CHAPTER VI.

EDMUND SPENSER, 1552–1599.

1.

OR one hundred and fifty years after Chaucer's death,

poetry was almost ron-existent in England. From the year 1400, down to the birth of Spenser, in 1552, there is no poetical genius of the first, or even of the

second, rank in the history of this country. Perhaps the two best writers of poetry that fall within this inter

regnum, are Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. Surrey especially did much to polish the English language and to improve the forms of English verse; and his poems are, some of them, worth reading. He was the first Englishman to introduce and to use blank verse, into which he translated the second and fourth books of the Æneid; and he was also the first to introduce the sonnet in its purely Italian form. Puttenbam, in his "Art of Poesie" (1589), holds np these two poets (Surrey and Wyatt) as the “chief lanterns of light” to all subsequent English poets. He adds: “Their conceits? were lofty, their style stately, their conveyance cleanly, their termes proper, their metre sweet and well-proportioned; in all imitating very naturally and studiously their master, Francis Petrarch. They greatly polished our rude and homely manners of vulgar 5 poesie from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be sayd the first reformers of our English metre and style.”

Dr. Nott, the editor of Surrey's works, maintains that he is the inventor of the present system of versification; and that it was he who introduced the principle of measuring verse, not by the number of accents, but by the number of syllables. This may be; it is not a

1 1516-1547. 2 Ital. concetti, thoughts. 3 Mode of statement neat.

4 1304-1374. 5 Popular poetry, i.e., poetry written in the vulgar tongue ; that is, in English. Writers and readers of classical authors, always spoke thus of their mothertongue, and of the works that appeared in it.

question of much importance. But, so far as regards poetry in the highest sense, there is nothing to stay our steps in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, until we come to the name of Edmund Spenser.

2. As in the case of Chaucer, this great poet had to wait for a great time. The last half of the fifteenth century had been filled with the Wars of the Roses; England had been in a state of disorder; and the feeling of tranquillity, order, and security, which is necessary to the production of great works of any kind, had been absent from the country.

Neither was there a settled confidence in the political condition of England under Henry VIII., Edward VI., or Mary; it was not until Elizabeth had been firmly seated on the throne for some years, that a lasting internal peace reigned. Then “men began to trade, farm, and build, with renewed vigour; a great breadth of forest land was reclaimed ; travellers went forth to discover 'islands far away,' and to open new outlets for commerce, Wealth, through this multiplied activity, poured into the kingdom and that general prosperity which was the result, led her subjects t: invest the sovereign, under whom all this was done, with a hundred valuable and shining qualities not her own.” Sbakspeare says of her :

She shall be loved and feared ; her own shall bless her ;
Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,
And hang their heads with sorrow. Good grows with her;
In her days every man shall eat in safety
Under his own vino what he plants, and sing

The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours. England, for the first time for two hundred years, felt herself to be once more a great and a united country. The terrible danger of the Spanish Armada" had made England rise and act as one man; great deeds were done every year; great discoveries made; great soldiers and sailors were constantly appearing; and a host of the greatest writers that have ever lived in any country at any period.

In 1590 (the year in wbich Spenser published the first three books of the Faerie Queene) there were met in London, Chapman, Drayton, Shakspeare, Bacon, Raleigh, Donne, and Ben Jonson, not to mention a crowd of others hardly less great. In the fields of action and of politics there were Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Burleigh, and Sir Francis Drake; while on the Continent this was the time of Charles

| 1588.

V. and Philip II. of Spain, and of Henry IV. of France. It was a time of the greatest activity, both of mind and body, and also of fixed and conscious strength. The enemies of England were defeated and put down on the Continent and at home.

Spenser's poems are full of allusions to the young life of England : to ber outburst of national feeling; her devotion to the queen; her resistance to Spain; her ocean adventures; her great men; her high artistic and intellectual culture; her romantic spirit; her championship of freedom abroad; and her reverence for law and authority at home." I

3. Spenser was born in London, at East Smithfield, near the Tower, in the year 1552. This was just one year before the burning of the Martyrs began in West Smithfield, under Queen Mary. In one of his smaller poems he talks of

Mery London, my most kindly nourse,
That to me gave this life's first native source ;
Though from another place I take my name,
A house auncient fame.

Nothing is known of his parents, except that his mother's name was Elizabeth. He says of that name

Most happy letters! framed by skilful trade
With which that happy name was first desyned,
The which three times thrise happy hath me made,

With gifts of body, fortune, and of mind. The three Elizabeths were his mother, the queen, and his wife. Of his contemporaries, Hooker was born the year after, in 1553 ; Sidney, in 1554; Bacon, in 1561; and Shakspeare, in 1564. He studied at Cambridge, and became B.A. in 1573, and M.A. in 1576. While there he formed a close friendship with Gabriel Harvey, a clever but pedantic scholar, who induced Spenser for some time to write in hexameter and other classic metres. Spenser, however,

i Kitchin, in bis Life of Spenser.

2 The hexameter mentioned here, is not the iambic hexameter, that is, the Alex. andrine, or line of six iambuses, with the formula of 6 x a. It is the classical hexameter, which had very different laws and a very different melody, and which consisted of six dactyls and spondees. But, as there is no such foot in our language as the spondee, which consists of two long syllables, and which in our language would have to consist of two syllables, both of which are accented (or a a), and as there are no words in our language which are or can be so accented

one of

soon felt that these forms of verse cramped his own power as much as they did the English language. After the close of his university life, he went (probably as tutor) to the North of England. Harvey, whose friendship was better and truer than his poetical taste, brought hirn back to London, introduced him to Sir Philip Sidney, the very diamonds of Her Majesty's Court," who for him the good-will and “patronage" of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester. By Lord Leicester's influence, he obtained the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland, under Lord Grey de Wilton, in 1580. But Lord Grey was recalled in 1582, and Spenser returned with him to England. The same influence at Court obtained for him a grant of 3028 acres of forfeited lands in Ireland, part of the confiscated estates of the Earl of Desmond. One of the conditions of this gift was residence upon the land; and Spenser accordingly went to Ireland, and lived in what bad been the earl's castle of Kilcolman, on the banks of the Awbey (Mulla, Spenser calls it), in the county of Cork. Sir Walter Raleigh had obtained, for his military services in Ireland, 12,000 acres of the same estate ; and, for some time, these two celebrated men were near neighbours. The castle stood on the north side of a fine lake, in the midst of a vast plain, with mountains on every side. The hills in the neighbourhood commanded a view of half the breadth of Ireland.

4. Here he was often visited by Sir Walter Raleigh, whom he calls in his poem, the “ Shepherd of the Ocean”; and, in one of these visits, he read to Raleigh large portions of the Faerie Queene. Raleigh advised him strongly to publish it. Both set out for London with that purpose; and in 1590, the first three books of the Faerie Queene appeared. The poem was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, as

Queen of England, France, and Ireland, and of Virginia sa side compliment to Sir Walter Raleigh, who established that colony, and named it after the queen), to whom her most humble servant, Edmund

(except farewell and amen), the classical hexameter cannot exist in English. WA have plenty of dactyls in the language, but no spondees. Mr. Longfellow and others have tried to introduce the metre into English, in the Evangeline and other poems; but the lines will not scan. They will be found to consist of a jumble of trochees, iambuses, and dactyls, which is neither sweet nor melodious. The classical hexameter has not naturalized itself in England, and will not. The first line of Evangeline“This is the forest pri / meval. The murmuring | pines and the | hemlock” is composed of five dactyls and a trochee : the line,“Brought in the olden time from France and I since as an | heirloom," consists of two dactyls and four trochees.