_From an original Picture in the possession of
The Earl of Kinnoull._
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge.
_London. Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street._
]
Lady Compton and Mounteagle, express affection and bounden duty, on the
score of kindred, to the house whence those ladies sprang, who were
three sisters, and daughters of Sir John Spencer of Althorpe.
Spenser took the degree of Bachelor in 1572, and that of Master of Arts
in 1576, in which year it is said that he was an unsuccessful competitor
for a fellowship; but Mr. Church, student of Christ Church in Oxford,
who has been more minute in his inquiries than Spenser’s other
biographers, thinks that the story has no foundation. It is agreed on
all hands that Sir Philip Sidney was the person who drew the poet from
obscurity, and introduced him at court. On this subject we are told that
Spenser sent a copy of the ninth canto of the first book of the ‘Faery
Queene’ to Leicester House; and that Sidney was so transported at the
discovery of such astonishing genius, as, after having read a stanza or
two, to order his steward to give the author fifty pounds: after the
next stanza the sum was doubled. The steward was not so enthusiastic as
his master, and therefore in no hurry to make the disbursement; but one
stanza more raised the gratuity to two hundred pounds, with a command of
immediate payment, lest a further perusal should tempt the gallant
knight to give away his whole estate. The obvious drift of this story is
to magnify the genius of its subject; but it is rather hard on Sir
Philip, that a reputation fully capable of standing by itself should
have been unnecessarily propped at the expense of his character for
common sense. The plain fact is, that the celebrated Gabriel Harvey,
Spenser’s college friend, introduced him to Sidney; that he wrote part
of his ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ at Penshurst, and under the modest name of
_Immerito_, inscribed it to his patron. The general strain of this poem
is serious and pensive, but with occasional bursts of amorous complaint.
Without the latter it was considered that there could be no pastoral
poetry; but in this instance the wailings are thought not to have been
altogether fictitious. The name of Rosalinde is said to have shadowed
forth a mistress who had deserted him, as that of Colin Clout both there
and elsewhere denoted himself. Sidney lost no time in introducing his
new friend to the Earl of Leicester, and finally to Queen Elizabeth. On
his presenting some poems to her, the Queen ordered him a gratuity of a
hundred pounds. Lord Treasurer Burleigh, better qualified to appreciate
the useful than the ornamental, said, “What! all this for a song?” The
Queen in anger repeated the order; and the minister from that time
became the personal enemy of the poet, who alludes to this misfortune in
several parts of his works.
The Earl of Leicester seems to have undertaken to provide for Spenser by
sending him abroad. A letter to Gabriel Harvey from Leicester House
fixes this to the year 1579; but either there is a mistake in the date,
or the scheme must have been abandoned; for in 1580 he was appointed
secretary to Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, who was sent as lord-deputy to
Ireland. While in that country he wrote his ‘Discourse on the State of
Ireland,’ a judicious treatise on the policy then best suited to the
condition of that country. His services were rewarded with a grant of
3028 acres in the county of Cork, out of the forfeited lands of Gerald
Fitz Gerald Earl of Desmond. Spenser’s residence was at the castle of
Kilcolman, near Doneraile. The river Mulla, which he has more than once
introduced into his poems, ran through his grounds. Here he contracted
an intimacy with Sir Walter Raleigh, who was then a captain under Lord
Grey. ‘Colin Clout’s come Home again,’ in which Sir Walter is described
as the Shepherd of the Ocean, is a beautiful memorial of this
friendship, founded on a similarity of taste for the polite arts, and
described with equal delicacy and strength of feeling. The author
acknowledges services at court rendered to him by Raleigh; probably the
confirmation of the grant of land, which he obtained in 1586. The
friends returned to England together, and Spenser wished to have
obtained a settlement at home, rather than to have continued in a
country at that time little better than barbarous. To mortifications,
and ultimate disappointment in his attendance at court, we probably owe
the well-known lines in ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale.’ If his forced return to
Ireland was the cause of his writing the ‘Faery Queene,’ his country was
benefited, and his fame immeasurably enhanced by the disappointment of
his wishes. On the publication of the first three books the Queen
rewarded him with a pension of fifty pounds a year; and in him the
office of Laureate may be considered to have commenced, although not
conferred under that title.
Spenser’s marriage is placed by most biographers in 1593; by Mr. Church
in 1596: the year of his death, if we could rest our faith in the
monument. All we know of the lady is, that her Christian name was
Elizabeth: a name, he says in his 74th sonnet, which has given him three
graces, in his mother, his queen, and his mistress. In his
‘Epithalamion’ he says,
“Tell me, ye merchants’ daughters, did ye see
So fair a creature in your town before?
So sweet, so lovely, and so mild as she,
Adorn’d with beauty’s grace and virtue’s store:
Her goodly eyes, like sapphire, shining bright.
* * * * *
Her long loose yellow locks, like golden wire,
Sprinkled with pearl, and pearling flow’rs atween,
Do, like a golden mantle, her attire.”
He probably dwells the more on this latter circumstance, because the
Queen’s hair was yellow. But even if the marriage took place in 1593,
his term of domestic happiness was very short. In the Earl of Tyrone’s
rebellion, in 1598, he was plundered and deprived of his estate. No
direct or authentic account of the circumstances attending this calamity
has come down to us; but among the heads of a conversation between Ben
Jonson and Drummond at Hawthornden, given in the works of the latter,
Jonson, after saying that neither Spenser’s stanzas pleased him, nor his
matter, is stated to have given the following appalling description of
his misfortune: that “his goods were robbed by the Irish, and his house
and a little child burnt: he and his wife escaped, and after died for
want of bread in King Street, Westminster.” Jonson however adds a
circumstance, the strangeness of which throws suspicion over the former
part of the story: “He refused twenty pieces sent him by my Lord Essex,
and said he was sure he had no time to spend them.” But whether these
particulars be true or not, it is certain that he died in London,
ruined, and a victim to despair, according to Camden, in 1598, but
according to Sir James Ware, who wrote the preface to the ‘View of the
State of Ireland,’ in 1599. Sir James, after having given a high
character of his poetry, says, “With a fate peculiar to poets, Spenser
lived in a continual struggle with poverty: he was driven away from his
house and plundered by the rebels: soon after his return in penury to
England he died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey near Chaucer, at the
expense of the Earl of Essex; the poets of the time, who attended his
funeral, threw verses into his grave.” In order to account for the
inaccuracy of the dates on the monument, it is alleged that the
inscription had been defaced, perhaps by the Puritans in revenge for the
descriptions of the Blatant Beast; and that on its renewal, the carver
(the year of birth being illegible) put ten at a venture, and ninety-six
instead of ninety-eight or ninety-nine.
Respecting Spenser’s private character, conversation and manners, his
contemporaries leave us nearly in the dark. We know that Burleigh was
his enemy, that Sidney and Raleigh were his friends: and from the
dignity of sentiment and moral tendency prevailing throughout his works,
we may reasonably infer that his virtue was not unworthy of his genius.
Milton speaks of him as “our sage and serious poet, whom I dare be known
to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.” ‘The Shepherd’s
Calendar,’ the first of Spenser’s works in print, is generally said to
have come out in 1579. It is a series of pastorals, formed on no uniform
plan, but lowered to the standard supposed to be appropriate to that
style of composition. But the rustic language of these pieces renders
them so utterly untunable to a modern ear, that what obtained the
applause of Sidney would not have saved the author’s name from oblivion,
had it not been borne up to imperishable fame by the splendour of the
‘Faery Queene,’ the three first books of which were published in 1590.
Six years afterwards three other books came out; and after his death two
other cantos, and the beginning of a third. The poem, therefore, exists
as a fragment: there is a traditionary story that he had completed his
design in twelve books, as was his avowed intention; but that the last
six books were lost by a servant who had the charge of bringing them
over to England. Yet, unfinished as the poem is, any one canto has merit
and beauties enough to have secured its author’s fame. In 1591 a quarto
volume was published, containing the following nine pieces:—‘The Ruines
of Time;’ ‘The Tears of the Muses;’ ‘Virgil’s Gnat;’ ‘Mother Hubbard’s
Tale;’ ‘Ruines of Rome;’ ‘Muiopotmos;’ ‘Visions of the World’s Vanitie;’
‘Bellay’s Visions;’ ‘Petrarche’s Visions.’ ‘Daphnaida,’ published in
1592, was dedicated to the Marchioness of Northampton, on the death of
her niece, Douglas Howard. The pastoral elegy of ‘Astrophel’ was devoted
wholly to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney, and inscribed to Lady Essex.
To enter on the subject of his Sonnets, &c. &c. would carry us far
beyond our prescribed limits.
In a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, Spenser sets forth the general design
of the ‘Faery Queene,’ and settles the scheme of the whole twelve books.
But the following passage proves that he contemplated twelve more. “I
labour to pourtraict in Arthur, before he was king, the image of a brave
knight, perfected in the twelve Moral Vertues, as Aristotle devised, the
which is the purport of these first twelve books: which if I find to be
well accepted, I may perhaps be encouraged to frame the other part of
Politic Vertues in his person, after that he came to be king.” He also
says, “In the person of Prince Arthur I set forth Magnificence in
particular.” By magnificence Dryden understands him to mean magnanimity,
in succouring the representatives of the particular moral virtues when
in distress, and considers his interposition in each legend as the only
bond of uniformity in a design, which in all other respects insulates
his allegorical heroes, without subordination or preference. This plan
gave him much opportunity of drawing flattering portraits of individual
courtiers, though few of the likenesses have been recognized, and the
originals seem to have shown but little gratitude for the compliment. It
is generally allowed that Prince Arthur was meant for Sir Philip Sidney,
who was the poet’s chief patron. The prevailing beauty of this great
poem consists in its vein of fabulous invention, set off by a power of
description and force of imagination, so various and inexhaustible, that
the reader is too much pleased and distracted to be sensible of the
faults into which his judgment is betrayed by occasional excess. It is
remarked by Sir William Temple, in his ‘Essay on Poetry,’ that “the
religion of the Gentiles had been woven into the contexture of all the
ancient poetry with an agreeable mixture, which made the moderns affect
to give that of Christianity a place in their poems; but the true
religion was not found to become fictions so well as the false one had
done, and all their attempts of this kind seemed rather to debase
religion than heighten poetry.” Critics in general, and common sense
itself, have confirmed Temple’s remark as to the hazard, which it
required such a mind as Milton’s successfully to face, of giving a
poetical colouring to the solemn truths of religion. To a feeling of
this difficulty we probably owe the peculiarity of Spenser’s epic, if so
it may be called. In other epics, instruction is subordinate to story,
and conveyed through it; in the ‘Faery Queene,’ morality is the avowed
object, to be illustrated by the actions of such shadowy personages,
that but a thin veil is thrown over the bare design. Whatever may be
thought of allegorical poetry as a system, the execution in this
instance is excellent, the flights of fancy brilliant, and often
sublime. Rymer finds fault with Spenser for having suffered himself to
be “misled by Ariosto;” and says that “his poem is perfect Fairyland.”
The readers of poetry in the present day will probably receive that
censure as praise: marvels and adventures, even if probability be not
made matter of conscience, may have more attraction than classic
regularity and strict adherence to the unities. But though Spenser
frequently imitated both Tasso and Ariosto in descriptions of battles,
and his general delineation of knight-errantry, the plan and conduct of
his poem deviated widely from Ariosto’s model, and, it is generally
thought, not on the side of improvement. Ariosto narrates adventures as
real, however extravagant, and only occasionally intermixes portions of
pure allegory. But allegory is the staple of Spenser’s design; and his
legendary tales are interwoven with it so far only as they are connected
with his one human hero. With the exception of Prince Arthur, his heroes
are abstractions; they bear the names of knights, but are in reality
Virtues personified. Dryden finds fault with Spenser’s obsolete
language, and the ill choice of his stanza. The poems of the Elizabethan
age, now considered as the golden age of poetry, are so much more read
and better understood in these later times, than they were in Dryden’s
days, that the language is no longer felt as a serious obstacle to the
pleasures of perusal. With respect to the form of stanza, it was natural
for Dryden, the mighty master of the couplet, to condemn it; and it may
be in itself objectionable as favouring redundancy of style, not only in
respect of expletives and tautology, but of ideas. Its fulness of melody
however, and sonorous majesty, have of late brought it into favour both
with writers and readers.
Of all critics, none can be better worth hearing, on such a subject as
that of the Faery Queene, than the historian of English poetry. Warton
writes thus:—“If the Faery Queene be destitute of that arrangement and
economy which epic severity requires, yet we scarcely regret the loss of
these, while their place is so amply supplied by something which more
powerfully attracts us; something which engages the affections, the
feelings of the heart, rather than the cold approbation of the head. If
there be any poem whose graces please, because they are situated beyond
the reach of art; and where the force and faculties of creative
imagination delight, because they are unassisted and unrestrained by
those of deliberate judgment, it is this: in reading Spenser, if the
critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported.”
The principal editions of Spenser are Upton’s ‘Faery Queene, with a
Glossary and Notes,’ London, 1751; and Mr. Todd’s Variorum Edition of
his Works, 8 vols. 8vo. 1805.
[Illustration:
[Illustration of the ‘Faery Queene,’ after a design by Stothard.]
]
[Illustration:
_Engraved by J. Posselwhite._