tern of the true and
faithful Christian pastor. And if Pembroke Hall retained at all the tone
and tendencies of such masters as Ridley, Grindal, and Whitgift, the
school in which Spenser grew up was one of their mitigated puritanism.
But his puritanism was political and national, rather than religious. He
went heartily with the puritan party in their intense hatred of Rome and
Roman partisans; he went with them also in their denunciations of the
scandals and abuses of the ecclesiastical government at home. But in
temper of mind and intellectual bias he had little in common with the
puritans. For the stern austerities of Calvinism, its fierce and eager
scholasticism, its isolation from human history, human enjoyment, and
all the manifold play and variety of human character, there could not be
much sympathy in a man like Spenser, with his easy and flexible nature,
keenly alive to all beauty, an admirer even when he was not a lover of
the alluring pleasures of which the world is full, with a perpetual
struggle going on in him, between his strong instincts of purity and
right, and his passionate appreciation of every charm and grace. He
shows no signs of agreement with the internal characteristics of the
puritans, their distinguishing theology, their peculiarities of thought
and habits, their protests, right or wrong, against the fashions and
amusements of the world. If not a man of pleasure, he yet threw himself
without scruple into the tastes, the language, the pursuits, of the gay
and gallant society in which they saw so much evil: and from their
narrow view of life, and the contempt, dislike, and fear, with which
they regarded the whole field of human interest, he certainly was parted
by the widest gulf. Indeed, he had not the sternness and concentration
of purpose, which made Milton the great puritan poet.

Spenser took his Master's degree in 1576, and then left Cambridge. He
gained no Fellowship, and there is nothing to show how he employed
himself. His classical learning, whether acquired there or elsewhere,
was copious, but curiously inaccurate; and the only specimen remaining
of his Latin composition in verse is contemptible in its mediaeval
clumsiness. We know nothing of his Cambridge life except the friendships
which he formed there. An intimacy began at Cambridge of the closest and
most affectionate kind, which lasted long into after-life, between him
and two men of his college, one older in standing than himself