and one of the brightest too-of that glorious galaxy which gave such splendour to the court of the "Maiden Queen."

But in leaving the green solitudes of Penshurst for the splendours of the court, Spenser was destined to exchange his freedom and his happiness for a chain only the heavier because it was of gold. He forgot the profound truth concealed in that oracular verse of the poet which so truly describes the proper atmosphere for a lettered life,

"Flumina amem sylvasque, inglorius ;"

and he paid for his mistake, the heavy penalty of a life embittered by court disappointments, and finished in affliction.

Though early distinguished by the favour of Elizabeth, his life at court seems to have been a nearly uninterrupted succession of mortifications and disappointments. The very favour of the Earl of Leicester, powerful as it was, was not omnipotent, and in courts, as in the fairy tale, the talisman or charmed weapon, given to the adventurous knight by a friendly magician, often proves the very cause of his being attacked by a hostile enchanter. The very patronage and protection of Leicester naturally drew upon Spenser the dislike and suspicion of Lord Burleigh, then Chancellor and highly favoured by Elizabeth; and the poet, in innumerable passages of his works, has alluded to the discouragement and coldness he experienced at the hands of the great lawyer. One stanza, indeed, describing the miseries of court dependence, has passed ineffaceably into the memory of every reader of English poetry. It is so painfully beautiful and so evidently sincere-written, as it were, with the very heart's blood of the poet-that we cannot forbear quoting it here :

"Full little knowest thou who hast not tried,
What hell it is in suing long to bide;

To lose good days that might be better spent ;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow;
To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peers';
To have thy asking, yet wait many years;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy heart in comfort less despairs:
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to wait to be undone."

At length, however, Spenser received (in 1580) the appointment of secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, whom he accompanied to Ireland, and under whose orders the poet seems to have distinguished himself as a man of business, for he was soon afterwards rewarded with a grant from the Crown of 3000 acres of land in the county of Cork, an estate which had previously formed part of the domains belonging to the Earls of Desmond, but which had been forfeited to the Crown. This is one of the numerous instances of Elizabeth's ingenious policy; for she thus rewarded a faithful servant with a gift

of land which cost her nothing, and which the recipient (or "undertaker," as he was termed) was bound by his contract to inhabit and keep in cultivation. A territory, however, recently devastated by contending armies with fire and sword, was a gift rather splendid in appearance than profitable in reality; and perhaps the principal advantage derived by Spenser from this donation was the necessity it imposed upon him of residing on his estate, and the leisure which it enabled him to dedicate to his literary pursuits. He took up his abode in the ancient castle of Kilcolman, situated in the midst of his beautiful but unproductive domain, and it is here that he composed the greater part of his immortal work-the poem of 'The Faerie Queene.' The scenery by which he was here surrounded is remarked for its beauty even in beautiful Ireland; and it may not be fanciful to speculate how far the natural loveliness of the spot is reflected and reproduced in the rich pictures which fill the pages of the poem.

It was here that the poet was visited by Raleigh, then a young man, beginning, as Captain of the Guards, that extraordinary and brilliant career which has rendered his name so illustrious at once for learning and for enterprise. To Raleigh-a kindred spiritSpenser communicated his literary projects, and read to him the unfinished cantos of the Faerie Queene.' Among the various friendships and meetings recorded among great men, there is perhaps none on which we reflect with such interest as this: how delightful is it to picture to ourselves the Ariosto of England and the colonizer of Virginia seated together on the banks of Mulla, exchanging thoughts bright with immortality,

"amongst the coolly shade

Of the green alders, by the Mulla's shore !"

The "Shepherd of the Ocean," as Raleigh was styled in Spenser's poetical nomenclature, replaced for the bard, in some degree at least, the irreparable loss inflicted by the early death of Sidney-perhaps the severest blow inflicted on the sensitive heart of the poet during the carlier part of his career: the death of his youthful patron cast a gloom over the whole of his too short existence.

In 1590 Spenser returned to England in order to present to Elizabeth the first part of the 'Faerie Queene;' and, insatiable as was that great sovereign in the matter of praise and adulation, with the exquisite tribute of Spenser's Muse she must have been profoundly gratified. All the learning and genius of an age remarkable for learning and genius were exhausted in supplying the Maiden Monarch with incessant clouds of elegant and poetical incense; and among all the worshippers in the temple none were certainly more devoted or more capable than Spenser. The annals of court adulation are in general among the most humiliating pages of human folly

and absurdity; but the age of Elizabeth was singular and fortunate in one respect the greatness of the sovereign's character was not unworthy of the sublimest strains of panegyric, and the greatest among poets-for Shakspeare and Spenser both praised, in deathless verse, this extraordinary ruler-found in the achievements and the wisdom of their patroness a subject which they could adorn, but hardly exaggerate. The queen expressed her approbation of the poem by conferring on the author a pension of 507. per annum-in estimating which reward we must consider the much higher value of money at that period: and Spenser then probably returned to Ireland; for in 1595 he published his pastoral of Colin Clout,' and in 1596 the second part of the 'Faerie Queene.' It must not however be supposed that the poet had no occupation during this period excepting such as he found in the strenua inertia"-the laborious abstraction of a literary life: he was employed actively and uninterruptedly in the service of the state; for, after passing through many subordinate employments, we find him about this time, Clerk of the Council for the province of Munster, and exhibiting the knowledge he had acquired of the character and prospects of the conquered nation in his interesting prose work entitled 'A View of the State of Ireland.' This book, the production of one who was at the same time a poet and a statesman, bears every mark of its author's double quality it gives a most curious and evidently faithful description of the manners of the Celtic inhabitants of the country, and contains many wise hints for the subjection and civilizing of that warlike race. It is true that some of the measures recommended by Spenser are of a violent and coercive character; but we should be unwise to expect in a writer of the sixteenth century a tone of mildness and toleration unknown in politics previous to the nineteenth.

During the whole of Spenser's residence in Ireland, he appears to have made frequent voyages to his own country, and seems to have been agitated by an incessant and feverish discontentment-dissatisfied probably with the very reward conferred upon him by the queen-a reward which condemned him to reside in a barbarous and disturbed country, and deprived him of the pleasures and society of the court. This honourable banishment under the disguise of advancement was perhaps an ingenious contrivance of the profound and tortuous policy of Spenser's great opponent, Burleigh, who thus removed the dangerous fascinations of Spenser's manners and genius far from the sphere of the court, and thus deprived the party of Leicester of a hold upon Elizabeth's capricious and impressionable vanity.

In 1597 Spenser retired for the last time to Ireland, and shortly afterwards the flame of popular discontent, communicated from the furious outburst which, under the name of "Tyrone's Rebellion," had been raging for some years in Ulster, swept over his retreat at

Kilcolman Castle, and drove Spenser, a heartbroken and ruined man, to die in sorrow and distress in London. In his offices of Clerk of the Council, and afterwards of Sheriff of Cork, Spenser had probably given but too much grounds for the accusation of injustice and oppression brought against him by the Irish, and exaggerated by the natural indignation of a proud and savage people uneasy under a recent yoke. In October, 1598, the Castle of Kilcolman was attacked and burned by the insurgents, and Spenser, with difficulty saving himself and his wife from the fury of the victors, escaped to England. In the hurry of leaving his blazing residence, however, either from the imminence of personal danger or from one of those frightful mistakes so likely to happen at such terrific moments, the poet's infant child was left behind, and perished with the house. Spenser reached London, ruined, heartbroken, and despairing, and, after lingering for three months, he died, in King Street, Westminster, on the 16th of January, 1599.

He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near the tomb of Chaucer. The following is an account of the principal poems of Spenser, at least of such as are not alluded to in the foregoing pages: The Tears of the Muses,' and 'Mother Hubbard's Tale,' published in 1591; Daphnaida,' 1592; The 'Amoretti' and 'Epithalanium' two works descriptive of his courtship and marriage, the latter one of the noblest hymeneal songs in any language-in 1595; and the Elegy on Astrophil,' a lament on the death of the illustrious Sidney, at the same period. We have hinted that the 'Fairy Queen' was given to the world in detached portions and at long intervals of time: the dates of these various publications are nearly as follows: Books I., II., and III. appeared together in January 1589-90; IV., V., and VI. in 1596.

The design of the whole poem, if completed, would have given us one of the most splendid works of romantic fiction in which Chivalry ever pronounced the oracles of Wisdom: and we may judge, by the unfinished portion of this Palace of Honour, what would have been the gorgeous effect of the whole majestic structure. Spenser supposed the Fairy Queen to appear in a vision to Prince Arthur, who, awaking deeply enamoured, resolves on seeking his unearthly mistress in Faery Land. The poet then represents the Fairy Queen as holding her solemn annual feast during twelve days, on each of which a perilous adventure is undertaken by some particular knight; each of the twelve knights typifying some moral virtue. "The first," to use the words of Chambers's abridgment of the plan, "is the Redcross Knight, expressing Holiness; the second, Sir Guyon, or Temperance; and the third, Britomartis, 'a lady knight,' representing Chastity. There was thus a blending of chivalry and religion in the design of the Faery Queen.' Besides his personification of the abstract virtues, the poet made his allegorical personages and their

adventures represent historical characters and events. The queen, Gloriana, and the huntress, Belphoebe, are both symbolical of Queen Elizabeth; the adventures of the Redcross Knight shadow forth the history of the Church of England; and the distressed knight is Henry IV. The Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books contain the legend of Cambel and Triamond, or Friendship; Artegal, or Justice; and Sir Calidore, or Courtesy. A double allegory is contained in these cantos, as in the previous ones: Artegal is the poet's friend and patron, Lord Grey; and various historical events are related in the knight's adventures. Half of the original design was thus finished; six of the twelve adventures and moral virtues were produced: but unfortunately the world saw only some fragments more of the work."

It

Even were we not fully aware of the great general influence exerted on the age of Elizabeth by the taste for Italian poetry, we should be easily enabled to trace its effect in modifying the genius of Spenser. The Faery Queen' is written in a peculiar versification to which we have given the name of the "Spenserian stanza." is really nothing more than the Italian "ottava rima," or eight-lined stanza, to which Spenser, in order to give to the English the "linked sweetness long drawn out" of the "favella Toscana," most wisely added a ninth line, whose billowy flow admirably winds up the swelling and varying music of each stanza. This measure is as difficult to write with effect in English as it is easy in Italian, a language in which the rhymes are so abundant, and the rhythmic cadence so inherent, that it requires almost an effort to avoid giving a metrical form even to prose: and Spenser has wielded this com-plicated instrument with such consummate mastery and grace, that the rich abundant melody of his versification almost oppresses the ear with its overwhelming sweetness. Like the soft undulation of a Tropic sea, it bears us onward dreamily with easy swell and falls, by wizard islands of sunshine and of rest, by bright phantom-peopled realms and old enchanted cities.

The genius of Spenser is essentially pictorial. There are no scenes, soft or terrible, which ever glowed before the intellectual gaze of the great painters which have more reality than his; like the gallery so exquisitely described by Byron :

"There rose a Carlo Dolce, or a Titian,

Or wilder group of savage Salvatore's;

There danced Albano's boys, and here the sea shone
With Vernet's ocean lights; and there the stories

Of martyrs awed, as Spagnoletto tainted

His brush with all the blood of all the sainted.

There sweetly spread a landscape of Lorraine;

There Rembrandt made his darkness equal light;
Or gloomy Caravaggio's gloomier stain
Bronzed o'er some lean and stoic anchorite."