stands first upon the list.* Sidney loved his company, persuaded him to Penshurst with him, where Spenser wrote the "Shepheard's Calendar;" introduced him to his uncle, the magnificent Leicester, and added yet a crowning honor to his spotless fame, by making the poet's fortunes his care, until the fatal wound at Zutphen deprived the age of an ornament, and Spenser of the rare consolation of a spirit worthy to claim kindred with his own. Spenser and Sidney! We love to think of them together at Penshurst; young men of five and twenty or so (for there was

* Sidney seems to have enjoyed a reputation even at his own day, such as no other man of his age ever acquired, at least in sober England. Some have been disposed to question his right to the place he has ever held in the hearts of his countrymen, and of all who speak his language; but Campbell well remarks, "Traits of character will distinguish great men, independent of their pens or their swords. The contemporaries of Sidney knew the man; and foreigners, no less than his own countrymen, seem to have felt from his personal influence and conversation, a homage for him that could only be paid to a commanding intellect guiding the principles of a noble heart." We are tempted to give here a sonnet by Lord Chancellor Thurlow, in which Sidney and Spenser are coupled :

"ON A PICTURE OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

"The man that looks, sweet Sidney, in thy face
Beholding there love's truest majesty,

And the soft image of departed grace,
Shall fill his mind with magnanimity;
There may he read unfeigned humility:
And golden pity, born of heavenly brood,
Unsullied thoughts of immortality,

And musing virtue, prodigal of blood;
Yes! in this map of what is fair and good,
This glorious index of a heavenly book;
Not seldom, as in youthful years he stood,
Divinest Spenser would admiring look;
And framing thence high wit and pure desire,
Imagined deeds that set the world on fire."

only a year or two's difference in their ages), full of the enthusiasm which foreshadowed their future; preux chevaliers both, though with a difference; looking upon life as a theatre of honorable enterprise and splendid achievement; one in soul, though widely separated in fortune. What a field for Sidney's nobleness! and yet, perhaps, still more for that of Spenser; for what requires so much undoubting and generous faith as the receiving of favors? Accepting has fallen into disrepute, from the suspicion which mortifying experience has taught us, that the giver may expect degrading compliances. But if our friend's soul is to us as our own, and we know the gift free, we may as well pretend to scrutinize or decline the bounty of Heaven, or to set up a barrier between the right hand and the left, as decline that which he would bestow upon us. We, in our day, regret that Spenser should have been in any degree dependent, even upon Sidney. We have an uneasy fear that his noble friend's power of bestowing what the poet so much needed for quietness of mind and golden leisure, may have derogated from the purity and dignity of their affection. But, setting aside the unerring instinct of oneness between two minds of such tone, the high chivalric spirit of the time, with the deeply felt recognition of difference in rank, took from such dependence its meaner elements. To be the patron of elegant letters was the ambition, not the reluctant duty, of the great man of Spenser's day. Such patronage was the unquestioned resource of men of genius; and the adulation which makes our modern cheeks tingle as we read, was evidently considered only as an elegant way of proving the poet's claim to the favor he sought. Sidney repaid Spenser by praise of equal extravagance and similar tone. Raleigh saw the soul of Petrarch weep (envious tears of course), at sight of the Faëry Queen. Shakspeare was "drown'd in deep delight" at sound of Spenser's verse; and one and all exhausted not only their mother tongue, but all the languages they could command, in heaping superlatives

upon Queen Elizabeth, who was the last to wish a purer taste to prevail. To refuse the most preposterous flattery when Queen Elizabeth expected it, would have been equivalent to hugging poverty for life; and if our sublime (theoretic) virtue is disgusted with the adulatory verses of Spenser to "great Gloriane," we may inquire how many of the first men of the time, the grave and the gay, the Burghleys as well as the Harringtons, he had to keep him in countenance. We may well suppose they could not look at each other without laughing on these occasions; but even now it may be questioned whether there would be many poor and obscure people among us, if flattery were sure to be rewarded in current coin. Shakspeare and Spenser found it so; and, needing money, they paid the price. Shakspeare, in the exquisite picture of the "fair vestal throned in the west," threw a veil of silver mist over the hard-featured spinster, through which, to all time, her red hair will seem golden, and her egotistic coquetry “maiden meditation, fancy-free." If Spenser called her a "goddesse heavenly bright," and a "mirrour of all lovelinesse," perhaps he thought her such; for he had a most creative imagination; and "a lively sense of future favors" probably excited it to the uttermost. And he certainly left her his debtor in the end, since he identified her name with that of the Faëry Queen.

Raleigh was Spenser's next friend after Sidney, and we know of no other man of the time so worthy to succeed Astrophel in his affection. Raleigh had much of the high chivalric spirit which Spenser so worshipped; his soul and his life were full of poetry ;*

* Sir Egerton Brydges speaks enthusiastically of Raleigh's poetical powers. "Do I pronounce Raleigh a poet? Not, perhaps, in the judgment of a severe criticism. Raleigh, in his better days, was too much occupied in action to have cultivated all the powers of a poet, which require solitude and a perpetual meditation, and a refinement of sensibility, such as intercourse with business and the world deadens. have no proof that Raleigh possessed the copious, vivid and creative powers

*

We

he was himself fit to be a hero of romance; and he had a brotherly, unenvying admiration for Spenser's genius, which must have been as delightful as it was honorable to both. He introduced Spenser to the Queen, and in such a sort, that she gave the poet a pension of fifty pounds, and the laureateship, though without its title. The "Shepheard of the Ocean" endeavored to persuade Spenser to remain and try his fortune at court; to bask as he did, in the smiles of high-born dames, and trust his fortunes to the ticklish chances of great men's favor. Spenser seems to have submitted for a time, and we may imagine the gentle poet, with his elegant taste, his delicacy, his high-soaring imagination, teeming even then with the magnificent conceptions which afterwards found birth in the Faëry Queen,-among the waiting crowd which swayed to and fro, like reeds in the wind, as Elizabeth turned her mighty regards on one side or the other, subject to the insolence of courtiers who had been taught to regard gorgeous apparel as the measure of dignity, and feeling, in all its bitterness, what he so well expressed in one of his satires—

"Whoever leaves sweet home, when mean* estate

In safe assurance, without strife or hate,
Finds all things needful for contentment meek,
And will to court for shadows vain to seek,

Or hope to gain, himself will a daw try :†
That curse, God send unto mine enemy!

He had noble countenance enough, for his friends were the

of Spenser; nor is it probable that any cultivation would have brought forth fruit equally rich. But.even in the careless fragments now presented to the reader (in Raleigh's collected poems), I think we can perceive some traits of attraction which, perhaps, even Spenser wanted. If less diversified than that gifted bard, he would, I think, have been sometimes more forcible and sublime. His images would have been more gigantic, his reflections more daring."

* Mean-middling.

† Try, for prove.

lights of the court, and he had abundant examples of genius waiting even then for the favor of its inferiors; yet all his writings bear witness to his detestation of the position in which he found himself at court, where, in spite of his gentleness, the all-powerfull and vindictive Burghley had become, for some trifling offence, his determined enemy; even so far, say some, as the withholding or preventing the payment of the pension with which the Queen had honored him. Spenser seems to have made desperate efforts to propitiate the hard old lord, but in vain; and he left the court in disgust, flying back to his Irish estate, by the soft-flowing Mulla, where the Muses visited him more freely, and where Raleigh loved to meet them in his company. The poet vented his vexation and disappointment in those oft-quoted lines:

"Full little knowest thou, that 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 peer's;
To have thy asking, yet wait many years;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs ;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run;
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.
Unhappy wight, born to disastrous end,

That doth his life in so long tendance spend !"

Another of Spenser's intimate friends was Gabriel Harvey, one of the learned men of the time, though too much of a pedant to admire the Faëry Queen. This acquaintance was made at college, where Spenser began to give promise of his after years, by an unusual devotion to study, and a scrupulous morality of conduct such as ever after honorably distinguished him. Some poems which appeared about that time have been ascribed to