then often devolved on poets and dramatists. At length, when Lord Grey of Wilton was sent as Lord Deputy to Ireland, he became his secretary. Returning to England with the deputy after two years abroad, the poet received from the crown in June, 1586, a grant of land out of the forfeited domain of the Earl of Desmond in Ireland.

"When we remember," says Craik, "that letters as yet depended to a great extent for encouragement and support upon the patronage of the great, and that Spenser's scheme of life was, first of all, to procure for himself by any honorable means the leisure necessary to enable him to cultivate and employ his poetical powers, we shall not blame him for seeking such a provision as he required from the bounty of the crown. Spenser was not a mere dreamer, but a man of the largest sense and the most penetrating insight, of the most general research and information, capable of achieving any degree of success in any other field as well as in poetry; yet conscious of possessing 'the vision and the faculty divine,' he well knew that so endowed he might return to his country what she gave him a hundredfold, by conferring upon the land, the language, and the people what all future generations would prize as their best inheritance, and what would contribute more than laws or victories or any other glory to maintain the name of England in honor and renown so long as it should be heard among men."

As one of the conditions of the grant was that the poet should reside on his estate, he repaired to Ireland, and took up his abode in Kilcolman Castle, which had been one of the strongholds of the earls of Desmond. This castle, though its towers are now almost level with the ground, must ever be dear to the lovers of genius. stood in the midst of a large plain, by the side of a lake. The river Mulla ran through the poet's grounds, and a distant chain of mountains seemed to bulwark in the romantic retreat. Here Spenser is supposed to have written most of his "Faery Queen." Here he brought home his wife

It

Elizabeth, the proud beauty so long loved and so hardly won, who is said to have been the tenderest and most faithful of wives. Of all the sonnets addressed to her (and their name is legion), his reply when she confesses herself won, yet fears to relinquish her maiden freedom, is the most beautiful.

"The doubt that ye misdeem, fair one, is vain,
That fondly fear to lose your liberty;

When losing one, two liberties ye gain,

And make him bound that bondage erst did fly.
Sweet be the bands the which true love doth tie,
Without constraint, or dread of any ill;

The gentle bird feels no captivity

Within her cage, but sings, and feeds her fill.
There Pride dare not approach nor Discord spill
The league 'twixt them that loyal love hath bound;
But simple truth and mutual good-will

Seeks with sweet peace to salve each other's wound.
There Faith doth fearless dwell in brazen tower,
And spotless Pleasure builds her sacred bower."

About two years after this marriage Spenser was attacked in his castle by the jealous adherents of its former chief during the insurrection following Tyrone's Rebellion. The insurgents plundered and set fire to the castle. Spenser escaped with his Elizabeth, but a new-born infant, left behind in the confusion incident to such a calamity, perished in the flames. Impoverished and depressed by these calamities, the poet arrived in London in 1598, and died in about three months, on the 16th of January, 1599. It has been mistakenly stated that the author of the "Faery Queen" died of poverty and starvation. His death was doubtless the result of accumulated misfortune upon a spirit too finely touched for mortal combat with woe and ill; yet he was not without the certainty of a decent subsistence. "His annual pension," observes Todd, "of

fifty pounds, granted by Queen Elizabeth, was a sum by no means inconsiderable in those days; and we may at least believe that a plundered servant of the crown would not pass unnoticed by the government either in regard to permanent compensation or to immediate relief if requisite." His funeral was ordered at the charge of the Earl of Essex, which mark of that generous nobleman's respect has been erroneously cited as a proof of the poet's extreme indigence. His hearse was attended and the pall upborne by the poets of the time, while mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, were thrown into his tomb.

Spenser had that high opinion of his own art without which no man can be a true poet. Poetry was with him the great business of his life; and it has been remarked of him that "he approached the composition of the 'Faery Queen' with a seriousness of resolve not unlike that solemn mood of mind in which Milton has told us that he himself meditated upon the plan of the Paradise Lost.'" His works show him to have been a man of great delicacy of organization, with a magnetic sensitiveness to all impressions of beauty, and clearly evince the purity and elevation of his moral nature and the depth and fervor of his religious principles.

The subject which he selected for his great work, though not in accordance with the formal epic model, was peculiarly adapted to the fanciful and romantic character of his mind. Though he borrowed freely from other poets and drew abundantly from the copious stores of both classical and romantic literature, it may still be said of him that he is strictly original and never a servile imitator.

The "Faery Queen" appeared in January, 1589. Its adaptation to the court and times of the Virgin Queen as well as the intrinsic beauty and excellence of the poem, insured it an enthusiastic reception. It was designed by its author

to be taken as an allegory or "dark conceit," as he calls it in his letter to Raleigh, explaining the nature and plan of the work. He states his object to be "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline," and that he had chosen Prince Arthur for his hero. He conceives that prince to have beheld the Faery Queen in a dream, and to have been so enamoured of the vision that on awakening he resolved to set forth and seek her in Faeryland.

The poet further devises that the Faery Queen keep her annual feast twelve days, twelve separate adventures happening in that time, and each of them being undertaken by a knight.

The adventures were also to express the same number of moral virtues. The Red-cross Knight expresses Holiness; Sir Guyon, Temperance; Britomartis, Chastity. The adventures of the Red-cross Knight shadow forth the history of the Church of England; the distressed knight is Henry IV., and Envy is intended to glance at the unfortunate Mary Queen of Scots. The Queen Gloriana and the Huntress Belphobe are both symbolical of Queen Elizabeth, whom, as Belphoebe, Spenser thus daintily describes :

"Her ivorye forehead full of bountie brave,
Like a broad table did itself dispred,
For love his loftie triumphes to engrave,
And write the battailes of his great god head.

All good and honour might therein be red;

For there their dwelling was. And when she spake,
Sweet wordes, like dropping honey, she did shed,

And 'twixt the perles and rubins softly brake

A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make."

In this extract may be seen the dainty luxuriousness of Spenser as a descriptive poet and his richness of fancy and sweetness of conception; yet with all due deference to the

best of poets, one cannot refrain from contrasting in imagination with this flowery ideal a matter-of-fact picture of England's maiden royalty. Behold a stately spinster of fifty-five; her head adorned with reddish hair, a snowstorm of powder and a pyramid of crowns towering upward from the vasty depths of a huge ruff, like the Sphinx asserting itself through the encroaching sands of an Egyptian desert; her tall majesty encased in the stubbornest of hoops, in comparison with which our modern crinoline is doubtless undulating, and "yclad in her purple gown of cloth of gold," tricked out in miscellaneous showers of "golden agulets, tortoise-shaped buttons, enamelled oak-leaves and acorns," "so indifferently stitched on," says the historian," that her Highness is said always to have returned minus a portion, whenever she appeared in public,” — which -important loss was thus recorded in the court memorandum, "Lost from her Majesty's back, on the 14th of May, Anno 21, one small acorn and one leaf of gold, at Westminster." Behold her thus behind a huge fan of red and white feathers, "having her Majesty's picture within, and on the reverse a device with a crow over it," and hear on fit occasions, issuing from the sweet lips among the poet's "dropping honey, 'twixt the perles and rubins," a good round oath or two; behold the "ivory forehead, full of bountie brave," distorted with rage, the "majestie and awful ire," mounting into uncontrollable fury till this daughter of Henry VIII. falls down in a fit, from which only vinegar and stimulants, it is said, could revive her; and looking on this picture and then on Spenser's rare portrait, we may at least give the limner credit for "poetic license." We shall, however, be less inclined to censure him as a sycophant when we remember that many good and wise men were guilty of the same folly, for flattery was the current coin at the court of Elizabeth. Yet over the faults and follies of this dead queen let us kindly throw the veil of charity, since underlying