n _Spenser
and his Poetry_.

R. W. C.

_March, 1879._

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
PAGE
SPENSER'S EARLY LIFE (1552-1579) 1

CHAPTER II.

THE NEW POET--THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR (1579) 29

CHAPTER III.

SPENSER IN IRELAND (1580) 51

CHAPTER IV.

THE FAERY QUEEN--THE FIRST PART (1580-1590) 81

CHAPTER V.

THE FAERY QUEEN 118

CHAPTER VI.

SECOND PART OF THE FAERY QUEEN--SPENSER'S LAST
YEARS (1590-1599) 166

SPENSER.

CHAPTER I.

SPENSER'S EARLY LIFE.

[1552-1579.]

Spenser marks a beginning in English literature. He is the first
Englishman who, in that great division of our history which dates from
the Reformation, attempted and achieved a poetical work of the highest
order. Born about the same time as Hooker (1552-1554), in the middle of
that eventful century which began with Henry VIII., and ended with
Elizabeth, he was the earliest of our great modern writers in poetry, as
Hooker was the earliest of our great modern writers in prose. In that
reviving English literature, which, after Chaucer's wonderful promise,
had been arrested in its progress, first by the Wars of the Roses, and
then by the religious troubles of the Reformation, these two were the
writers who first realized to Englishmen the ideas of a high literary
perfection. These ideas vaguely filled many minds; but no one had yet
shown the genius and the strength to grasp and exhibit them in a way to
challenge comparison with what had been accomplished by the poetry and
prose of Greece, Rome, and Italy. There had been poets in England since
Chaucer, and prose writers since Wycliffe had translated the Bible.
Surrey and Wyatt have deserved to live, while a crowd of poets, as
ambitious as they, and not incapable of occasional force and sweetness,
have been forgotten. Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, Tyndale, the
translator of the New Testament, Bishop Latimer, the writers of many
state documents, and the framers, either by translation or composition,
of the offices of the English Prayer Book, showed that they understood
the power of the English language over many of the subtl