not actually have been for want of bread, but his spirit was broken. He was buried in Westminster Abbey near the grave of Chaucer, "his hearse being attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems with the pens that wrote them thrown into his tomb" (Camden). Spenser, like every other poet and great man, is the child of his age. Whatever remains for such men in posterity, they inherit their own age as no others can. The large heart and the open mind absorb life in a wonderful way. Few periods of English history have been so interesting and so various. To begin with, there was the new sense for truth, and the new search for truth, together embodied in the great parallel movements (if they are not one) which we call the Renaissance and the Reformation. Old Learning, new Geography and eternal Religion-the elements came together; and Truth was carried alive into the heart of mankind by passion. The spiritual experience was the centre of it. This was the atmosphere into which Spenser was born, which he breathed. It is wonderful to see how in his poetry the whole life of the day sooner or later is felt and finds expression in beauty. Let us begin at the circumference and work back to the centre. In 1580, the year of Spenser's settlement in Ireland, Francis Drake came home after a voyage of nearly three years. Worm-eaten and heavy with weeds the Golden Hind entered Plymouth Sound on 26 September. She had been round the world, through seas no Englishman had sailed, strange oceans and archipelagoes. When men thought of where Drake had sailed and what he had seen, nor Drake only, there would be a quick response to such lines as these Rich Oranochy, though but knowen late; When Spenser describes Fansy, like a lovely Boy, he goes to America for his garb His garment nether was of silke nor say, Their tawney bodies in their proudest plight Drake had come home by the East Indies, and a year or so after Spenser's death the East India Company was formed in 1600. Hakluyt published in 1589 his book, "The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation made by Sea or over land to the most remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth." England was one in all this, and Spenser was her trueborn son. We may find another sign of the times in a strange little corner of his poem. When Belphœbe finds "the soveraine weede" to heal the wounds of Timias, the poet is not quite certain whether yt divine Tobacco were, Or Panachæa, or Polygony (iii. 5, 32). King James had other adjectives for it. Raleigh, Spenser's friend, is famous in connexion with its introduction to English notice and even if he learnt its use in France,2 his name lives with that of Virginia, the great colony projected in 1585, for whose sake later on the growing of tobacco was forbidden in England. The ships of England were not merely engaged in 1 Cf. Milton, P. L., ix. 1115. Such of late Columbus found the American, so girt With feather'd cincture, naked else and wild Among the trees on isles and woody shores. 2 Rennell Rodd, Raleigh, p. 67. See a very amusing letter of Howell's on Tobacco (1646), book iii. 7. Spenser's day in discovery. The Red Cross Knight has to leave his bride to serve the Faerie Queene Gainst that proud Paynim king that workes her teene (i. 12, 18). Whether the poet meant to tell the story or not (i. II, 7), his sonnet to "the Lord Ch. Howard high Admiral of England" is full of the great victory of 1588 Sith those huge castles of Castilian King, That vainly threatned kingdomes to displace, The whole poem is one of victory, of hope and triumph -clear proof of the poet's sympathy with his people. He was a Puritan of London; and the only party, according to a report drawn up in 1585 for the Pope by a distinguished Jesuit,1 that would fight to death for the Queen were the Puritans of London and of the sea towns. Providentially, he held, they were few. The Jesuit was so far right in saying they would fight, but more than they fought for the Queen, for Howard was a Catholic. King Philip's wars in the Low Countries and the Inquisition are the theme of the tenth canto of book v. of the Faerie Queene. Spenser had been at College when the Saint Bartholomew Massacre took place, and the Pope coined his medal to celebrate it. Englishmen then had no doubts as to the spirit and nature of the Roman Church, and here again Spenser stood with his countrymen. Another characteristic feature of the time meets us when Sir Arthegall, the Knight of Justice, comes upon the "mighty Gyant" with "an huge great paire of ballance in his hand " (v. 2, 30). The Giant has his eye on the world around him and sees "realmes and nations run awry," and he undertakes to reduce them to equality again 1 Froude, English Seamen, p. 8. * 18 August 1572. Were it not good that wrong were then surceast, Therefore I will throw downe these mountains hie, The Giant was perhaps an Anabaptist; and at any rate the vulgar clustered thick "unto his leasings vaine, like foolish flies about an hony-crocke." Sir Arthegall tests him; he claims he can weigh everything in his balances; can he weigh the wind, the light Or weigh the thought that from mans mind doth flowor even a single word? Can he weigh right against wrong, true against false? No, it proves that these cannot be weighed against each other. Talus, the iron squire, begins to suspect the Giant, and in his abrupt way, shoulders him off the cliff into the sea. So was the high-aspyring with huge ruine humbled— and the lawless multitude Talus scattered with his flail. The whole incident is full of suggestion. The giant has not proved so easy to deal with in history as in allegory. But Spenser was himself a man of letters, a student and a poet, and while his friends fought on land and sea, his business lay elsewhere. It was a formative time, for the English language and literature took then directions they were not to leave. So far England had had one great poet, but two centuries had changed her speech and Chaucer was not wholly intelligible. Pronunciation in particular had shifted, and men, while they read him scan. with enthusiasm, could never be sure of making his lines His accents, his grammar, and his use of final e perplexed his readers, and his great gift of metre was obscured, as it remained till Tyrwhitt took him in hand in the 18th century. Few can have loved Chaucer in that day as Spenser did; indeed English taste, missing his secret, was looking to other models-" our maker, therefore, at these days shall not follow Piers Plowman, nor Gower, nor Lydgate, nor yet Chaucer, for their language is now out of use with us."1 But to Spenser he is still "that renowned Poet" Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled, On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled (iv. 2, 32)— and on Chaucer's English Spenser now and then modelled his own, archaizing, as a poet would, with an enthusiasm that owns no canons of philological science. Milton, here as elsewhere in unity with Spenser, was also a student of Chaucer, him who left half-told The story of Cambuscan bold And of the wonderous horse of brass— that tale which Spenser tried to finish. With Chaucer Milton couples another poet And if aught else great bards beside Of turneys, and of trophies hung, Of forests and enchantments drear Where more is meant than meets the ear. What is more, they both thought of Chaucer as a sort of precursor of the Reformation. Foxe, the Martyrologist (whose book appeared in 1563), says of him that he "no doubt, saw in religion as much almost as ever we do now, 1 1 Puttenham, cited by T. R. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, iii. p. 60. |