hurst, showed in these first years noteworthy individuality; and his stately and solemn Induction (1563), in rhyme royal, with its vision of the realms of the dead, "The large great kingdoms, and the dreadful reign Of Pluto in his throne where he did dwell, The wide waste places, and the hugy plain," recalls Lydgate almost as much as it anticipates Spenser. But production was not suspended. John Foxe's great Book of Martyrs (printed in English, in 1563) fixed the terrible lessons of Mary's reign; translations from the classics multiplied; masques and little plays for the queen's progresses and other ceremonials were written; tales, translated from the Italian and published in collections, like William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1566), became extremely popular; and the affected verses of the swarm of minor poets were gathered into further miscellaneous collections, such as the Paradise of Dainty Devices in 1576. Then, in 1579, with the appearance of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender the great age was fairly begun. This ancient fortress, standing on the north bank of the Thames, was much used as a royal residence before the time of Elizabeth and was the scene of some of the most important events in English history-the murder, for instance, of the infant King Edward V. and his younger brother Richard. Elizabeth was once confined here. Sir Walter Raleigh went from here to his execution in Old Palace Yard, Westminster. Wyatt, Surrey, Latimer, Bacon, and other distinguished authors were at various times confined within its precincts. Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599. Edmund Spenser is to be regarded as one of the courtier group who surrounded Elizabeth, though he spent much of his life out of England. The precise kind of preferment and patronage which his talents should have won for him never came. He was born, probably in 1552, in eastern London, in sight equally of green fields and of the ancient castellated Tower. From a grammar school he went to Cambridge, where he partly worked his way, taking the master's degree after seven years' residence. Shortly after this, on a visit to the north, he seems to have been captivated by the charms of one "Rosalind," whose indifference inspired some of the plaintive verses of the Shepheardes Calender. The publication of this in 1579 was the beginning of his career as a poet. About the same time he became an inmate of the great house of Leicester, and a friend of Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney. Thenceforward, whether for good or bad, his life was to be spent almost entirely in the turbulent country of Ireland, whither he went as a secretary of the Lord-Deputy. He was granted the estate of Kilcolman Castle, married an Irish lady, whose name, Elizabeth, he has celebrated in one of his sonnets together with his mother's and his queen's, and settled down to a life of semi-banishment, relieved only by several journeys to London, or by the occasional visit of a friend like Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1598 Ireland was in open rebellion; Kilcolman was burned, and Spenser had to flee with his family to London, where he died at the beginning of the following year. The Shepheardes Calender is scarcely in itself a great poem, but besides its promise of the very great poetry soon to be, it "Shepcontained some fulfilment of the promise that for heardes more than twenty years had already been. Colin Calender," Clout, the shepherd's boy of the January Eclogue, who, 1579. "When winters wastfull spight was almost spent, All in a sunshine day, as did befall, Led forth his flocke that had bene long y-pent," was unconsciously emblematic of Spenser himself leading forth to the sunshine these firstlings of the new poetry. There are twelve Eclogues, or pastoral poems, in the "calender," one for each month of the year. Ten are in the form of dialogues, in which shepherds, lounging in sun or shade, discuss love or politics, or hold singing matches after the fashion of the shepherds in Virgil and Theocritus. The rustic background is genuine and interesting, and though the songs and satire sound artificial on the lips of "Hobbinol" and "Piers," they are in themselves the genuine work of a poet happy to find any excuse for the exercise of his gift. Their freshness and melody, the variety of themes which they display, and the mastery over a wide range of forms, from rugged, clownish verse to the most difficult of intricately rhymed stanzas, mark them off from anything that had been seen since the days of Chaucer. Afterward Spenser attained his highest lyrical reach in two hymns, the Epithalamion (written for his own marriage) and the Prothalamion, which contend with each other for the honor of being the noblest marriage hymns in any literature. "Come now, ye damzels, daughters of delight, But first come ye fayre Houres, which were begot "Faërie Queene," 1590-1596. And, as ye her array, still throw betweene Some graces to be seene; And, as ye use to Venus, to her sing, The whiles the woods shal answer, and your eccho ring." (Epithalamion, Stanza 6.) These products, however, are minor as compared with the very great one which is now almost synonymous with Spenser's name. The Faerie Queene is one of those works that could scarcely have come out of any age but the Elizabethan. Spenser had been revolving the idea of it for several years, and after he was established in Ireland he took up the congenial task of composition. He was by nature a lover of pomp and splendor and a dreamer upon the romantic deeds of bygone days; he admired courage and hated cowardice; he loved beauty and nobility of character no less than beauty of physical form; his imagination, too, was filled with pictures in which these abstractions seemed almost real, and his facility for metre and rhyme prompted poetic expression. Accordingly, with the models of the great Italian romantic epics before him, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's lately published Jerusalem Delivered, he planned an intricate tale of chivalry in which he might give a like full play to his fancy and embody his loftier ideals of beauty and truth. When three Books, of twelve Cantos each, were finished, Raleigh saw the poem and urged him to take it to London and the queen. The result was that this portion was published in 1590 with a fitting dedication "To the most mightie and magnificent Empresse Elizabeth." There were to have been twelve Books in all-indeed, Spenser even contemplated twenty-fourbut only three more were completed, and the six were published together six years later, making a volume of nearly twice the bulk of the Canterbury Tales. The whole poem was planned with allegorical intent, to set forth the twelve moral virtues, for which the Books are respectively named. Thus the Knight of the Red Cross represents Holiness; Sir Guyon, Temperance; Britomart, |