In 1591,

Irish Court of Chancery. In 1588 he resigned that appointment for the office of Clerk to the Council of Munster. In 1598 he was recommended by the Queen as a suitable person to be Sheriff of Cork; but had to flee the country in less than a month afterwards. For eighteen years, therefore, with the exception of two brief ascertained visits to England, the author of the 'Faery Queen' remained in Ireland, nominally at least, as an official clerk; and the last appointment would seem to show that his duties were more than nominal, and were efficiently discharged. In 1586 his friends obtained for him a grant of three thousand acres of forfeited land at Kilcolman, near Cork. It being a condition of the grant that the holder should cultivate the soil, our poet probably at once went into residence. There, on the borders of a lake, amid beautiful scenery, with easy official duties, and with occasional visits from his friends-Sir Walter Raleigh among the number-he placidly elaborated his 'Faery Queen.' In 1590 he crossed St George's Channel in Raleigh's company, with three books ready for the printer; saw to the publication of them; was introduced to Elizabeth; and recrossed to Kilcolman, probably in the spring of 1591, with a substantial proof of her Majesty's favour in the shape of a grant for a yearly pension of fifty pounds, and the consequent honorary title of Poet-Laureate. some minor poems of his were published, with or without his superintendence: "The Ruins of Time," "The Tears of the Muses," "Virgil's Gnat," "Prosopopoeia, or Mother Hubbard's Tale," "Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly," and "Visions of the World's Vanity." About the same time he wrote his "Daphnaida," an elegy on the death of a noble lady. His next publications were in 1595: when Ponsonby issued in separate volumes, and at different times, Colin Clout's Come Home Again' (a poem interesting from its allusions to his contemporaries), along with a lament for Sir Philip Sidney, and his "Amoretti" and "Epithalamion," love-sonnets and a marriagesong, occasioned by his wooing and its successful termination in 1594. In 1596 he went over to England and superintended the publication of three more Books of the 'Faery Queen,' along with a second edition of the first three. In the same year appeared in one volume his "Prothalamion" (spousal verses), the elegiac 'Daphnaida" already mentioned, and four Hymns. In 1598 he was driven from Kilcolman by the outbreak of Tyrone's rebellion. His wife and himself escaped, but in the hurry and panic they left a little child behind them, and never saw it again. Their house was sacked and burned. He died soon after in London, January

1 Probably before. It is dated Jan. 1, 1591; and we know (Preface to 'Shepherd's Calendar') that Spenser made the year begin with January, and not, as was then usual, with March.

1599. His 'View of the State of Ireland,' a prose dialogue, completed in 1596, was not published till 1633.

"Short curling hair, a full moustache, cut after the pattern of Lord Leicester's, close-clipped beard, heavy eyebrows, and under them thoughtful brown eyes, whose upper eyelids weigh them dreamily down; a long and straight nose, strongly developed, answering to a long and somewhat spare face, with a well-formed sensible-looking forehead; a mouth almost obscured by the moustache, but still showing rather full lips, denoting feeling, well set together, so that the warmth of feeling shall not run riot, with a touch of sadness in them;-such is the look of Spenser, as his portrait hands it down to us."1

What may have been the extent of his official duties we do not know; but, to judge from internal evidence, no man ever lived more exclusively in and for poetry than Spenser. We try in vain for any image to express the voluptuous completeness of his immersion in the colours and music of poetry. He was a man of reserved and gentle disposition, and he turned luxuriously from the rough world of facts to the ampler ether, the diviner air, the softer and more resplendent forms of Arcadia, and the delightful land of Faery. While the dramatists were labouring to make the past present, his imagination worked in an opposite line: his effort was to remove hard, clear, visible, and tangible actualities to dreamy regions, and there to reproduce them in a glorified state with softer and warmer forms and colours, or, as the case might be, in a degraded state, with attributes exaggerated in hideousness. His own Pastoral land and Faery land he had furnished with a geography, a population, and a history of their own, and there chiefly his imagination loved to dwell and pursue its creative work. But his spirit, restless and insatiate in its search for deliverance from the cold and definite world, never disdained to enter the abodes prepared by other poets. He expatiated freely through the realms of ancient mythology, and often soared up and poised his wing in mystical contemplation of love and beauty.

More than one of Spenser's contemporaries expressed admiration of his " deep conceit." The luxuriance of leaf and blossom in his poems is deeply rooted in meditation. The profound allegory of the Faery Queen' has been supposed to be alarming to the easy general reader; and several critics, out of a laudable desire to extend Spenser's popularity, have assured us that we may give over all anxiety about the hidden meaning and yet lose none of the enjoyment of the plain story. If, indeed, we desire

1 Rev. G. W. Kitchin, in Clarendon Press edition of 'Faery Queen.'

to understand fully the rich activity and subtlety of the poet's imagination, we do well to get possession of the allegorical groundwork, and study from that point the luxuriant growth of enfolding images. But that effort is necessary only if we desire to feel stems growing and leaves and flowers bursting about us with unceasing energy and boundless profusion.

Many have asserted, and Christopher North indignantly denied, that Spenser's imagination overpowered his judgment. The meaning of the assertors seems to be, that Spenser's fertile mind conceived many images that offend against good taste or that twine themselves together with bewildering intricacy, and his judgment was not strong enough to keep them back. In all such cases the critic can speak only for himself. Warton, and many soberminded people who read poetry with a certain amount of pleasure, would doubtless often be bewildered and occasionally disgusted in journeying through the intricate paths and encountering some of the monstrous personages of the land of Faery. Wilson was too enraptured with the poem to be conscious of any such faults: he was not, perhaps, so easily bewildered nor so easily disgusted by strongly painted "lumps of foul deformity."

Spenser was not without a full share of the poet's alleged peculiar failings, vanity and irritability. Like Sir Walter Scott, our other great poet of chivalrous heroism, he loved to dwell on his ancestry he somewhat ostentatiously claimed kindred with the noble house of Spencer. Over his natural pride in the exercise of his great gift, he spread but a thin disguise: his transparent compliments to himself are almost unique. He wrote, or procured or allowed a mysterious friend to write, under the initials E. K., an introduction and explanatory notes to his 'Shepherd's Calendar,' comparing this trial of his wings with similar essays by Theocritus and Virgil, and announcing him as "one that in time shall be able to keep wing with the best." Among the shepherds he represents himself under the names of Colin Clout and young Cuddy, and makes other shepherds speak of these sweet players on the oaten pipe with boundless admiration as the joy of their fellows and the rivals of Calliope herself.1 As for the poet's irritability, that appears in the covert bitterness of his attacks on Roman Catholics and other subjects of his dislike, but most unmistakably in his 'View of the State of Ireland.' His temper was too thin for the asperities of public life. These, however, are the unfavourable aspects of the poet's amiable nature. More favourable aspects of the same reserved meditative disposition appear in his warm gratitude to benefactors, his passion for temperance and purity, and his deep religious earnestness.

1 See also Appendix.

II. HIS WORDS, METRES, AND GENERAL FORM.

Consistently with his shrinking from the cold realities of the present, Spenser gave a softer tinge to his diction by here and there introducing a word of the Chaucerian time. Even his diction was to be slightly mellowed with antiquity; he loved now and then to have upon his tongue a word with this soft unction round it. It is strange that the archaic character of his diction should ever have been doubted. The fact was recognised at the time. F. Beaumont, in an epistle prefixed to Speght's Chaucer, says that "Maister Spenser, following the counsel of Tully in De Oratore for reviving of ancient words, hath adorned his own style with that beauty and gravity which Tully speaks of, and his much frequenting of Chaucer's ancient speeches causeth many to allow far better of him than otherwise they would." And a still better and earlier authority, the shadowy E. K., anticipated the objections to disused words, saying that the poet, "having the sound of ancient poets still ringing in his ears, mought needs in singing, hit out some of their tunes.' "But whether he useth them by such casualty and custom, or of set purpose and choice, as thinking them fittest for such rustical rudeness of shepherds, either for that their rough sounds would make his rhymes more ragged and rustical, or else because such old and obsolete words are most used of country folk, sure I think, and I think not amiss, that they bring great grace, and as one would say authority to the verse. "Ancient solemn words are a great ornament." Tully saith that ofttimes an ancient word maketh the style seem grave, and as it were reverend, no otherwise than we honour and reverence grey hairs for a certain religious regard which we have of old age.' Yet what Spenser prided himself upon was denied of him by some modern admirers, who thought it a detraction.

Our poet had, however, in the rich music of his verse, a fuller protection to interpose between himself and the harsh discords of real life. He was a great metrician. With his friend Gabriel Harvey at Cambridge, with Sidney at Penshurst, with Raleigh at Kilcolman, his talk ran often on the subject of metres. He interested himself in Harvey's enthusiasm for unrhymed dactylic hexameters; but though he approved of them in theory, and produced a specimen with which he was himself highly pleased, he was not so unwise as to waste upon the experiment a poem of any length. Some of the stanzas in his 'Shepherd's Calendar' are exceedingly pretty, particularly the light, airy, childlike jig of the contest between Perigot and Willy. But his greatest achievement was the stanza that bears his name, which he formed by adding an Alexandrine to the stave used in Chaucer's Monk's Tale. In the last

"All

great revival of poetry this stanza was warmly adopted. poets," says Wilson, "have, since Warton's time, agreed in thinking the Spenserian stanza the finest ever conceived by the soul of man—and what various delightful specimens of it have we now in our language! Thomson's Castle of Indolence,' Shenstone's 'Schoolmistress,' Beattie's 'Minstrel,' Burns's 'Cotter's Saturday Night,' Campbell's 'Gertrude of Wyoming,' Scott's 'Don Roderick,' Wordsworth's 'Female Vagrant,' Shelley's 'Revolt of Islam,' Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes,' Croly's Angel of the World,' Byron's 'Childe Harold'!" It lends itself with peculiar harmony to impassioned meditation and luxurious description.

Spenser's sonnets, entitled "Amoretti," composed to commemorate his love for the lady whom he afterwards married, are very intricate in form. They consist of three quatrains closed in by a couplet, the first quatrain being interwoven with the second and the second with the third. They obey the rule that confines each sonnet to a distinct idea. Their beauties, however, are wholly technical; their thin pale sentiment and frigid conceits are fatal to anything like profound human interest.

Very different from the involved and timid sonnets is the triumphant "Epithalamion," which celebrates the completion of the same courtship. I know no poem that realises so directly and vividly the idea of winged words: no poem whose verses soar and precipitate themselves with such a vehemence of impetuous ardour and exultation.

Spenser followed the example of Virgil in trying his skill first upon pastoral poetry. This poetical exercise of his has been criticised by various standards, and pronounced wanting. The 'Shepherd's Calendar' was unhappily praised by Dryden as showing mastery of the northern dialect, and as being an exact imitation of Theocritus: this was subsequently seen to be a mistake, and, the standard of comparison being retained, Spenser was blamed because he did not imitate Theocritus. Amid the mass of confused criticism of these pastorals, where each critic pronounces from some vague ideal of what pastoral poetry ought to be, the fundamental objection has always been that they do not represent the actual life of shepherds. Shepherds in real life do not sit in the shade playing on pan-pipes, improvising songs for wagers of lambs and curiously carved bowls, and discoursing in rhymed verse about morality, religion, and politics. But it was not Spenser's design to paint real shepherds, or to copy the features of real pastoral life. His shepherds are allegorical representatives of his friends and his enemies, and exponents of his artistic, moral, and other theories, the whole drifted into a land of the imagination. If we are asked why he chose such a disguise, we must go