THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH. SPENSER. FROM the time of Spenser the modern English poetry takes its date. The "Faerie Queene," is, as every one knows, an allegorical poem. The author has represented twelve private virtues, which are classed as in Ariosto. These virtues are transformed into knights, and King Arthur is at the head of the party. Gloriana, Queen of the Fairies, is Queen Elizabeth, and King Arthur is Sir Philip Sydney. Lord Buckhurst, in his "Mirrour for Magistrates," appears to have suggested the first idea of the "Faerie Queene." The form of Spenser's poem is modelled on that of the Orlando and Gerusalemme. Each canto consists of stanzas of nine lines. The six last cantos are wanting, excepting two fragments. Allegory was in vogue in what was considered the elegant poetry of the middle ages. In the productions of that school we find Ladies' Loyalty, VOL. I. Q Reason, and Prowess; Squire Desire, Sir Love, and the Chatelaine his mother; Emperor Pride, &c. What suggested these fancies to the poets of the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries? Their classical education. They were trained up among the deities of antiquity, in a bygone world. The colleges sent forth men of subtile genius, who had no relation with the living world. Being christians, and therefore unable to avail themselves of the pagan divinities, they invented moral divinities. They invested these fanciful creations with the manners of chivalry, and mingled them with the inhabitants of fairy land; they introduced them to tournaments, to the castles of dukes and barons, and the courts of princes, always taking care to conduct them to Lisseux and Pontoise, where le beau françois was spoken. The poetry of Spenser is remarkable for brilliant imagination, fertile invention, and flowing rhythm; yet with all these recommendations, it is cold and tedious. To the English reader the "Faerie Queene " presents the charm of antiquated style, which never fails to please us in our own language, but which we cannot appreciate in a foreign tongue. Spenser commenced his poem in Ireland, in the castle of Kilcolman, situated in a grant of three thousand and twenty-eight acres of land, part of the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond. There, seated at a hearth which was not his own, the rightful heirs to which were wandering in exile, he celebrated the hill of Mole, and the banks of the Mulla, without reflecting that the fugitive orphans were never to revisit their paternal haunts. The poet must have thought of the lines of Virgil: Nos patriæ fines et dulcia linquimus arva ; Spenser is the author of a sort of essay on the manners and antiquities of Ireland, which I prefer to his "Faerie Queene." The English formerly traded in their children, and sold them; this commerce was carried on to a great extent with Ireland. A council held at Armagh in 1117, by the Irish ecclesiastics, declared that, in order to avert the wrath of Jesus Christ, the enemy of servitude, the English slaves throughout the whole island should be restored to their former freedom. (See Wilkin Concil. vol. i.) How have the Irish been requited for this generous resolution of their ancestors? But for them the period of the deliverance of Christ is at length arrived. Q 2 SHAKSPEARE. We now come to Shakspeare. Let us consider him at our leisure, as Montesquieu says of Alexander. I quote from memory the titles of two pieces: Every Man, which was performed in the reign of Henry VIII., and Gammer Gurton's Needle performed in 1552. The dramatic authors contemporary with Shakspeare, were Robert Green, Heywood, Decker, Rowley, Peele, Chapman, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher: jacet oratio! Ben Jonson's plays, entitled the Fox, and the Alchymist, are still esteemed. Spenser was the favourite poet of the reign of Elizabeth. The author of Macbeth, and Richard III. was eclipsed by the dazzling rays of the Shepherd's Calendar," and the "Faerie Queene." Did Montmorency, Biron, and Sully, who were by turns ambassadors from France to the courts of Elizabeth and James I., ever hear |