It took about two centuries to weld into a common tongue the two perfectly distinct languages spoken in England from the time of the Norman Conquest; about two more to shape that common tongue into the general form of what is now called English ; a third space of the same length to bring the compound thus produced to the state in all essential respects in which it has remained ever since, and will no doubt remain while it continues to subsist. In other words, for the first two hundred years the Saxon and Norman were still two separate languages, whose streams were distinguishable even while fowing in the same channel ; in the second period the two mingled elements were in a state of effervescence, or of something like contention; in the third, they were perfectly interfused and united, but still in a state of transition, and only advancing to maturity. By the middle of the twelfth century, Saxon and Norman had rum together into one body; by the middle of the four

teenth that body had acquired a perfect unity of spirit, character, and tendency ; by the middle of the sixteenth it had achieved its full growth and ultimate form and condition.

The completion of the first of these three periods produced nothing which has lived in or can be said to belong to our literature. What was then accomplished, indeed, was rather the destruction of the two old tongues than the creation of a new one. But the termination of the second period produced the poetry of Chaucer; the termination of the third, the poetry of Spenser. While Chaucer, however, is one of the greatest writers of our own or any other country, his poetry is hidden or obscured to the popular eye under the disguise of a language that has become to a great extent dead or obsolete

– that is not, either in its vocables or its grammatical forms, the English that we now speak, but requires to be in great part translated, like a foreign tongue, in order to be made generally intelligible. Spenser has the advantage of having written after the language had become substantially what it still remains, and of being, with the exception of a word here and there, as universally and readily intelligible as any poet of our own day. While Chaucer, therefore, has been properly called the morning star of our poetry, Spenser is its morning sun. The daylight of our literature begins with him.

As for the intervening time between Chaucer and Spenser, it was the era only of imitatorship and abortive effort. The greater part of the poetry of that grey of the morning is a mere reflection of Chaucer ; what of it aims at being anything more is still only either a feeble or a lurid light even when it is most original. Lydgate may serve for an exemplification of its more common character ; Surrey, Wyatt, and Gascoigne, of that of it which, aiming at a note of its own, was still as it were too timid to raise its voice properly ; Skelton and Buckhurst, of what of it evinced most of force and daring, though as yet rather in contest than in conquest. The first voice of song heard in this new era that was really full and free was that of Spenser.

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,

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. Prothalamion, already cited, while he intimates that London was his birth-place, he adds,

“ Though from another place I take my name,

An house of ancient fame."

In the

19

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 liave 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

6

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,
The honour of the noble family
Of which I meanest boast myself to be,

And most that unto them I am so nigh."
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. In the various parish registers of the district Mr. F. C. Spenser found, from about the middle of the sixteenth to