Edmund Spenser was certainly a native of London. This he has told us himself in the plainest words in one of his poems-his Prothalamion, or spousal verse, on the marriages of the Ladies Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset-in which his words are,— 66 merry London, my most kindly nurse, That to me gave this life's first native source." The tradition is, that he drew his first breath in the district of East Smithfield, near the Tower. But no record of his birth has been discovered. The former inscription on his monument in Westminster Abbey, which was put up many years after his death, in stating him to have been born in the year 1510, undoubtedly exhibited an entirely inadmissible date; but there are some difficulties attendant upon the account commonly given which makes him not to have come into the world till 1552 or 1553. That date has been deduced from what he says in one of his sonnets (the 60th), in which, writing in 1593 or 1594, he speaks or seems to speak of having then lived forty and one years, or, as he puts it, one year during which the planet of Love had shone clear to him, and forty which he had wasted "in long languishment," or without that consolation. But perhaps we ought to add some space in which he could not well be said to be either a languishing or a prosperous lover. Yet that again would carry back the time of his birth rather too far for the known dates of some of the events of his life. No very certain conclusion, however, it must be confessed, can be grounded on the evidence of the sonnet, the meaning of which is extremely obscure and disputable. In his printed works Spenser repeatedly claims kindred with the chief family of his name, the Spensers, or Spencers, of Althorpe, from whom both the Earls Spencer and the Dukes of Marlborough are sprung. În the Prothalamion, already cited, while he intimates that London was his birth-place, he adds, "Though from another place I take my name, By taking his name he must be supposed to mean taking it by descent or connexion; the mere identity of surname would not have been worth mentioning. But there is abundant evidence that the relationship was admitted by the Spensers of Althorpe, as well as claimed by the poet. The daughters of Sir John Spenser of Althorpe, the head of the family, were the principal persons, after the queen, the protection of whose names he was wont to seek, as was the fashion of that age, for his published works. He has three dedications addressed to as many of these ladies. In that prefixed to his Mother Hubbard's Tale,' which is addressed to the Lady Compton and Monteagle, Sir John's fifth daughter, Anne, he observes that he has often sought opportunity by some good means to make known to her ladyship the humble affection and faithful duty which he has always professed and is bound to bear to that house from which she springs, and he beseeches her to accept the present poem as a pledge of the profession he thus makes, until with some other more worthy labour he may redeem it out of her hands, and discharge his utmost duty. The peculiar connexion which this language implies is indicated with more distinctness in the dedication of his 'Muiopotmos❜ to Lady Carey, Sir John Spenser's second daughter, Elizabeth, in which he describes himself as glorying to advance her ladyship's excellent parts and noble virtues, and to spend himself in honouring her; "not so much," he adds, "for your great bounty [which may mean merely what we should now call goodness, or kindness, in a general sense] to myself, which yet may not be unminded; nor for name or kindred's sake by you vouchsafed, being also regardable; as for that honourable name which ye have by your brave deserts purchased to yourself, and spread in the mouths of all men. Still more explicitly, in the dedication of his 'Tears of the Muses' to the Lady Strange, Sir John's youngest daughter, Alice, he says, "The causes for which ye have thus deserved of me to be honoured (if honour it be at all) are both your particular bounties and also some private bands of affinity, which it hath pleased your ladyship to acknowledge." These three poems were all published in 1591. And there can be no doubt that it is to the same ladies he alludes in his 'Colin Clout's Come Home Again,' where he says, "Ne less praiseworthy are the sisters three, Of which I meanest boast myself to be, It is only within these few years, however, that any clue has been discovered to the particular branch of the Spensers to which the poet belonged. The discovery was made by a living descendant of the same stock, Mr. F. C. Spenser, of Halifax, and was communicated by him to the public in a communication which appeared in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for August, 1842. The evidence produced in this paper may be considered to make it nearly certain that Spenser's immediate progenitors were the owners of a small property still known by the name of Spensers, lying about two miles to the northwest of Burnley, in the eastern part of Lancashire. Edmund is far from being one of the most common of English Christian names; nor is it found to prevail in the pedigree of any other branch of the Spensers, as far as is known. If it were only that among the old Lancashire Spensers there appeared to have been several who bore this name of Edmund, even that would afford some presumption that the family of the poet was to be sought for in that quarter. But it chances that, besides Edmund, we have another not very common name in the poet's family. Not only the poet himself, but both his grandson and his great-great-grandson, by his eldest son, bore the name of Edmund; and it appears that another of his sons bore the equally far from common name of Lawrence. Now it turns out that both Edmund and Lawrence, comparatively rare as they are in general, were the most usual of all Christian names among the Spensers formerly seated in the neighbourhood of Burnley. the various parish registers of the district Mr. F. C. Spenser found, from about the middle of the sixteenth to In the end of the seventeenth century, above forty entries containing the names of either Edmund or Lawrence Spenser. The probability thus arising that the names of Edmund and Lawrence in the family of the poet were derived from this quarter will be admitted to be very strong. It appears also that the head of these Lancashire Spensers in the time of Elizabeth was an Edmund Spenser of Worsthorne: Worsthorne is a village about two miles east of Burnley, and this Edmund Spenser was the successor of an Adam le Spenser, who had held the same lands by military tenure in the early part of the reign of Edward II. It is further stated by Mr. F. C. Spenser that a communication he has had from John Travers, Esq., of Birch-hill, Cork, who is descended from a sister of the poet, confirms his opinion that the family were from Lancashire; and he afterwards speaks of having ascertained that they were from that particular county, on the authority of Mr. Travers. It has always, indeed, been believed that Spenser had relations in the north of England, and we shall presently find that he certainly spent a part of his early life there. Mr. F. C. Spenser conceives his grandfather to have been a Lawrence Spenser, whose burial is recorded in the register of the New Church in Pendle, the parish in which Spensers is situated, to have taken place in 1584. Spenser's father had probably emigrated from his native district to the south, and at last settled in London. Mr. Collier, in his Life of Shakespeare,' has lately noticed the existence of an Edmund Spenser at Kingsbury, in Warwickshire, in 1569, and has hazarded a conjecture that this may have been the father of the poet. This year, 1569, it so happens, is the next after that of his birth in which we have any certain mention of the poet; but the same year is also curiously abundant in notices, whether of him or of some other person or persons of the same names is doubtful. In the first place, as we have just seen, there is the Edmund Spenser registered as then resident in Warwickshire; it is not impossible that this may have been the poet himself. Then, we have. an Edmund Spenser who is recorded in the Books of the Treasurer of the Queen's Chamber to have that year brought despatches to her Majesty from Sir Henry Norris, ambassador in France: Mr. Peter Cunningham, to whom we are indebted for the discovery of this entry, and for its announcement in his Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court,' published in 1842 by the Shakespeare Society, is inclined to believe that it refers to the poet. Again, we find George Turbervile, who had recently gone out to Russia as secretary to the English ambassador, addressing an epistle in verse from that country in 1569 to a friend whom he calls Spenser, and who is stated by Anthony Wood to have been Edmund Spenser the poet; the epistle is printed along with Turbervile's Tragical Tales,' and also in the first volume of Hakluyt's Voyages, both of which works appeared in Spenser's lifetime, and when he was the only person to whom the name used as it is in this instance could well be understood to apply. Yet, if he be really the person referred to in all or any of these cases, it is difficult to believe that he could have been at this time no older than sixteen or seventeen. Even nineteen, which he would be if we carry back his birth to 1550, seems too early an age either for the intimate friend of Turbervile, who was then a man of about thirty, or for one already employed as an ambassador's courier. A fourth fact of the same date is still more difficult to reconcile than any thing that has yet been mentioned with the common supposition that Spenser was born in 1552 or 1553. In a work called Vander Noodt's Theatre of Worldlings, which was printed at London in this year, 1569, are found translations in rhyme of six sonnets of Petrarch's, which twelve years afterwards were reprinted as Spenser's in a collection of his minor poems, under the title of 'The Visions of Petrarch formerly translated.' Were these translations, then, which have besides all the characteristics of his style and manner, produced by him when he was only a boy of sixteen or seventeen? We can only say that they were certainly composed in or before the year 1569. And so were translations in blank verse, also found in Vander Noodt's book, of eleven sonnets of |