soldier-poet did not treat them with the slight and disregard the crabbed and tasteless Gabriel Harvey had shown about nine years before: on the contrary, Spenser, adverting to Raleigh's opinion, tells us, "And when he heard the music that I made, He found himselfe full greatly pleas'd at it;" very diffidently describing what must have been Raleigh's extraordinary delight and admiration. Such part of the great poem, including, possibly, the " design and intendment" of the whole, as had been written before 1580, must necessarily have been composed in England, for at that date Spenser had never been abroad, nor in Ireland; and how much had been added between the time when it was in Gabriel Harvey's hands about 1580, and the year 1589, when Sir Walter Raleigh heard Spenser read it, or part of it, it would be vain to speculate. That it had been much increased in bulk while its author was resident in Ireland we are quite sure; for afterwards, when introducing it to Lord Grey de Wilton in a preliminary sonnet, Spenser told him that it consisted of "Rude rymes the which a rustick Muse did weave In savadge soyle;" and in the same spirit, in another of the sonnets appended to the printed copy, he asked the Earl of Ormond to "Receive, most noble Lord, a simple taste Nothing, then, can be clearer than that a considerable part of the poem (Spenser makes no exсерtion as to any portion) had been written in the "savage soil" of Ireland; and we may conclude with sufficient safety, that when Raleigh saw "The Faerie Queene" at Kilcolman, in 1589, it was either complete, or nearly so, as far as the end of the third book; and that the poet, having opened to his gallant and accomplished guest the whole scope of the subject, as well as his design in relation to particular virtues and vices, Raleigh advised him to write and print the very epistle which' Spenser subsequently addressed to him, and appended to "The Faerie Queene," "expounding his intention in the course of the work." By the time this epistle was put to press Raleigh had been restored to the Queen's favour: he was not only Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, but Lord Warden of the Stannaries; and these titles Spenser gave him in one of the introductory sonnets, remarkable for its beautiful simplicity. There he refers to Raleigh's own unprinted, and now unhappily lost, poem in praise of Queen Elizabeth, under the name of "Cynthia," and entreats him to make it universally known : "Yet, till that thou thy Poeme wilt make knowne, Let thy faire Cynthia's praises be thus rudely showne." We apprehend that the subsidence of the Queen's displeasure brought Raleigh back speedily to England, and that he remained but a short time in Ireland. The opinion is so reasonable and probable, that it might almost be treated as a fact, even if Spenser himself had not borne witness to it, that Raleigh brought our poet with him to London, in order that he might present him anew to the Queen. It will not have been forgotten that in one of his letters to Harvey in 1580, Spenser told his old college friend that he had seen her majesty, but whether as Lord Leicester's agent, or messenger, is doubtful: it is indisputable that in the autumn of 1589 Raleigh brought Spenser distinctly under the personal notice and regard of Elizabeth. "Colin Clout's come Home again" is altogether an autobiographical poem, or pastoral, in which the author relates the unexpected visit of Raleigh to him at Kilcolman, the manner in which "the shepherd of the sea" had listened to and applauded his verses (portions of the "Faerie Queene"), and, among other points, their hasty departure together for England : "He me perswaded forth with him to fare. Afterwards we learn from the same poem, that, on arriving in the metropolis, Raleigh introduced Spenser at Court, " that same shepheard still us guyded, Untill that we to Cynthia's presence came." The Queen " inclined her ear" to his melody, "That she thenceforth therein gan take delight;" and " at timely hours" Spenser read portions of " his song" to her, which, " by the measure of her own great mind," she declared to be of "wondrous worth." We need not pause to consider what parts of " The Faerie Queene" he read to her majesty: all that related to Gloriana and Belphœbe must have been especially grateful to the vanity of the royal ear; and, without following Spenser's narrative farther, we may state that just after the three first books had been printed in 1590 (for Spenser, with the aid of Ponsonby, and under the advice of Raleigh, put them to press immediately) the Queen granted her poet a pension of £50 a year. This reward to modern ears may sound insignificant, and unworthy not only of the poem but of the Queen's bounty; but if we take into consideration the great difference in the value of 1 See vol. v. p. 94. 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. |