Popish and anti-Christian. Cartwright, an
extreme and uncompromising man, was deprived in 1570; but the course
which things were taking under the influence of Rome and Spain gave
force to his lessons and warnings, and strengthened his party. In this
turmoil of opinions, amid these hard and technical debates, these fierce
conflicts between the highest authorities, and this unsparing violence
and bitterness of party recriminations, Spenser, with the tastes and
faculties of a poet, and the love not only of what was beautiful, but of
what was meditative and dreamy, began his university life.

It was not a favourable atmosphere for the nurture of a great poet. But
it suited one side of Spenser's mind, as it suited that of all but the
most independent Englishmen of the time, Shakespere, Bacon, Ralegh.
Little is known of Spenser's Cambridge career. It is probable, from the
persons with whom he was connected, that he would not be indifferent to
the debates around him, and that his religious prepossessions were then,
as afterwards, in favour of the conforming puritanism in the Church, as
opposed to the extreme and thorough-going puritanism of Cartwright. Of
the conforming puritans, who would have been glad of a greater
approximation to the Swiss model, but who, whatever their private wishes
or dislikes, thought it best, for good reasons or bad, to submit to the
strong determination of the government against it, and to accept what
the government approved and imposed, Grindal, who held successively the
great sees of London, York, and Canterbury, and Nowell, Dean of St.
Paul's, Spenser's benefactor, were representative types. Grindal, a
waverer like many others in opinion, had also a noble and manly side to
his character, in his hatred of practical abuses, and in the courageous
and obstinate resistance which he could offer to power, when his sense
of right was outraged. Grindal, as has been said, was perhaps
instrumental in getting Spenser into his own old college, Pembroke Hall,
with the intention, it may be, as was the fashion of bishops of that
time, of becoming his patron. But certainly after his disgrace in 1577,
and when it was not quite safe to praise a great man under the
displeasure of the Court, Grindal is the person whom Spenser first
singled out for his warmest and heartiest praise. He is introduced under
a thin disguise, "Algrind," in Spenser's earliest work after he left
Cambridge, the _Shepherd's Calendar_, as the pat