Petrarch without having
been able to read the Italian original; and if Spenser was the
translator, it is a curious illustration of the fashionableness 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 master, is said by Warton to have given special attention
to the teaching of the English language.

If these translations were Spenser's, he must have gone to Cambridge
with a faculty of verse, which for his time may be compared to that with
which winners of prize poems go to the universities now. But there was
this difference, that the school-boy versifiers of our days are rich
with the accumulated experience and practice of the most varied and
magnificent 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 removed from the living language of the day. Even Milton, in
his boyish compositions, wrote after Spenser and Shakespeare, with their
contemporaries, had created modern English poetry. Whatever there was in
Spenser's early verses of grace and music was of his own finding: 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 excitement,
troublesome and mutinous. Whitgift, 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 from the Margaret Professor's chair was teaching the
exclusive and divine claims of the Geneva platform of discipline, and in
defiance of the bishops and the government was denouncing the received
Church polity and ritual as