And gather nuttes to make my Christmas game,
And joyed oft to chase the trembling pricket,
Or hunt the hartlesse hare till she were tame.
What wrecked I of wintrie age's waste?
Tho' deemed I my spring would ever last.
"How often have I scaled the craggie oke,
All to dislodge the raven of her nest?
How have I wearied with many a stroke
The stately walnut tree, the while the rest
Under the tree fell all for nuttes at strife?
For like to me was libertye and life."
He was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School, and afterwards at
Cambridge, where an old biographer declares "he mispent not his time, as
the fruites of his labours doe manifest, for that he became an excellent
scholar, especially most happy in English poetry." But no other
memories remain to us of his university life except the names of his two
great and lifelong friends, and all we know of him during the first few
years after he left Cambridge is that he lived in the north, and that he
fell violently in love with a certain Rosaline, "a gentlewoman both of
nature and manners, worthy to be commended to immortalitie for her rare
and singular virtues," but who apparently did not in any way return his
ardent affections. He lamented her indifference so deeply that he left
his home and made his way to London, "all weeping and disconsolate," and
though he was by nature light-hearted and pleasure-loving, he treasured
the memory of her many charms for fourteen years, until he met and
married the Elizabeth whom he described as "my love, my life's last
ornament." But if it was despair which drove Spenser to London, he had
no cause ever to regret the move, for it led to his making the
acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, who introduced him to his uncle, the
all-powerful Earl of Leicester. Both received him cordially, and in a
short time he was mixing in all the intellectual society of the day.
England was at peace; Elizabeth's firm rule made for prosperity; the new
learning had taken root; the spirit of adventure, of imagination, of
chivalry had free scope; the spirit of growth, of progress, of
enterprise pervaded the air. All was ready for the coming of a poet who
could sing as Chaucer had done, and make sweet music with the national
language. In the winter of 1579 Spenser published, not under his own
name, his "Shepherdes Calendar," a series of shepherd tales, one for
each of the twelve months of the year, and these he dedicated to
"Maister Philip Sidney, that noble and vertuous gentleman, most worthy
of all titles, both of learning and chevalrie." At once the "new poet"
leapt into fame, though nothing could have been in greater contrast than
Chaucer's Tales and Spenser's Calendar. The first faithfully pictured
life as it was without romance or exaggeration; the second, according to
the fashion of the day, was in the form of a masquerade: the heroes and
heroines were all shepherds or shepherdesses; everything took place in
the country, every one was a rustic, and the highest praise that could
be given to Chaucer was to call him the "god of shepherds." So the
Calendar had none of that simplicity and truthfulness which gave to
Chaucer's work its great charm. Shepherds and shepherdesses, when put
in all kinds of unnatural positions, could not fail to be unreal and
artificial, especially when they were made to talk in the language of
scholars. But Spenser's strength lay in the melody of his verse, in his
sense of beauty and his power over language, and it has been truly said
that though he is not the greatest of poets, his poetry is the most
poetical of all poetry.
Fuller, who wrote on the "Worthies of England," tells us that Spenser
was presented to Queen Elizabeth, who was so overcome by the beauties of
his poem, that she ordered Lord Burleigh to give him a hundred pounds,
to which the cautious Treasurer objected, saying it was too much. "Then
give him what is reason," said the Queen. But it was evident that
Burleigh had not a great liking for the new poet, probably because he
was such a friend of Leicester's, and Spenser saw nothing of the money
till he brought it to the Queen's remembrance in a little rhyme. He
soon found that he could not live by his poetry, but he had no desire to
exist on the favours of Leicester or Sidney, and preferred to earn his
own daily bread in some honourable and independent way. An opening came
unexpectedly. Ireland was causing much anxiety to the crown; one Lord
Deputy after another sent from England had failed to restore to it order
or good government, and had come home depressed and disheartened, if not
actually disgraced. In 1579 the Government pressed Lord Grey de
Wilton--the "good Lord Grey"--high-minded, religious, and fearless, to
undertake the thankless task, and he, from a sense of duty, accepted the
office of Lord Deputy. He invited Spenser to come with him, as his
secretary, and the offer was at once accepted, though it must have cost
the poet something to tear himself away from the centre of life and
learning, from the society he so enjoyed, to bury himself in a country
regarded as only half civilised, and which at that very time was in open
rebellion. He left behind him Merrie England, with all that was
pleasant to him, when he went to Ireland, which was then in a most
turbulent and rebellious condition, and for the time being his writing
had to be laid aside for sterner stuff. But all honour to him that he
chose work rather than dependence.
Lord Grey de Wilton did not succeed any better than his predecessors had
done. Naturally kind-hearted, he nevertheless deemed it his duty to
carry out a policy of great severity, and himself almost a Puritan in
his religious views, he saw no hope for the distressful country until
Protestantism reigned there. Spenser adopted the same opinions as his
master, and pitiless force was the only weapon used in the warfare. Of
course it availed nothing, and Lord Grey was recalled, more or less
under a cloud, for he had many enemies at home among those who found him
too uncompromisingly straightforward and honourable, as well as among
those who condemned his fanatical severity and his ruthlessly heavy
hand. Spenser, who stayed behind in Ireland, always remained loyal to
him, and sturdily defended that "most just and honourable personage,
whose least virtues, of many most excellent, which abounded in his
heroical spirit, they were never able to aspire to, who with evil
tongues did most untruly and maliciously backbite and slander him."
For the next few years the poet held various clerkships and other posts,
and at last he became the possessor of Kilcolman Castle, where he lived
for some time, devoting his spare hours to the great work he so long had
in contemplation, "The Faerie Queene." In 1590 he got permission to
return for awhile to England that he might publish that part of his book
which he had finished, a permission he owed to Raleigh, who had read
much of the work when staying as his guest in Ireland, and who with
generous sympathy longed to give to the poet the fame which was so
justly his. Thanks to him, too, the Queen listened to some portions of
the poem, and was greatly delighted with the many references made to
herself. For Spenser had learnt how to flatter gracefully in his verse,
and had realised that to find favour in the Queen's eyes he would do
well
"To lyken her to a crowne of lillies
Upon a virgin bryde's adorned head,
With roses dight and goolds and daffadillies;
Or like the circlet of a Turtle true
In which alle colours of the rainbow bee.
Or like faire Phebes' garland shining new,
In which alle pure perfection one may see.
But vain it is to think by paragone
Of earthly things, to judge of things Divine."
He had dedicated his book to her, "The most High, Mightie, and
Magnificent Empress, renowned for Pietie, Virtue, and alle gracious
Government;" and at the end of the dedication expressed the humble hope
that "thus his labours might live with the eternity of her fame."
Elizabeth smiled graciously on one who added such glory to her court,
and gave Spenser a pension of L50. "The Faerie Queene" was greeted with
a chorus of enthusiastic praise, and the publisher, who in an
introduction had begged gentle readers to "graciouslie entertain the new
Poet," had no reason to complain of the warm welcome given to him.
Of course, the work was an allegory, a double allegory, so to speak; for
besides having a general meaning to his story, he had a special one
which referred to living people, such as the Queen, Sir Philip Sidney,
Lord Grey, and so on. The whole poem, therefore, is rather complicated,
and in great contrast to the well-arranged plots which Chaucer had woven
into his stories. The general idea was that in a certain happy country
there reigned a great Queen Gloriana, around whose presence had gathered
a body of brave and fearless knights. The queen decided to hold a feast
for twelve days, and on each day an adventure was to be undertaken by
one of these knights for the purpose of righting some wrong, releasing
some captive, or succouring some oppressed person. Spenser purposed to
tell of these several adventures in twelve books, but only six were
finished. Now if in "The Faerie Queene" we attempt to unravel the very
knotted allegory, we shall soon get into difficulties, for Spenser's
greatest gifts did not lie in his power of making a clear story, but in
his perfectly chosen language, his lofty thoughts, and the never-failing
music of his verse. So the wisest plan, I think, is to read the
romances for their own beauty without trying to find a hidden meaning in
every line, and even so, we shall everywhere discover rich gems.
It is strange that in spite of all the fame which "The Faerie Queene"
gave the poet, it brought him neither wealth nor even work, and he
"tourned back to his sheepe" in Ireland. He married, and poured out his
joy in an exquisite song called "Epithalamion." Besides this, he wrote
more books of his great work, many sonnets and hymns, and a treatise on
Ireland. He was made Sheriff of Cork, and altogether his worldly affairs
prospered; for Burleigh was dead, and it was Burleigh who had always
checked the Queen's generosity towards him, "saying a song needed not
such liberal payment." Suddenly a fresh and violent rebellion broke out
in Ireland. Spenser's castle was attacked and set on fire; his little
child was burned to death; and all his valued possessions were
destroyed. He came back to London with his wife, homeless, penniless,
broken-hearted. Over the next few months a veil is drawn; how it came
to pass that his many friends and admirers knew nothing of his
sufferings, or knowing did not raise a hand to help him, remains a
mystery. This is certain, that he died of grief and for lack of bread
in a street near Westminster. After his death, indeed, his friends came
to the fore once more. The Earl of Essex paid all the expenses of his
funeral, which took place in the Abbey. Poets and writers flocked to
his grave-side, throwing on to his coffin their songs of woe. We may
take it for granted that Shakespeare was among the mourners, and with
him were all the brightest spirits of the day. Truly the broken-hearted
poet was well honoured on that last event of his life. At some period
of his career, probably near the end, he had written a poem on "Change
and Mutabilitie." God grant that in those bitter closing days he found
the ray of hope he thus did sing of:--
"Then gin I think on that which Nature sayd,
Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things firmly stayd,
Upon the Pillars of Eternitie,
That is contrayr to Mutabilitie.
For all that moveth does in change delight:
But thenceforth all shall rest eternally
With Him, that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:
O that great Sabbaoth God, grant me that Sabbaoth's sight."
True it is that Spenser, the herald of the Elizabethan day, gives to the
Poets' Corner the reflected glory of that period, but we can never cease
to regret that Shakespeare, its crown and its sun, lies so far away from
Westminster. Only the Abbey seems a fitting monument to that great mind,
our king of English literature.
"Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive while still thy books doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give."
So wrote Ben Jonson. With that thought, and the fact that, a hundred
and twenty years after his death, a memorial to Shakespeare was put up
in the Poets' Corner by public subscription, we must rest content. Ben
Jonson himself was buried here, having in his imperious way demanded of
the king "eighteen inches of ground in the Abbey," and so he remained in
death "a child of Westminster." He had been educated at Westminster
School, this turbulent, strong-spirited lad, with Border blood in him,
who could never settle down to the trade of a builder, to which he had
been apprenticed, and who was heard of among actors and playwriters. He
was the friend of Shakespeare; indeed, it is said that the great man not
only warmly praised his first play, "Every Man in his Humour," but acted
in it himself at the Globe Theatre. Jonson produced a great number of
plays and a still greater number of court masques. He was a master of
plot, and everything he wrote was full of force and personality. Such a
fiery character as his could hardly fail to lead him into a series of
quarrels; but, in spite of this, he was held by his large circle of
friends to be "the prince of good fellows," and the words, "O rare Ben
Jonson," carved on his tomb by order of Sir John Young, "who, walking
here when the grave was covering, gave the fellow eighteenpence to cut
it," is an epitaph that came from the hearts of those who loved him and
recognised his genius. Francis Beaumont, another Elizabethan
playwriter, and the intimate friend of the whole group of dramatists,
lies here; as does Michael Drayton, who wrote more than one hundred
thousand lines of verse, and who, despite the fact that he was always
quarrelling with his booksellers, whom he described as "a company of
base knaves I scorn to kick," was known among his contemporaries as the
"all-loved Drayton." Abraham Cowley, held in his day to be a great
poet, had a magnificent funeral and a most flattering epitaph, but
though one enthusiastic admirer went so far as to declare that the Great
Fire left the Abbey untouched because Fate would that Cowley's tomb
should be preserved, his works did not long survive him. Close to him
was laid John Dryden, who as a boy had been well whipped by the great
Doctor Busby. He says himself that he "endeavoured to write good
English," and he produced several plays and some excellent political
satires. He was not a great poet, but he had the knack of reasoning
well in verse, of choosing apt words, and of writing vigorously. And we
must remember that he lived in the days of the later Stuarts, when poets
had well-nigh forgotten the sweet music of the Elizabethan age. Near to
his tomb stands the bust of his bitter enemy, Shadwell, of whom he had
written:--
"Shadwell alone of all my sons is he
Who stands confirmed in all stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning made pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense."
Even so did the Abbey unite these rival poets-laureate.
[Illustration: POETS' CORNER]
Another satirist, Samuel Butler, has a monument, but not a tomb, in the
Abbey. He also died in abject poverty, and of him these lines were
written, which apply to more than one of those commemorated in the
Poets' Corner:--
"When Butler, needy wretch, was yet alive,
No generous patron would a dinner give.
Behold him starved to death and turned to dust,
Presented with a monumental bust.
The poet's fate is here in emblem shown:
He asked for bread, and he received a stone."
Thomas May, the historian; Davenant, the Royalist poet-laureate; Sir
John Denham, a Royalist versifier, and John Phillips, a devoted imitator
of Milton, are little more than names to us; but then we must remember
that, with few exceptions, neither the poets nor the poetry of that
period which ended with the death of William III. have lived on through
our literature. With the accession of Anne there came a burst of new
life, and the next great name we come to in the Abbey is that of Joseph
Addison, the most charming of our prose writers. To find his grave,
however, we must leave the Poets' Corner and go to General Monk's vault
in Henry VII.'s Chapel. For here, close to his friend Charles Montagu,
Lord Keeper, he of "piercing wit, gentle irony, and sparkling humour,"
the regular contributor to our two earliest newspapers, the _Tattler_
and the _Spectator_, was buried. His own words, from an article in the
_Spectator_ when it was about twelve days old, best describe both the
man and his aims: "It is with much satisfaction that I hear this great
city enquiring day by day after these my papers, and receiving my
morning lectures with a becoming seriousness and attention. My
publisher tells me that already three thousand of them are distributed
every day, so that if I allow twenty readers to every paper, I may
reckon about threescore thousand disciples in London and Westminster,
who, I hope, will take care to distinguish themselves from the
thoughtless herd of their ignorant and unattentive brethren. I shall
spare no pains to make their instruction agreeable and their diversion
useful. For which reason I shall endeavour to enliven morality with wit
and to temper wit with morality.... I have resolved to refresh their
memories from day to day, till I have recovered them from that desperate
state of folly and vice into which the age is fallen. The mind that
lies fallow but a single day sprouts up in follies that are only to be
killed by assiduous culture. It was said of Socrates that he brought
philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men, and I shall be
ambitious to have it said of me that I brought philosophy out of closets
and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies,
at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." Then, having given his general
aim, he goes on to especially commend his paper to all well-regulated
families; to those gentlemen of leisure who consider the world a
theatre, and desire to form a right judgment of those who are the actors
on it; and to those "poor souls called the blanks of society, who are
altogether unfurnished with ideas, who ask the first men they meet if
there is any news stirring, and who know not what to talk about till
twelve o'clock in the morning, by which time they are pretty good judges
of the weather, and know which way the wind sets;" while finally he
appeals to the female world: "I have often thought," he says, "that
there has not been sufficient pains taken to find out proper employments
and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements seem contrived for
them rather as they are women than as they are reasonable creatures.
The toilet is their great scene of business, and the right adjusting of
their hair the principal employment of their lives. This, I say, is the
state of ordinary women, though I know there are multitudes of those
that move in an exalted sphere of knowledge and virtue, and that join
all the beauties of mind to the ornaments of dress. I hope to increase
the number of those by publishing this daily paper, which I shall always
endeavour to make an innocent entertainment, and by that means at least
divert the minds of my female readers from far greater trifles."
Faithfully and yet very pleasantly did Addison carry out his scheme.
His humour was always kindly, his good sense was unvarying, his thoughts
were always generous and true, and his easy unaffected language
completed the charm. Instead of dropping to the level of his readers,
he raised them to the much higher level on which he himself stood, and
this without dull lecturing or violent denunciations. Religion, duty,
love, honour, purity, truth, kindliness, and public-spiritedness were
all real things to him, and he sought to make them everywhere realities
too, gilding his little moral pills so cleverly, that until they were
swallowed no one knew they were pills, and then they left nothing but a
sweet taste behind.
"About an age ago," he writes, "it was the fashion in England for every
one who would be thought religious to throw as much sanctity as possible
into his face. The saint was of a sorrowful countenance, and generally
was eaten up with melancholy. I do not presume to tax such characters
with hypocrisy, as is done too frequently, that being a vice which, I
think, none but He who knows the secrets of men's hearts should pretend
to discover in another. But I think they would do well to consider
whether such a behaviour does not deter men from religion.... In short,
those who represent religion in so unamiable a light are like the spies
sent out by Moses to make a discovery in the Land of Promise, when by
their reports they discouraged the people from entering upon it. Those
that show us the joys, the cheerfulness, the good-humour that naturally
spring up in this happy state are like the spies bringing along with
them clusters of grapes and delicious fruits that so invited their
companions into the pleasant country which produced them."
Two of his articles have Westminster Abbey for their subject. On one
occasion Addison, as the Spectator, goes there for a walk, and thus
describes his feelings:--"I yesterday passed a whole afternoon in the
Cloisters and the Church ... And I began to consider with myself what
innumerable multitudes of people lay confused under the pavement of that
ancient cathedral; how men and women, friends and enemies, priests and
soldiers, monks and prebendaries were crumbled one against the other;
how beauty, strength, and youth, with old age, weakness, and deformity,
lay undistinguished in the same heap of matter.... Some of the
monuments were covered with such extravagant epitaphs that, if it were
possible for the dead person to be acquainted with them, he would blush
at the praises which his friends bestowed on him. There were others so
excessively modest that they deliver the character of the person
departed in Greek or Hebrew so that they are not understood once in a
twelvemonth. I found there were poets which had no monuments, and
monuments which had no poets.... Sir Cloudesley Shovel's monument gave
me great offence. Instead of the brave, rough English admiral, which
was the distinguishing character of that plain gallant man, he is
represented on his tomb by the figure of a beau, dressed in a long
periwig, and reposing himself upon velvet cushions under a canopy of
state. The Dutch, whom we are apt to despise for want of genius, show
an infinitely greater taste.... The monuments of their admirals which
have been erected at the public expense represent them like themselves,
and are adorned with rostral crowns and naval ornaments, with beautiful
festoons of seaweed, shells, and coral. When I look upon the tombs of
the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of
the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the
grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when
I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of
grieving for those that we must quickly follow. When I see kings lying
by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by
side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and
disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little
competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several
dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred
years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be
contemporaries, and make our appearance together."