"_Semper--pauperimus esse_," were nearly all blest with none or a
slender competence. But what they wanted in wealth was amply supplied
in wit. Spenser, Lee, Otway, Ben Johnson, and his son Randolph,
Milton, Cowley, Dryden, Prior, and Kit Smart, poets as they were, had
fared but so so, had they lived by poësy only--and who ever dreamed of
caring ought for _their_ posterity.
SPENCER was matriculated a member of Pembroke College, Cambridge, the
20th of May, 1569, at the age of sixteen, at which early period he is
supposed to have been under his "sweet fit of poesy," and soon after
formed the design of his great poem, the _Faery Queene_, _stanzas_ of
which, it is said, on very good authority, were lately discovered on
the removal of some of the old wainscoting of the room in which he
_kept_ in Pembroke College. He took B.A. 1573, and M.A. 1576,
without succeeding to fellowship, died _in want of bread_, 1599, and
was buried in Westminster Abbey, according to his request, near
Chaucer. Camden says of him--
"Anglica, te vivo, vixit plautisque poesis,
Nunc moritura, timet, te moriente, mori!"
In the common-place-book of Edward, Earl of Oxford and Mortimer,
preserved amongst the MSS. of the British Museum, is the
memoranda:--"Lord Carteret told me, that when he was Lord Lieutenant
of Ireland, a man of the name of Spenser, immediately descended from
our illustrious poet, came to be examined before the Lord Chief
Justice, as a witness in a cause, and that he was so entirely ignorant
of the English language, that they were forced to have an interpreter
for him." But I have no intention to give my readers the _blues_.
"NAT. LEE" was a Trinity man, and was, as the folk say, "as poor as a
church mouse" during his short life, four years of which he passed in
Bedlam. An envious scribe one day there saw him, and mocked his
calamity by asking, "If it was not easy to write like a madman?" "No,
Sir," said he; "but it is