Like himself, his great work, the Canterbury Tales, lay buried for upwards of seventy years in manuscript. Caxton, the first English printer, selected these Tales as one of the earliest productions of his press, and thus gave to the world what it will never again consent to lose. Spite of the rude state of the language when he wrote, the splendour of his genius beams and burns gloriously through its inadequate vehicle. Time, which has destroyed his house at Woodstock, and beaten down his castle at Donnington, has not been able to effect the same ruin on his poems. The language has gone on perfecting and polishing; a host of glorious names and glorious works have succeeded Chaucer and the Cauterbury Tales, making England affluent in its literary fame as any nation on earth; but from his distant position, the Father of English poetry beams like a star of the first magnitude in the eternal hemisphere of genius. Like Shakspeare, he has, for the most part, seized on narratives already in existence to employ his art upon, but that art is so exquisite, that it has stamped immortal value on the narrative. The life and the characters he has represented to us are a portion of the far past, rescued for us from the oblivion that has overwhelmed all that age besides. We gaze on the living and moving scenes with an interest which the progress of time can only deepen. To the latest ages, men will read and say,-Thus in the days of Wickliffe, of John of Gaunt, and Richard II, did men and women look, and act, and think, and feel; thus did a great poet live amongst them, and send them down to us, and to all posterity, ten thousand times more faithfully preserved than by all the arts of Egypt and the East. Quaint as they are, they are the very quintessence of human nature. They live yet, fresh and vivid, passionate and strong, as they did on their way to the tomb of St. Thomas, upwards of five hundred years ago. They can never die; they can never grow old; and amid them, the poet, Englishman every inch, lives, and laughs, and quaffs his cup of wine, and tells his story, and chuckles over his jokes, or listens to the narratives of all those around him with a relish of life, that he only could feel, or could communicate. There is an elastic geniality in his spirit, a buoyant music in his numbers, a soul of enjoyment in his whole nature, that mark him at once as a man of a thousand; and we feel in the charm that bears us along, a strength that will outlast a thousand years. It is like that of the stream that runs, of the wind that blows, of the sun that comes up. ruddy as with youth, from the bright east on an early summer's morning. It is the strength of nature living in its own joyful life, and mingling with the life of all around in gladdening companionship. For a hundred beautiful pictures of genuine English existence and English character, for a world of persons and things that have snatched us from the present to their society, for a host of wise and experience-fraught maxims, for many a tear shed, and emotion revived, and laugh of merriment, for many a happy hour and bright remembrance, we thank thee, Dan Chaucer, and just thanks shalt thou receive a thousand years hence. So little is known of the early life of Spenser, that our notice of his haunts will be confined, almost wholly, to his Castle of Kilcolman. He is said to be descended from the ancient family of Spenser ; indeed he says it himself "At length they all to mery London came; This was the house of Althorpe, and now also of Marlborough; but however this may be, his parentage was obscure enough. He is said by Fenton to be born in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, in 1553; but the parish registers of that time are wanting, and we have no clue to trace more accurately the locality. He was admitted as sizer, the lowest order of students, at Pembroke-hall, Cambridge, in the year 1569; he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts in January 1572-3, and that of Master of Arts in June 1576, in which year he was an unsuccessful candidate for a fellowship, according to some of his biographers, though others deny this. On quitting the University, he went to reside with his relations in the north of England, but how he was supported does not appear. These relations, it would seem probable, from the communication of a Mr. F. C. Spenser, in the Gentleman's Magazine of August 1842, quoted by Craik, in his Spenser and his Poetry, were the Spensers, or Le Spensers, of Huntwood, near Burnly, Lancashire, part of which estate abutted on a little property still called Spensers, at the foot of Pendle-hill. This derives confirmation from the fact of Spenser having a son called Lawrence, and of the names of Edmund and Lawrence abounding in the registries of this Lancashire family, as well as of that family only spelling the name with an "s." Here he fell in love with a lady, whom he celebrates under the name of Rosalind, and who deserted him; this is said to be the cause of his writing the Shepherd's Calendar, in which he complains of this faithless mistress. Others, again, think she was a maiden of Kent, a Rose Lynde, the Lyndes being an old family in that county, where he went on his acquaintance with Sir Philip Sidney, while in the south; but this cannot at all agree with the letter of his friend Gabriel Harvey to him. To Sir Philip he was introduced by this old college friend Gabriel Harvey, and dedicated to him the Shepherd's Calendar. If it be true that the dedication was the cause of introduction, this must have been solicited and decided upon while the poem was only in progress, for it appears pretty clearly that he wrote part of the Calendar at Penshurst; especially the eleventh eclogue, in which he laments the death of a "maiden of great blood," supposed to have been a daughter of the Earl of Leicester. In the tenth eclogue he lauds the Earl of Leicester as "the worthy whom the queen loves best;" so that he was now in the high road to preferment, and does not appear to have been backward to walk diligently in it. Leicester and Sidney, near kinsmen as they were, were just the two men of the whole kingdom to push the fortunes of a poet. With this early and regular introduction to these two powerful men, (powerful in politics and literature, and in favour with the queen,) it is difficult to weave in a belief of the fine story of Spenser's pushing his own way with the ninth canto of the first book of the Faerie Queene. It is a pity this should not be true, yet how can it? The story goes thus: One morning Spenser, determined to try his fortune with Sir Philip Sidney, the courtier most celebrated of the time, for his intellectual accomplishments, and for his generous disposition, went to Leicester House, an entire stranger, carrying with him this canto of his great poem in which is contained the fine allegory of Despair. He Obtained admission to Sidney, and presented his MS. for his approbation that great lover and judge of poetry had not read far before he was so much struck with the beauty of a stanza, that he ordered fifty pounds to be given to the author; proceeding to the next stanza he raised his gift to a hundred, which sum he doubled on reading a third, and commanded his steward to pay instantly, lest he should be induced by a further delay to give away his whole estate. Pity so fine a story was not true! some imaginative person must have pleased himself with fancying how such a thing might have bean. However, Spenser was now a regular inmate of Leicester House, and of Penshurst; so that that latter sweet place has the honour of being as well the haunt of our great romantic poet as of the highhearted Sidney. By Leicester and Sidney Spenser was introduced to Queen Elizabeth, who, it is said, on his presenting some poems to her, conferred on him a gratuity of a hundred pounds. If this be true, it is so unlike Elizabeth's parsimony, that we must set it down as a wonder. Yet it is to this fact that Lord Burleigh's dislike to the rhymer, as he called Spenser, is attributed. He deemed the grant so extravagant as to neglect its payment till he received a repetition of the order from his mistress, with a reproof for his delay. There were, no doubt, plenty of causes for Burleigh's dislike of Spenser. In the first place, he had not a spark of poetry in his constitution. To him it was sheer nonsense, idle and childish nonsense. But, besides this, Spenser was brought forward by the very party of whom Burleigh was most jealous-Leicester. He appeared at court as the particular friend of Leicester and Sidney; and the incautious poet is said to have aggravated the dislike of Burleigh by some satirical rhymes, which were assiduously carried to the clever but cold-blooded minister. There has not been wanting active vindication of Burleigh, and the discovery of a patent granting him a pension of fifty pounds a year, dated 1590-1, which he enjoyed till his death in 1598-9, has been said to be sufficient refutation of all that has been alleged against Burleigh in Spenser's case. But how does this at all remove the statements of Burleigh's dislike of Spenser and reluctance to his promotion? Not in the least. It merely shows that Spenser had friends, and an interest in the queen's good-will, powerful enough to overrule the minister's opposition. It may be, and most likely is, just as true, that on the grant of this pension Burleigh declared "the pension was a good example, too great to be given to a ballad-maker;" and that when the queen ordered him a hundred pounds, he replied-"What! all this for a song?" These facts are so in keeping with Burleigh's character, that we cannot question them. Indeed, Spenser himself has put the truth past a doubt. What means "To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peeres'?" What those lines at the close of the sixth book of the Faerie "Ne may this homely verse, of many meanest, More than my former writs, all were they clearest, With which some wicked tongues did it backbite, Again, in the Ruines of Time, written subsequently to the first edition of the Faerie Queene :— The rugged foremost that with grave foresight Thus, whether Spenser, as alleged, or not, gave cause of offence by his satire, one thing is clear, that Burleigh was his bitter and unchangeable enemy. That Spenser had suffered at court is fully shown in his oft-cited verses in his "Mother Hubbard's Tale," the most lively picture of court attendance and its consequent chagrins that ever was painted. "Full little knowest thou that hast not tryd, To lose good days that might be better spent ; Spenser's sole reliance was on Leicester, Sidney, and Raleigh, with whom he became soon acquainted. He is said to have been employed by the Earl of Leicester on a mission to France in 1579; and though this has been questioned, yet his own assertion, in a letter to Gabriel Harvey, confirms it. In 1580 he accompanied Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, who went as Lord-Lieutenant to Ireland, as his private secretary. In this post he is said to have displayed great talents for business. He wrote a "Discourse on the State of Ireland," containing many decided plans for the improvement of that country. In 1581, the first year of his being in Ireland, he was also made clerk to the Irish Court of Chancery, and Mr. Craik has pointed out the fact given in Collins's Peerage, in the account of the Earls of Portsmouth, that in this same year, too, he received from the queen a grant of a lease of the Abbey of Iniscorthy, or Enniscorthy, and the attached castle and manor, in the county of Wexford, at an annual rent of 300l. 6s. 8d.; and that he conveyed this property on the 9th of December of the same year to Richard Synot. This leasehold by another sale came into the hands of the family of the Earls of Portsmouth, and is rated by G. Wakefield, in his “Account of Ireland," at 8,000l. a-year. Lord Grey was recalled in 1582, and Spenser returned with him. But his fate was bound up with Ireland. After hanging about court for four years, during which time there can be little doubt that he experienced much of the bitterness expressed in the lines just quoted, he obtained, through the interest of his friends, Lords Grey and Leicester, and Sir Philip Sidney, a grant of 3,026 acres of land in the county of Cork, part of the forfeited estate of the great Eari of Desmond. Scarcely was his patent made out, when his best friend and patron, Sidney, was killed at the battle of Zutphen. This was the death of his hopes in England, and he set out to reside on and cultivate his newly acquired estate in Ireland; having lamented Sir Philip's death in the pastoral elegy of Astrophel. This was in 1586. In three or four years, 1590 or 1591, Spenser returned |