Part 1 (2/2)

Alice, Lady Strange, Lady Derby, Lady Elleser Lady Derby, the ”Sweet Amaryllis” of the poet, had the rare fortune to be a personal link between Spenser and Milton She was ae: and she was the first whom Milton honoured; for he corandchildren, and the _Masque of Cohter, another Lady Alice With these illustrious sisters Spenser claimed kindred To each of these he dedicated one of his e, the _Tears of the Muses_; to Lady Coue of the Fox and the Ape, _Mother Hubberd's Tale_; to Lady Carey, the Fable of the butterfly and the Spider, _Muiopotmos_ And in each dedication he assunition of his claim

The sisters three, The honour of the noble family, Of which I ree of relationshi+p to them, he could hardly even in the days of his fae it, unless there had been soround for it There are obscure indications, which antiquarian diligence may perhaps make clear, which point to East Lancashi+re as the home of the particular faed Probably he was, however, in humble circumstances

Edmund Spenser was a Londoner by education as well as birth A recent discovery by Mr R B Knowles, further illustrated by Dr Grosart,[7:7]

has made us acquainted with Spenser's school He was a pupil, probably one of the earliest ones, of the grammar school, then recently (1560) established by the Merchant Taylors' Co the manuscripts at Townley Hall are preserved the account books of the executors of a bountiful London citizen, Robert Nowell, the brother of Dr Alexander Nowell, as Dean of St Paul's during Elizabeth's reign, and was a leading person in the ecclesiastical affairs of the time In these books, in a crowd of unknown naners, and parish paupers, who shared from time to time the liberality of Mr Robert Nowell's representatives, there appear a the numerous ”poor scholars” whom his wealth assisted, the names of Richard Hooker, and Lancelot Andrewes And there, also, in the roll of the expenditure at Mr Nowell's po lists of unknown iven thees, for heraldic pageantry and ornamentation, for abundant supplies for the sumptuous funeral banquet, are put down lists of boys, from the chief London schools, St Paul's, Westiven to owns: and at the head of the six scholars named from Merchant Taylors' is the name of Edmund Spenser

He was then, probably, the senior boy of the school, and in the following May he went to Cae The Nowells still helped him: we read in their account books under April 28, 1569, ”to Edmond Spensore, scholler of the e to penbrocke hall in chae, x{s}” On the 20th of May, he was ad clerk at Pembroke Hall; and on more than one occasion afterwards, like Hooker and like Lancelot Andrewes, also a Merchant Taylors' boy, two or three years Spenser's junior, and a e, Spenser had a share in the benefactions, small in themselves, but very numerous, hich the Nowells after the fine fashi+on of the time, were accustomed to assist poor scholars at the Universities In the visitations of Merchant Taylors' School, at which Grindal, Bishop of London, was frequently present,[9:8] it is not unlikely that his interest was attracted, in the appositions or exa senior boy of the school At any rate Spenser, who afterwards celebrated Grindal's qualities as a bishop, was admitted to a place, one which befitted a scholar in hue It is perhaps worth noticing that all Spenser's early friends, Grindal, the Nowells, Dr Mulcaster, his master, were north country men

Spenser was sixteen or seventeen when he left school for the university, and he entered Cale which was to occupy the reign of Elizabeth was just opening At the end of the year 1569, the first distinct bloas struck against the queen and the new settle of the North In the first ten years of Elizabeth's reign, Spenser's school tireat quarrel had sluious wars in France, the death of the Duke of Guise (1563), the loss of Havre, and expulsion of the English garrisons, the close of the Council of Trent (1563), the French peace, the accession of Pius V

(1565/6) Nearer hoe of Mary of Scotland with Henry Darnley (1565), and all the tragedy which followed, Kirk of Field (1567), Lochleven, Langside, Carlisle, the ilish Crown (1568) In England, the authority of Elizabeth had established itself, and the internal organization of the Refor on, in an uncertain and tentative way, but steadily There was a struggle between Genevan exiles, ere for going too fast, and bishops and politicians ere for going too slow; between authority and individual judgn revolutionary zeal But outwardly, at least, England had been peaceful

Noever a great change was at hand In 1566, the Dominican Inquisitor, Michael Ghislieri, was elected Pope, under the title of Pius V

In Pius (1566-72), were embodied the new spirit and policy of the Roreat Jesuit order, and by refor bishops like Ghiberti of Verona, and Carlo Borro as a saint, fierce and inflexible against abuses as a puritan, resolute and unco as a Jacobin idealist or an Asiatic despot, ruthless and inexorable as an executioner, his soul was bent on re-establishi+ng, not only by preaching and martyrdom, but by the sword and by the stake, the unity of Christendom and of its belief Eastwards and ards, he beheld two forers; and he saw before hilish heresy and beating back Turkishcaution of his predecessors by the Bull of Deposition against Elizabeth in 1570 He was the soul of the confederacy which won the day of Lepanto against the Ottoh dead, his spirit was parahter of St

Bartholomew in 1572

In the year 1569, while Spenser was passing froland, spreading abroad that Elizabeth was a bastard and an apostate, incapable of filling a Christian throne, which belonged by right to the captive Mary The seed they sowed bore fruit In the end of the year, southern England was alarreat Earls in the north, Percy of Northumberland and Neville of Westmoreland Durhaent host, before which an ”aged gentleman,”

Richard Norton with his sons, bore the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ The rebellion was easily put down, and the revenge was stern To the ation of the Pope and in the cause of Mary, Elizabeth gave, as she had sworn ”such a breakfast as never was in the North before” The hangman finished the work on those who had escaped the sword Poetry, early and late, has recorded the dreary fate of those brave victi of the North_, and in the _White Doe of Rylstone_ It was the signal given for the internecine hich was to folloeen Roreat public event which Spenser would hear of in all ury of fierce and dangerous years to come The nation awoke to the certainty--one which so profoundly affects sentiment and character both in a nation and in an individual--that a the habitual and fixed conditions of life is that of having a serious and implacable enemy ever to reckon with

And in this year, apparently in the transition tian The evidence is curious, but it seeee Fleland from the ”abominations of the Roman Antichrist”

and the persecutions of the Duke of Alva, John Vander Noodt, published one of those odd miscellanies, fashi+onable at the time, half moral and poetical, half fiercely polemical, which he called a ”_Theatre_, wherein be represented as well the Miseries and Calareat Joys and Pleasures which the Faithful do enjoy--an argument both profitable and delectable to all that sincerely love the word of God” This ”little treatise,” was a eneral, the vanity of the world, and, in particular, predictions of the ruin of Rome and Antichrist: and it enforced its lessons by illustrative woodcuts In this strange jumble are preserved, we can scarcely doubt, the first co the pieces are some Sonnets of Petrarch, and some Visions of the French poet Joachim du Bellay, whose poems were published in 1568 In the collection itself, these pieces are said by the compiler to have been translated by hilish” But in a volume of ”poems of the world's vanity,” and published years afterwards in 1591, ascribed to Spenser, and put together, apparently with his consent, by his publisher, are found these very pieces from Petrarch and Du Bellay The translations from Petrarch are almost literally the same, and are said to have been ”formerly translated” In the Visions of Du Bellay there is this difference, that the earlier translations are in blank verse, and the later ones are rie does not destroy the manifest identity of the two translations So that unless Spenser's publisher, to whoenuine pieces for the volume, is not to be trusted,--which, of course, is possible, but not probable--or unless,--what is in the last degree inconceivable,--Spenser had afterwards been willing to take the trouble of turning the blank verse of Du Bellay's unknown translator into ris_ on the 25th May, 1569,and fluent school boy, to furnish hilish versified form, of which he himself took the credit, for compositions which he professes to have known only in the Brabants or Dutch translations The sonnets froe; there occurs in theht of Spenser's:--

--The Nymphs, That sweetly in accord did _tune their voice To the soft sounding of the waters' fall_[13:9]

It is scarcely credible that the translator of the sonnets could have caught sobeen able to read the Italian original; and if Spenser was the translator, it is a curious illustration of the fashi+onableness of Italian literature in the days of Elizabeth, that a school-boy just leaving Merchant Taylors' should have been so much interested in it Dr

Mulcaster, his iven special attention to the teaching of the English language

If these translations were Spenser's, he e with a faculty of verse, which for his tio to the universities now But there was this difference, that the school-boy versifiers of our days are rich with the accunificent poetical literature in the world; while Spenser had but one really great English model behind him; and Chaucer, honoured as he was, had become in Elizabeth's time, if not obsolete, yet in his diction, very far ree of the day Even Milton, in his boyish compositions, wrote after Spenser and Shakespeare, with their contelish poetry Whatever there was in Spenser's early verses of grace and : no one of his own time, except in occasional and fitful snatches, like stanzas of Sackville's, had shown him the way Thus equipped, he entered the student world, then full of pedantic and ill-applied learning, of the disputations of Calvinistic theology, and of the beginnings of those highly speculative puritanical controversies, which were the echo at the University of the great political struggles of the day, and were soon to become so seriously practical The University was represented to the authorities in London as being in a state of dangerous exciteift, afterwards Elizabeth's favourite archbishop, Master, first of Pembroke, and then of Trinity, was Vice-Chancellor of the University; but as the guardian of established order, he found it difficult to keep in check the violent and revolutionary spirit of the theological schools Calvin was beginning to be set up there as the infallible doctor of Protestant theology

Cartwright fro the exclusive and divine claims of the Geneva platforovern the received Church polity and ritual as Popish and anti-Christian Cartwright, an extre s were taking under the influence of Ros, and strengthened his party In this turmoil of opinions, amid these hard and technical debates, these fierce conflicts between the highest authorities, and this unsparing violence and bitterness of party recriminations, Spenser, with the tastes and faculties of a poet, and the love not only of as beautiful, but of as an his university life

It was not a favourable atreat poet But it suited one side of Spenser's lishh

Little is known of Spenser's Cae career It is probable, from the persons hom he was connected, that he would not be indifferent to the debates around hiious prepossessions were then, as afterwards, in favour of the confor puritanis puritanis puritans, ould have been glad of a greater approximation to the Swiss model, but hatever their private wishes or dislikes, thought it best, for good reasons or bad, to subainst it, and to accept what the government approved and ireat sees of London, York, and Canterbury, and Nowell, Dean of St

Paul's, Spenser's benefactor, were representative types Grindal, a waverer like many others in opinion, had also a noble and manly side to his character, in his hatred of practical abuses, and in the courageous and obstinate resistance which he could offer to pohen his sense of right was outraged Grindal, as has been said, was perhaps instrue, Pembroke Hall, with the intention, it may be, as was the fashi+on of bishops of that tirace in 1577, and when it was not quite safe to praise a great man under the displeasure of the Court, Grindal is the person wholed out for his waruise, ”Algrind,” in Spenser's earliest work after he left Cae, the _Shepherd's Calendar_, as the pattern of the true and faithful Christian pastor And if Pembroke Hall retained at all the tone and tendencies of such ift, the school in which Spenser greas one of their ated puritanism

But his puritanisious He went heartily with the puritan party in their intense hatred of Rome and Roman partisans; he ith them also in their denunciations of the scandals and abuses of the ecclesiastical government at home But in temper of mind and intellectual bias he had little in common with the puritans For the stern austerities of Calviniser scholasticism, its isolation from human history, human enjoyment, and all the manifold play and variety of human character, there could not be much sympathy in a man like Spenser, with his easy and flexible nature, keenly alive to all beauty, an ad pleasures of which the world is full, with a perpetual struggle going on in hiht, and his passionate appreciation of every charreement with the internal characteristics of the puritans, their distinguishi+ng theology, their peculiarities of thought and habits, their protests, right or wrong, against the fashi+ons and amusements of the world If not a man of pleasure, he yet threw hie, the pursuits, of the gay and gallant society in which they saw so much evil: and from their narro of life, and the contearded the whole field of huulf Indeed, he had not the sternness and concentration of purpose, which reat puritan poet

Spenser took his Master's degree in 1576, and then left Ca to sho he e, whether acquired there or elsewhere, was copious, but curiously inaccurate; and the only speci of his Latin composition in verse is conte of his Cae life except the friendshi+ps which he fore of the closest andinto after-life, between hi than hier; Gabriel Harvey, first a fellow of Pembroke, and then a student or teacher of civil law at Trinity Hall, and Edward Kirke, like Spenser, a sizar at Pembroke, recently identified with the E K, as the editor and commentator of Spenser's earliest work, the anonyer friend this is the most that is known That he was deeply in Spenser's confidence as a literary coadjutor, and possibly in other ways, is shown in the hich he did But Gabriel Harvey was a man who had influence on Spenser's ideas and purposes, and on the direction of his efforts He was a classical scholar of much distinction in his day, well read in the Italian authors then so fashi+onable, and regarded as a high authority on questions of criticism and taste Except to students of Elizabethan literary history, he has becoe; and he has not usually been spoken of with e violently into the scurrilous quarrels of the day, and as he was onists, he has come down to us as a foolish pretender, or at least as a dull and stupid scholar who knew little of the real value of the books he was always ready to quote, like the pedant of the comedies, or Shakespere's schoolmaster Holofernes Further, he was one ith his classical learning, had little belief in the resources of his ue, and he was one of the earliest and most confident supporters of a plan then fashi+onable, for refor away its natural habits and rhyth on it the laws of the classical ular The professed treatises of this time on poetry, of which there were several, assu” and duly elevating English verse It was eagerly accepted by Philip Sidney and his Areopagus of wits at court, who busied the rules of their own--iht on those of the university lish hexameters and sapphics, or as they called it, artificial versifying They regarded the colish rhythms and the classical arded the comparison between Gothic and Palladian architecture One, even if it sometimes had a certain romantic interest, was rude and coarse; the other was the perfection of polite art and good taste Certainly in what re, there is h; and it has been naturally surerous friend and counsellor to Spenser But probably we are hard upon his, after all, are not much more affected and absurd in their outward fashi+on than most of the literary composition of the tihbours; he was not above, but he was not below, the false taste and clu” was for the h his enthusiaslish hexameters is of a piece with the puritan use of scripture texts in divinity and morals, yet there is no want of hard-headed shrewdness in his relish words and accents to classicalthe conditions of the problem, while Sidney and Spenser still appear confused and uncertain But in spite of his pedantry, and though he had not, as we shall see, the eye to discern at first the genius of the _Faery Queen_, he has to us the interest of having been Spenser's first, and as far as we can see, to the last, dearest friend By both of his younger fellow-students at Cae, he was looked up to with the deepest reverence, and the ant, but there is no reason to think that it was not genuine E

Kirke, the editor of Spenser's first venture, the _Shepherd's Calendar_, coe, and to the protection of his ”hty rhetoric,” and exhorts Harvey hiarland which to him alone is due” Spenser speaks in the same terms; ”_veruntamen te sequor solum; nunquam vero assequar_” Portions of the early correspondence between Harvey and Spenser have been preserved to us, possibly by Gabriel Harvey's self-satisfaction in regard to his own coue's jocoseness, and a playfulness which is like that of an elephant, it shows on both sides easy frankness, sincerity, and warer man In Spenser's earliest poetry, his pastorals, Harvey appears ainary rustics, as the poet's ”special and most familiar friend,” under the name of Hobbinol,--

”Good Hobbinol, that was so true”

To him Spenser addresses his confidences, under the name of Colin Clout, a name borrowed from Skelton, a satirical poet of Henry VIII's tihout his poetical career Harvey reappears in one of Spenser's latest writings, a return to the early pastoral, _Colin Clout's coain_, a picture drawn in distant Ireland, of the brilliant but disappointing court of Elizabeth And from Ireland in 1586, was addressed to Harvey by ”his devoted friend during life,” the following fine sonnet, which, whatever may have been the merit of Harvey's criticisms and his literary quarrels with Greene and Nash, shows at least Spenser's unabated honour for him