ready for the printer; saw to the publication of them; was introduced to Elizabeth; and recrossed to Kilcolman, probably in the spring of 1591, with a substantial proof of her Majesty's favour in the shape of a grant for a yearly pension of fifty pounds, and the consequent honorary title of Poet-laureate. In 1591, some minor poems of his were published, with or without his superintendence: "The Ruins of Time," "The Tears of the Muses," "Virgil's Gnat," "Prosopopoeia, or Mother Hubbard's Tale," "Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly," and "Visions of the World's Vanity." About the same time1 he wrote his "Daphnaida," an elegy on the death of a noble lady. His next publications were in 1595: when Ponsonby issued in separate volumes, and at different times, Colin Clout's Come Home Again' (a poem interesting from its allusions to his contemporaries), along with a lament for Sir Philip Sidney, and his "Amoretti" and "Epithalamion," love-sonnets and a marriage-song, occasioned by his wooing and its successful termination in 1594. In 1596 he went over to England and superintended the publication of three more Books of the 'Faery Queen,' along with a second edition of the first three. In the same year appeared in one volume his "Prothalamion" (spousal verses), the elegiac "Daphnaida" already mentioned, and four Hymns. In 1598 he was driven from Kilcolman by the outbreak of Tyrone's rebellion. His wife and himself escaped, but in the hurry and panic they left a little child behind them, and never saw it again. Their house was sacked and burned. He died soon after in London, January 1599. His 'View of the State of Ireland,' a prose dialogue, completed in 1596, was not published till 1633.

"Short curling hair, a full moustache, cut after the pattern

1 Probably before. It is dated Jan. 1, 1591; and we know (Preface to 'Shepherd's Calendar') that Spenser made the year begin with January, and not, as was then usual, with March.