Or they their days to idleness divide,
Or drowned lie in pleasure's wasteful well,
In which, like moldwarps, nousling still
they lurk,

Unmindful of chief parts of manliness, And do themselves, for want of other work,

Vain votaries of lazy love profess.

Taik of love, he says, is everywhere: all the walls and windows are writ full with inscriptions of it, and every one makes it a point of honor to wear a lady's badge and "swim in love up to the ears," but such so-called love is empty and frivolous, when indeed it is LIVING AGE. VOL. X. 479

not worse, as constituting an abuse of the sacred name of love to base ends and sordid uses. How worthily and how holily Spenser himself deemed of love may be seen by his quatrain of poems on "Earthly and Heavenly Beauty," and "Earthly and Heavenly Love."

The success of the "Faery Queene" led the publisher to collect and bring out as many of Spenser's smaller poems as he could lay his hands on. One of them, called “The Tears of the Muses," written probably several years before, is interesting, as containing the fullest expression of Spenser's view of the then state of literature and of authors. It is somewhat strange to find in the golden days of Queen Elizabeth such a picture of the neglect of literature-I do not say of the absence of it-as is here put before us. It accords, however, with the rest of his picture of his own times. Authors, except so far as they were dramatists, had no wide reading public to appeal to, and, unless they had private wealth, were necessarily dependent on the patronage of the great. In an age when the great were vying with each other in the richness of their apparel and the munificence of their entertainments-when they were largely given over to base and ignoble pleasures, little disposing them to appreciate any literature except of the base and ignoble sort-it is not strange if the average of authorship should not have been high, and if the best authors should have found but little encouragement-like Stow, whose labors were rewarded in his old age with a Royal Charter empowering him to go a-begging. Literature was abundant, no doubt: William Webbe, in the preface to his "Discourse of English Poetrie," comments on the "innumerable sortes of English books and infinite fardels of printed pamphlets wherewith this country is pestered, all shoppes stuffed, and every study furnished," and the greater part of which, he adds, were poetical, or connected with poetry. But the bulk of the poetry prevalent in Spenser's day was, he affirms, of a very base and degrading tendency:—

dawn; and in the later poem, "Colin Clout's Come Home Again," we see that

They feed [he says] the ears of fools with flattery

The noble hearts to pleasures they allure And tell their prince that learning is but vain;

Fair ladies' love they spot with thoughts impure,

And gentle minds with lewd delights distain;

Clerks they to loathly idleness entice, And fill their books with discipline of vice.

The drama, he complained, had greatly fallen off; good, honest comedy was neglected for mere scurrility; the best writers were dead or silent. As for the nobility, whose especial function Spenser upheld it to be, both to be examples of noble doing and to patronize the poets who immortalized noble deeds,

They do only strive themselves to raise Through pompous pride and foolish vanity:

visible in the sky. We there find detailed mention of many able writers, whose works in various branches of poetry win the author's cordial and unstinted admiration, and we no longer hear of literature failing to gain appreciation; on the contrary, it is there told, as part of the merits of England as contrasted with Ireland, that in the former country

learned arts do flourish in great honor And poets' wits are held in peerless price.

On his return to his Irish home Spenser proceeded steadily with his great work-steadily, but not with so full a flow of poetic fervor as had marked the early portion. His sixth book, however, on courtesy, is far from being the least pleasing of the whole. When the second three books were com

may spare,

And the rich fee which poets wont divide Now parasites and sycophants do share.

It is a remarkable record, to be left by an able and observant man, on the eve of the greatest efflorescence of English literature. It is dictated partly, perhaps, by personal disappointment, partly also, I imagine, by a certain aristocratic superciliousness in Spenser, who never forgets that he is himself of gentle blood, a scion of the noble family of the Spencers, and who regards as something of a sacrilege the irruption of the general public-largely, no doubt, the uneducated public-into the sacred precincts of literature, properly the domain of the well-born. This poem, too, marks perhaps the darkest hour-the hour before the

publication, and returned once more to Ireland. His Irish home was no longer a solitary one: his long and persistent love for Rosalind had given place at last to a love for an Elizabeth, whom he wooed in passionate sonnets, and his marriage with whom he celebrated in his "Epithalamium." His married life, however, was but of short duration; a sudden outbreak of the Irish among whom he dwelt led to the burning of his house, and the loss of his youngest child, and though he himself, with his wife and the rest of his children, contrived to escape to England, the shock was a fatal one, and he died very shortly after at the early age of fortysix.

I have spoken of Spenser chiefly in he was relation to his time-how affected by it, and how he has represented it. It is, of course, easy to read and enjoy his great poem without troubling ourselves very closely with the moral or historical allegory that underlies it; the vividness of his descriptions, and the variety, and often the beauty, of the scenes through which he leads us, may charm us sufficiently

of themselves. For myself, however, I find him fully as interesting and attractive when introducing us to the men and women of his own day. His pictures of contemporary life, while very gloomy, cannot, I think, be set aside as the mere reflection of his own sad feelings, the outcome of personal disappointment; nor can they, in his case, as they might in the case of many another poet, be discounted as the dreams of a recluse who took no part in the actual business of life. The evils which he depicts are evils which he was in a position to have personal knowledge of, and are just the same sort of evils which we find lamented in his contemporary Gascoigne's poem, called "The Stele Glass." However, if a study of his works tends to dissipate some delusions respecting the Elizabethan court and the Elizabethan age generally, as we fancy them, for example, when we read the pages of Charles Kingsley, the fact is not without its consolations. It is somewhat reassuring to us, when disheartened by the contemplation of the many glaring evils which are to be seen in society to-day, to remember that, to the eye of an observant and high-minded man, there were clouds as dark, or darker, over the moral and intellectual sky of that bygone age, which yet shines out upon us one of the grandest periods in the whole of our country's annals.

GEO. SERRELL.

From Blackwood's Magazine. THE PHILOSOPHY OF, BLUNDERS. The "Blunders of Philosophy" would doubtless furnish a wider and a deeper theme, and at the same time a more familiar one, than the "Philosophy of Blunders." But as the number of blunderers is probably considerably larger than the number of philosophers, and as it may be more comforting to believe that there is philosophy in most blunders than that there are blunders in most philosophies, there may be a certain advantage in adhering to the

title of this paper rather than its con

verse.

The whole subject of the Philosophy of Blunders, it must be confessed at the outset, is at once too wide for this paper and too deep for its writer. The blunders to be discussed are only some of those which come under the notice of an examiner in the course of oral and written examinations of various grades.

The process of examination may be regarded as a kind of thinking by proxy, or of co-operative thinking, either in the form of reminiscence or of reasoning. If the examination is mainly on matters of fact, or a revisal of matter previously committed to memory, it takes the form of remembering by proxy. If the question assume the form of what would be described in arithmetic as a problem, or in geometry as a rider, the process is that of reasoning by proxy. That is, of course, looking at it from the examiner's point of view. From the side of the examiné there is, unfortunately, nothing vicarious in the proceeding-it is severely personal.

The expression "thinking by proxy," however unjustifiable or inexact, has been used to bring out the fact that the examiner does not merely ask questions, as one would do who desires information. His mind has already performed a certain course of reminiscence or of reasoning regarding the subject under review. He then initiates the same process in the mind of the pupil or candidate by suggesting to him the first links of the same chain of thinking, with the object of discovering how far that mind is qualified by training and information to complete the chain.

Now it is clear that the required chain of reminiscence may fail in the case of the pupil from a variety of causes. In the first place, there may be ignorance of certain facts or events embraced in it. Again, the clue given by the examiner may be insufficient to suggest the next link in the series; and this may result either from a real defect in the form of the question, or from a relative defect as regards some individual pupil who has been accustomed to a more suggestive form of

question. Or again, at some point in the chain, some irrelevant series of ideas may appear instead of that expected by the examiner, due to a misleading association in the pupil's mind -this arising either from some want of clearness in the teaching or from misapprehension of it, when the subject was first presented to the pupil.

The performance of a chain of reasoning, which is more or less new to the pupil, may also fail from various causes. Some of the more obvious may be mentioned. The data supplied by the examiner may be insufficient, misleading, or misapprehended. There may be a weakness of the reasoning power which might fairly have been expected from the pupil, either general or confined to the subject of examination. Or there may be a want of information as to the subject, or an imperfect memory of the facts required, due to any of the various sources of incorrect reminiscence mentioned in the preceding paragraph.

So much for the more obvious causes of partial failure in this process of thinking by proxy-thinking begun by the examiner and continued by the pupil for him. Partial failure is all that concerns us at present. Total failure does not amount to blunder or error, which is always a partial truth. Mere ignorance is never equivalent to blunder; that is always error or falsehood masquerading in the garb of truth. It is literally a mis-take. In mere ignorance there is nothing to take, either amiss or otherwise. The pupil who is merely ignorant of a subject, and knows he is ignorant of it, does not blunder; he holds his peace. It is he who is ignorant, and does not know it, that cheers the examiner's heart with those refreshing blunders, the gleaning of which is sometimes supposed to form the favorite occupation of professional examiners.

It has already been stated that any stoppage or divergence of the desired train of thought may be due to the examiner as well as to the pupil. It may even be broadly asserted that in perhaps a majority of cases of blunder,

as distinct from mere failure to answer, the examiner is responsible rather than the pupil. The latter takes the words of the former literally, and without the qualification which an adult mind would probably feel to be necessary; the result is, from the examiner's point of view, a blunder. But in dealing with immature minds one should be careful to say what he means. Examples of blunders due to this cause will doubtless be easily recalled by such readers as have had anything to do with elementary school-work. One may be quoted. A little boy in the course of his reading lesson came to the word "widow," and called it "window,” word more familiar to him. The teacher, who was acting as examiner, corrected the blunder, and then, wishing to improve the occasion, put the question, "What is the difference between 'widow' and 'window'?" The boy's answer began, "You can see through a window, but-" and then

а

stopped. The amusement plainly visible on the teacher's face prevented this miniature Sam Weller from completing the contrast. Now, the blunder here, so far as it was a blunder, was entirely due to the teacher. He did not mean to impress on his pupils the transparency of a window as contrasted with a widow, but the difference in spelling between the two words.

The following instance, taken from a school in the same village as that just referred to, though it is not an actual case of blunder, serves to illustrate the fact that the younger mind is sometimes the more accurate. The teacher of an infant class was talking to her children one morning about birds. The fact had been dwelt on that birds have wings where we have arms, and that by these wings they have the power of flying. In winding up the lesson, just before dismissing the class for lunch, the following question was put in order to stimulate the imagination of the children regarding the subject, "Now, would you not all like to have wings, as the birds have, so that you coulḍ fly straight home as soon as you get out?" There was a chorus of assent,