Harvey and Edmund Spenser agree in this. The bravos that "have the stage at commandment can furnish out vices and devils at their pleasure," says Harvey. This describes the Vetus Comoedia-the old comedy-of which Nashe boasts. Can there be any doubt that Spenser had this state of things in view when he denounced the

"Ugly Barbarism,

And brutish Ignorance, ycrept of late

Out of dread darkness of the deep abysm."

He denounced it in common with his friend Harvey, who, however he partook of the controversial violence of his time, was a man of learning and eloquence; and to whom only three years before he had addressed a sonnet of which the highest mind in the country might have been proud.

But we must return to the "Thalia." The four stanzas which we have quoted are immediately followed by these four others :—

"All these, and all that else the comic stage

With season'd wit and goodly pleasure graced,
By which man's life in his likest image

Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced;
And those sweet wits, which wont the like to frame,
Are now despis'd, and made a laughing game.

And he, the man whom Nature self had made
To mock herself, and Truth to imitate,
With kindly counter, under mimic shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late:
With whom all joy and jolly merriment
Is also deaded, and in dolour drent.

Instead thereof scoffing Scurrility,

And scornful Folly, with Contempt, is crept,
Rolling in rhymes of shameless ribaldry,

Without regard or due decorum kept;
Each idle wit at will presumes to make,
And doth the Learned's task upon him take.

But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen
Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow,
Scorning the boldness of such base-born men,

Which dare their follies forth so rashly throw,
Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell

Than so himself to mockery to sell."

Here there is something even stronger than what has preceded it, in the direct allusion to the state of the stage in 1590. Comedy had ceased to be an exhibition of "seasoned wit" and "goodly pleasure;" it no longer showed "man's life in his likest image." Instead thereof there was "Scurrility -"scornful Folly "-" shameless Ribaldry;"”—and “each idle wit

"doth the Learned's task upon him take.”

It was the task of “the Learned" to deal with the high subjects of religious controversy the "matters of state and religion," with which the stage had meddled. Harvey had previously said, in the tract quoted by us, it is "a godly motion, when interluders leave penning their pleasurable plays to become zealous ecclesiastical writers." He calls Lyly more expressly, with reference to this meddling, the "fool

P

master of the theatre."

In this state of things the acknowledged head of the comic

stage was silent for a time :

"HE, the man whom Nature self had made

To mock herself, and Truth to imitate,
With kindly counter, under mimic shade,
Our pleasant WILLY, ah! is dead of late."

And the author of "The Faery Queen" adds,

"But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen
Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow,
Scorning the boldness of such base-born men,

Which dare their follies forth so madly throw,
Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell

Than so himself to mockery to sell."

The love of personal abuse had driven out real comedy; and there was one who, for a brief season, had left the madness to take its course. that

We cannot doubt

"HE, the man whom Nature self had made

To mock herself, and Truth to imitate,"

was William Shakspere. Mr. Collier, in his "History of Dramatic Poetry," says of Spenser's "Thalia,”- "Had it not been certain that it was written at so early a date, and that Shakespeare could not then have exhibited his talents and acquired reputation, we should say at once that it could be meant for no other poet. It reads like a prophetic anticipation, which could not have been fulfilled by Shakspere until several years after it was published." Mr. Collier, when he wrote this, had not discovered the document which proves that Shakspere was a sharer in the Blackfriars Theatre at least a year before this poem was published. At a later period, Mr. Collier lends his valuable opinion to the belief that Spenser's lines did allude to Shakspere. We are happy in such a convert.* Spenser, we have no doubt, described a real man, and real facts. He made no "prophetic anticipation;" there had been genuine comedy in existence; the ribaldry had driven it out for a season. The poem has reference to some temporary degradation of the stage; and what this temporary degradation was is most exactly defined by the public documents of the period, and the writings of Harvey, Nashe, and Lyly. The dates of all these proofs correspond with minute exactness. And who then is " our pleasant Willy," according to the opinion of those who would deny to Shakspere the title to the praise of the other great poet of the Elizabethan age? It is John Lyly, says Malone-the man whom Spenser's bosom friend was, at the same moment, denouncing as "the foolmaster of the theatre." We say, advisedly, that there is absolutely no proof that Shakspere had not written "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," "The Comedy of Errors," "Love's Labour's Lost," "The Taming of the Shrew," and "All's Well that Ends Well," amongst his comedies, before 1590: we believe that he alone merited the high praise of Spenser; that it was meant for him.

Eight years after the publication of "The Tears of the Muses," died in an obscure lodging-house in King Street, Westminster, "the prince of poets," Edmund Spenser. Ben Jonson, says, "He died for lack of bread in King Street, and refused twenty pieces sent him by my Lord Essex, and said he was sorry he had no time to spend them." The lack of bread could scarcely be. He could only have been a very short time in London, where he came to seek that imperfect compensation which the

* See Mr. Collier's "Life of Shakespeare," published in 1844. The arguments which we employed were printed in the first edition of this "Biography,”—1843.

government might afford him for some of his wrongs. His house was burnt; his wife and two children had fled from those outrages which had made

"The cooly shade

Of the green alders by the Mulla's shore,"

a place of terror and fatal recollections; his infant had perished in the flames which destroyed his property. But it seems impossible that one in his social position could die for lack of bread. He died most probably of that which kills as surely as hunger-the "hysterica passio" of Lear. In a few days most of the illustrious band of writers would be gathered round Spenser's grave in Westminster Abbey: "his hearse attended by poets, and mournful elegies, and poems, with the pens that wrote them, thrown into his tomb."* One of the ablest writers of our day, in his quaint and pleasant "Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare," &c., says, "William Shakspeare was the only poet who abstained from throwing in either pen or poem, at which no one marvelled, he being of low estate, and the others not having yet taken him by the hand.' This is the language only of romance; for assuredly when Shakspere stood by the grave of Spenser, he of all the poets then living must have been held to be the head. He was the “pleasant Willie” of Spenser himself. Five years before, Spenser had also, without doubt, thus described him :—

Jonson says―

"And there, though last not least, is Aëtion;
A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found:
Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention,
Doth like himself heroically sound.” †

"He seems to shake a lance As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance."

Fuller compares him to the poet Martial, "in the warlike sound of his surname, whence some may conjecture him of a military extraction, hasti-vibrans, or Shakespeare." We cannot doubt of the allusion. He could not have meant to compare the poet with the Roman painter Aëtion. The fancy of Spenser might readily connect the "high thoughts" with the soaring eagle-derós-and we might almost fancy that there was some association of the image with Shakspere's armorial bearings— "his crest or cognizance, a falcon, his wings displayed."

* Camden.

"Colin Clout's come Home again," 1594.

JOHN STANHOPE, one of the gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, writes thus to Lord Talbot, in December, 1589:-"The Queen is so well as, I assure you, six or seven galliards in a morning, besides music and singing, is her ordinary exercise." * This letter is dated from Richmond. The magnificent palace which the grandfather of Elizabeth erected upon the ruins of the old palace of the Plantagenets was a favourite residence of the Queen. Here, where she danced her galliards, and made the courts harmonious with her music, she closed her life some ten years after,-not quite so deserted as was the great Edward upon the same spot, but the victim, in all probability, of blighted affections and unavailing regrets. Scarcely a vestige is now left of the second palace of Richmond. The splendid towers of Henry VII. have fallen; but the name which he gave to the site endures, and the natural beauty which fixed

* Lodge's "Illustrations," 4to., vol. ii., page 411.

here the old sovereigns of England, and which the people of all lands still come to gaze upon, is something which outlives the works of man, if not the memory of those works. In the Christmas of 1589 the Queen's players would be necessarily busy for the diversion of the Court. The records are lost which would show us at this period what were the precise performances offered to the Queen; and the imperfect registers of the Council, which detail certain payments for plays, do not at this date refer to payments to Shakspere's company. But there can be little doubt that the Lord Chamberlain's servants were more frequently called upon for her Majesty's solace than the Lord Admiral's men, or Lord Strange's men, or the Earl of Warwick's men, to whom payments are recorded at this period. It is impossible that the registers of the Council, as published originally by Chalmers, should furnish a complete account of the theatrical performances at Court; for there is no entry of any payment whatever for such performances, under the Council's warrant, between the 11th of March, 1593, and the 27th of November, 1597. The office-books of the Treasurers of the Chamber exhibit a greater blank at this time. We can have no doubt that the last decade of the sixteenth century was the most brilliant period of the regal patronage of the drama; the period when Shakspere, especially,

"Made those flights upon the banks of Thames"

to which Jonson has so emphatically alluded. That Shakspere was familiar with Richmond we can well believe. He and his fellows would unquestionably, at the

holiday seasons of Christmas and Shrovetide, be at the daily command of the Lord Chamberlain, and in attendance upon the Court wherever the Queen chose to dwell.