fastening themselves upon the mind, are not overmatched by those of any Elizabethan writer. His theology is old and rankly conservative; but he shows throughout a beautiful reverence for that all-embracing Law, "whose seat (as he says) is the Bosom of God, and whose voice is the Harmony of the World.” * - Edmund Spenser. As for Edmund Spenser, he was a year older at this date - twenty-five: he had taken his master's degree at Cambridge and had just returned to London from a visit to the North of England, where he had encountered some fair damsel to whom he had been paying weary and vain suit, and whom he had embalmed in his Shepherd's Calendar (just then being made ready for the press) under the name of Rosalind. “Ah, faithless Rosalind, and voyd of grace, [My] teares would make the hardest flint to flow;" * Richard Hooker (1553-1600). Edition of his works (by Keble) first appeared 1836. First book of Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity has been edited for Clarendon Press Series by R. W. Church, 1868. and his tears keep a-drip through a great many of those charming eclogues-called the Shepherd's Calendar. Some of the commentators on Spenser have queried gravely — whether he ever forgot this Rosalind; and whether the occurrence of the name and certain woe-worn words in some madrigal of later years did not show a wound unhealed and bleeding. We are all at liberty to guess, and I am inclined to doubt here. I think he was equal to forgetting this Rosalind before the ink of the Shepherd's Calendar was fairly dry. He loved dreams and fed on dreams; and I suspect enjoyed the dream of his woe more than he ever suffered from a sting of rebuff. Indeed, much as we must all admire his poetic fervor and fancies, I do not find in him traces of heroic mould; easily friendly rather than firmly so; - full of an effusive piety, but not coming in way of martyrdom for faith's sake;-a tenderly contemplative man, loving and sensing beauty in the same sure and abounding way in which Turner has sense of color exhaustless in his stock of brilliant and ingenious imagery — running to similes as mountain rills run to rivers; a courtier withal honeyed and sometimes fulsome; a richly presentable man (if portraits may be trusted), with a welltrimmed face, a cautious face — dare I say—almost a smirking face; the face of a self-contained man who thinks allowably well of his parts, and is determined to make the most of them. And in the brows over the fine eyes there is a bulging out where phrenologists place the bump of languagethat shows where his forte lies: No such word-master had been heard to sing since the days when Chaucer sung. He is deeply read in Chaucer too; and read in all-worth reading who came between. His lingual aptitudes are amazing. He can tear words in tatters, and he can string them rhythmically in all shapes; he makes his own law in language, as he grows heated in his work; twists old phrases out of shape; makes new ones; binds them together; tosses them as he will to the changing level of his thought: so that whereas one may go to Chaucer, in points of language, as to an authority -one goes to Spenser as to a mine of graceful and euphonious phrases: but the authority is wanting - or, at least, is not so safe. He makes uses for words which no analogy and no good order can recognize. And his new words are not so much the product of keen, shrewd search after what will fullest and strongest express a feeling or a thought, or give color to epithet, as they are the luxuriant outcropping of a tropical genius for language, which delights in abundant forms, and makes them with an easy show of its own fecundity, or for the chance purpose of filling a line, or meting out the bounds of an orderly prosody. He came up to London, as I said, about the year 1578, at the invitation of a prig of a classmate, who makes him known to Philip Sidney: Sidney is the very man to recognize and appreciate the tender beauty of those woful plaints in the Shepherd's Calendar, and invites the poet down to Penshurst, that charming home of the Sidneys, in Kent. There, such interest is made for him that he is appointed to a secretaryship in Ireland, where the Queen's lieutenants are stamping out revolt. Spenser sees much of this fiery work; and its blaze reddens some of the pages of the Faery Queen. In the distribution of spoils, after the Irish revolt was put down, the poet has bestowed upon him, amongst other plums, some three thousand acres of wild land, with Kilcolman Castle, which stands upon a valley spur of this domain. This castle is represented as an uninteresting fortress-like Johnnie Armstrong's tower in Scotland- upon the borders of a small lake or mere, and the landscape-stretching in unlovely waste around it-savage and low and tame. Yet he finds rich rural pictures there -this idealist and dreamer: let him see only so much of sky as comes between the roofs of a city alley, and he will pluck out of it a multitude of twinkling stars; let him look upon a rood square of brown grass-land, and he will set it alight with scores of daisies and of primroses. The Faery Queen. And it is in this easy way he plants the men and women, the hags and demons, the wizards and dragons that figure in the phantasmagoria of the Faery Queen; they come and go like twilight shadows; they have no root of realism. There is reason to believe that the first cantos of this poem were blocked out in his mind before leaving England; perhaps the scheme had been talked over with his friend Sidney; in any event, it |