also serves to represent her in whom Catholicism most threatened England-Mary, Queen of Scots. Puritan in this sense, he is not Puritan in any other. He had nothing to do with the attack on Prelacy which was then raging, and the last canto of the Faerie Queen represents Calidore, the knight of courtesy, sent forth to bridle the blatant beast,' the manytongued and noisy Presbyterian body which attacked the Church. 6 The poem, however, soars far above this region of debate into the calm and pure air of art. It is the poem of the human soul and all its powers struggling towards the perfect love, the love which is God. Filled full with christianized platonism, the ideas of truth, justice, temperance, courtesy do not remain ideas in Spenser's mind, as in Plato's, but become real personages, whose lives and battles he honors and tells in verse so delicate, so gliding, and so steeped in the finer life of poetry, that he has been called the poet's poet. As the nobler Puritanism of the time is found in it, so also are the other influences of the time. It goes back, as men were doing then, to the old times for its framework, to the Celtic story of Arthur and his knights, which Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chaucer and Thomas Malory had loved. It represents the new love of chivalry, the new love of classical learning, the new delight in mystic theories of love and religion. It is full of those allegorical schemes in which doctrines and heresies, virtues and vices were contrasted and personified. It takes up and uses the popular legends of fairies, dwarfs, and giants, and mingles them with the savages and the wonders of the New World, of which the voyagers told in every company. Nearly the whole spirit of the English Renaissance under Elizabeth, except its coarser and baser elements, is in its pages. Of anything impure or ugly or violent, there is not a trace. Spenser walks through the whole of this woven world of faerie, 'With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace.' The first three books were finished in Ireland, whither he had gone as secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton in 1580. Raleigh listened to them in 1589 at Kilcolman Castle, among the alder shades of the river Mulla, that fed the lake below the castle. Delighted with the poem, he took Spenser to England. The books were published in 1590, and the Queen, the Court, and the whole of England soon shared in Raleigh's delight. It was the first great ideal poem that England had produced, and it is the source of all our modern poetry. It has never ceased to make poets, and it will not lose its power while our language lasts." "The interest in The Faerie Queen is twofold. There is the interest of the moral picture which it presents, and there is the interest of it as a work of poetical art. The moral picture is of the ideal of noble manliness in Elizabeth's time. Besides the writers and the thinkers, the statesmen and the plotters, the traders and the commons, of that fruitful and vigorous age, there were the men of action-the men who fought in France and the Netherlands and Ireland; the men who created the English navy, and showed ⚫ how it could be used; the men who tried for the north-west passage with Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and sailed round the world with Sir Francis Drake, and planted colonies in America with Sir Walter Raleigh; the men who chased the Armada to destruction, and dealt the return buffet to Spanish pride in the harbor of Cadiz; men who treated the sea as the rightful dominion of their mistress, and, seeking adventures on it far and near, with or without her leave, reaped its rich harvests of plunder from Spanish treasure-ships and West Indian islands, or from the exposed towns and churches of the Spanish coast. They were at once men of daring enterprise, and sometimes very rough execution; and yet men with all the cultivation and refinement of the time-courtiers, scholars, penmen, poets. These are the men whom Spenser had before his eyes in drawing his knights—their ideas of loyalty, of gallantry, of the worth and use of life,—their aims, their enthusiasm, their temptations, their foes, their defeats, their triumphs. As a work of art The Faerie Queen at once astonishes us by the wonderful fertility and richness of the writer's invention and imagination, by the facility with which he finds or makes language for his needs, and, above all, by the singular music and sweetness of his verse. The main theme seldom varies: it is a noble knight, fighting, overcoming, tempted, delivered; or a beautiful lady, plotted against, distressed, in danger, rescued. The poet's affluence of fancy and speech gives a new turn and color to each adventure. But, besides that under these conditions there must be monotony, the poet's art, admirable as it is, gives room for objections. Spenser's style is an imitation of the antique; and an imitation, however good, must want the master charm of naturalness, reality, simple truth. And in his system of work, with his brightness and quickness and fluency, he wanted self-restraint-the power of holding himself in, and of judging soundly of fitness and proportion. There was a looseness and carelessness, partly belonging to his age, partly his own. In the use of materials, nothing comes amiss to him. He had no scruples as a copyist. He took without ceremony any piece of old metal-word or story or image—which came to his hand, and threw it into the melting-pot of his imagination to come out fused with his own materials, often transformed, but often unchanged. The effect was sometimes happy, but not always so."-R. W. Church. SPENSER'S MINOR POEMS.-"The next year, 1591, Spenser, being still in England, collected his smaller poems and published them. Among them Mother Hubbard's Tale is a bright imitation of Chaucer, and the Tears of the Muses supports my statement that literature was looked on coldly previous to 1580, by the complaint the Muses make in it of their subjects' being despised in England. Sidney had died in 1586, and three of these poems bemoan his death. The others are of slight importance, and the whole collection was entitled Complaints. Returning to Ireland, he gave an account of his visit in Colin Clout's come Home again, 1591, and at last, after more than a year's pursuit, won his second love for his wife, and found with her perfect happiness. A long series of Sonnets records the progress of his wooing, and the Epithalamion, his marriage hymn, is the most glorious love-song in the English tongue. At the close of 1595 he carried to England, in a second visit, the last three books of the Faerie Queen. The next year he spent in London, and published these books with his other poems, the Prothalamion on the marriage of Lord Worcester's daughters, and his Hymnes to Love and Beauty, and to Heavenly Love and Beauty, in which the love philosophy of Petrarca is enshrined. The end of his life was sorrowful. In 1598 the Irish rising took place, his castle was burnt, and he and his family fled for their lives to England. Broken-hearted, poor, but not forgotten, the poet died in a London tavern. All his fellows went with his body to the grave where, close by Chaucer, he lies in Westminster Abbey. London, his most kindly nurse,' takes care also of his dust, and England keeps him in her love.” BIBLIOGRAPHY. SPENSER.-G. L. Craik's Spenser and his Poetry; Eng. Men of Letters Series; Ward's Anthology; Disraeli's Amen. of Lit.; Howitt's Homes of the Brit. Poets, vol. 1; Lowell's Among my Books, 2d Ser.; Whipple's Lit. of the age of Eliz.; Clar. Press Ed. of Faerie Queen; Minto's Char. of Eng. Poets; Atlantic, v.2, 1858; West. Rev., v. 87, 1867; Allibon, v. 2. From Spenser's Faerie Queen. Thus being entred, they behold around A large and spacious plaine, on every side Strowed with pleasauns;1 whose faire grassy ground With all the ornaments of Floraes pride, Wherewith her mother Art, as halfe in scorne Of niggard Nature, like a pompous bride Did decke her, and too lavishly adorne, When forth from virgin bowre she comes in th' early morne. Thereto the hevens alwayes joviall Lookt on them lovely, still in stedfast state, Nor scorching heat, nor cold intemperate, T'afflict the creatures which therein did dwell; But the milde aire with season moderate Gently attempred, and disposed so well That still it breathed forth sweet spirit and holesome" smell: More sweet and holesome then3 the pleasaunt hill 4 Of Rhodope, on which the nimphe that bore A gyaunt babe her selfe for griefe did kill; 1 Pleasantness. Than. 2 Wholesome. 4 On the frontier of Thrace. A long, deep defile. Or Ida1 where the gods lov'd to repaire. Whenever they their hevenly bowres forlore; Much wondred Guyon at the faire aspect But passed forth, and lookt still forward right, No gate, but like one, being goodly dight With boughes and braunches, which did broad dilate Their clasping armes in wanton wreathings intricate. There the most daintie paradise on ground In which all pleasures plenteously abownd, The painted flowres, the trees upshooting hye, One would have thought, so cunningly the rude And in the midst of all a fountaine stood So pure and shiny that the silver flood Through every channell running one might see; 1 Hill of Phrygia. Followed after. 2 Hill sacred to the Muses. 3 Lend favor to. |