ings, as also the great 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
mixture of verse and prose, setting forth in general, 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
compositions which we know of Spenser's. Among 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 him
"out of the Brabants speech," and "out of Dutch into English." 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 rimed as sonnets; but the change
does not destroy the manifest identity of the two translations. So that
unless Spenser's publisher, to whom the poet had certainly given some of
his genuine 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 rime, the Dutchman who dates his _Theatre of Worldlings_ on the
25th May, 1569, must have employed the promising and fluent school boy,
to furnish him with an English 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 from Petrarch are
translated with much command of language; there occurs in them, what was
afterwards a favourite thought 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 so much as he has done of the spirit of