and society we call the world. The great poets know them all, and better than the rest of us. Hence it is that Poetry is a thing (in the old definition) "of more high seriousness, of more intensity, than History." It is the interpretation of the world reached by a beautiful soul, greatly gifted for experience.

Spenser tells us that the Red Cross Knight, purified and strengthened by Truth, always does kill the dragon. Perhaps we shall not believe this at first hearing. Let us postpone decision, but let us keep in the company of the poet-this at least nothing can take away from us as we read-and as we move through scene after scene with this strong and serene spirit, so sensitive to all impressions of beauty, so happy in his knowledge of their meaning, so high and so pure, is it not possible that we too may look on the world at last in the spirit of love, and find that the golden Chain still holds it? This at least some of his friends found

For he hath taught hye drifts in shepeherdes weedes,
And deepe conceites now singes in Faeries deedes.
(Prefatory verses of R. S.)

Of Spenser's life the general course is well known; the detail not so well. He was born in London, he says

Mery London, my most kyndly Nurse,

That to me gave this Lifes first native sourse.

(Prothm. 129.)1

The date of his birth was 1552, or perhaps 1553-the latter the year in which Rabelais died and Queen Mary ascended the throne of England. The poet's parents must have been Protestants, and on the mind of a London child in a Protestant home the impressions of early years must have been indelible. When he was five or six years old Elizabeth succeeded Mary; and if, in years long after, the poet's praise of Elizabeth seems excessive, it is well to 1 Cf. his references to Troynovant (London) in iii. 9, 38, 45 f.

reflect that the combination of the words Queen and Elizabeth had meant in his childhood that the fires of Smithfield were put out, and for long during his manhood the same combination was the surest guarantee that those fires would not be re-lit.

In 1561 the Merchant Taylors' School was founded in London,1 and Edmund Spenser must have been one of its first scholars. The accounts of the expenditures at the funeral of Robert Nowell,2 in February 156, among very many items of less present interest, record gowns given to six scholars from the school, and among them is Edmund Spenser. In the same year the accounts of the same family contain the entry, under April 28, 1569;

"to Edmond Spensore, scholler of the m'chante tayler scholl, at his gowinge to penbrocke hall in chambridge, x3.” A month later he was entered at Pembroke Hall,3 and almost simultaneously a book appeared in which were printed without his name some lines that are certainly his -a pleasant conjunction of excitements. The lines were

some blank verse translations of the French poet du Bellay, whose sonnets had appeared only the year before, and others in rhyme from Petrarch. Years after, Spenser re-issued them-the Visions of Petrarch little changed, the others rhymed as sonnets. One thought, to be met several times in Spenser's later works, is found already here in a rendering itself strangely prophetic of what he was to do with the English language

Manie Muses, and the Nymphes withall,

That sweetly in accord did tune their voyce
To the soft sounding of the waters fall.

A curious letter survives of one of his College friends,

1 It is perhaps of interest to note that the first English Algebra was published in 1557-Record's Whetstone of Wit. The author invented the sign =, and explained how to extract a square root; but Spenser may have escaped all this. 2 R. W. Church, Soenser, p. 8.

:

Gabriel Harvey, which tells of Cambridge in those days. A few lines may be picked from it. "Xenophon and Plato reckoned among discoursers, and conceited superficial fellows; . . . Petrarch and Boccace in every man's mouth... the French and Italian highly regarded; the Latin and Greek but lightly... Turkish affairs familiarly known castles built in the air: much ado and little help in no age so little so much made of; every one highly in his own favour . . . the Gospel taught, not learnt... the Light, the Light in every man's lips, but mark their eyes, and you will say that they are rather like owls than eagles no more ado about caps and surplices Mr Cartwright quite forgotten." 1 Here we have the Cambridge life of Spenser,-French and Italian poets, hardly prescribed perhaps by the dons; Greek and Latin; Puritan controversy; wars and rumours of wars-don John won his battle of Lepanto over the Turks in 1571;-and, the most abiding and perhaps most valuable feature of Cambridge architecture, castles in the air.

What use Spenser made of his time is plain to see in his poems. "C Having," as his friend "E. K." put it in 1579, "the sound of those auncient Poetes still ringing in his eares, he mought needes, in singing, hit out some of theyr tunes." A close study of Plato, probably in Greek, certainly in the commentary of Ficino, left on him the deep impress that Plato must always make on sensitive natures.2

In 1576 Spenser graduated Master of Arts, and for the next two years he lived in "the North parts"

1 R. W. Church, Spenser, p. 25. Thomas Cartwright was appointed Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in 1569. His lectures on Church Government drew great audiences. He was deprived of his chair in Dec. 1570, and of his Trinity Fellowship Sept. 1571-interesting episodes, all in Spenser's Cambridge days.

⚫ See generally J. S. Harrison's interesting volume on Platonism in English Poetry of the 16th and 17th Centuries (New York, 1903), a book which every student of Spenser will be glad to have studied.

perhaps as a tutor.

And there, and then, the story says, he fell in love with Rosalind, "the widdowes daughter of the glen." Colin Clout says so, and says she would have none of him. This may have been essential for Idyllic purposes. In 1578 he came South again. The following year saw the appearance of North's Plutarch and Spenser's own first volume The Shepheard's Calendar. Meanwhile the "Shepherd" went to Court and "saw good manners." He became the friend of Sir Philip Sidney and other heroic men. The splendour of the court lives in his verse, but not less its sordidness and ugliness. A great poet can be terribly clear-sighted for the actual.

In 1580 a great change came in Spenser's life. He went to Ireland with Lord Grey of Wilton, from whom he afterwards drew Sir Arthegall, the Knight of Justice with the Yron Man, Talus, for his squire. An iron man was needed. The Irish were in rebellion, and Spanish and Italian adventurers were holding Smerwick.1 The rest of his life Spenser passed in Ireland, with only an occasional visit to England. He eventually received a grant of 3000 acres and Kilcolman Castle. There is in his fragmentary book on Mutabilitie abundant evidence of his sense of the beauty of the land, and he says as much in prose.

"And sure it is yet a most beautifull and sweet country as any is under heaven, seamed throughout with many goodly rivers, replenished with all sortes of fish, most abundantly sprinckled with many sweet Ilandes and goodly lakes . . . adorned with goodly woodes fitt for building of howses and shippes. . . And lastly the heavens most milde and temperat, though somewhat more moyst then the part toward the West." But he has other things to tell of it" nightly bordrags," wolves and "outlaws fell.” 2

In these Irish years much happened. 1 The surrender was made 9 Nov. 1580.

Sir Philip

a Colin Clout, 314.

Sidney fell at Zutphen in 1586. The Armada came, but flavit Deus et dissipati sunt--many of the galleons being wrecked on the West of Ireland. Sir Walter Raleigh, the "Shepherd of the Ocean" came

And, when he heard the musicke which I made,
He found himselfe full greatly pleasd at it.

(C. C. C. 70.)

He told Spenser he was "alwaies idle "-like Virgil studiis florentem ignobilis oti-and bore him off to London to publish the first three books of the Faerie Queene in 1590. It was now that Spenser received his pension from the Queen, a poor one indeed--but "all this for a song," said Lord Burleigh. He was brought into the next three books in one or two places for his saying.

Spenser went back to Ireland, sick of the Court. In 1594 he married a lady called Elizabeth and wrote his beautiful Epithalamion for her-the purest and most exquisite thing of the kind that bride ever had from lover. She too had "long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre" (Epithal. 154). They had four years of married life and several little children. His two little boys he called Sylvanus and Peregrine, playful allusive names like that of Hesperius which the poet Ausonius had given his son. Then in September 1598 the poet was promoted to be Sheriff of Cork but Ireland was again in rebellion. Arlo was a "chief fastness of the rebels," and in October they took and burnt Kilcolman Castle. Twenty years later Ben Jonson told the story to Drummond of Hawthornden-" that Spencer's goods were robbed by the Irish, and his house and a little child burnt, he and his wife escaped, and after died for want of bread in King Street; he refused 20 pieces sent him by my lord Essex, and said he was sure he had no time to spend them." His death (16 Jan. 1599) may

1 So Edward Phillips, nephew of Milton, in his Theatrum Poetarum Anglicorum (1675).