say, and yet I will not say that I thought, but there is an
end for this once, and fare you well, till God or some good
angel put you in a better mind.

It is plain on which side Spenser's own judgement inclined. He had
probably written the comedies, as he had written English hexameters, out
of deference to others, or to try his hand. But the current of his own
secret thoughts, those thoughts, with their ideals and aims, which tell
a man what he is made for, and where his power lies, set another way.
The _Fairy Queen was_ 'fairer in his eye than the Nine Muses, and
Hobgoblin did run away with the garland from Apollo.' What Gabriel
Harvey prayed for as the 'better mind' did not come. And we cannot
repine at a decision which gave us, in the shape which it took at last,
the allegory of the _Fairy Queen_.

But the _Fairy Queen_, though already planned and perhaps begun, belongs
to the last ten years of the century, to the season of fulfilment not of
promise, to the blossoming, not to the opening bud. The new hopes for
poetry which Spenser brought were given in a work, which the _Fairy
Queen_ has eclipsed and almost obscured, as the sun puts out the morning
star. Yet that which marked a turning-point in the history of our
poetry, was the book which came out, timidly and anonymously, in the end
of 1579, or the beginning of 1580, under the borrowed title of the
_Shepherd's Calendar_, a name familiar in those days as that of an early
medley of astrology and homely receipts from time to time reprinted,
which was the Moore's or Zadkiel's almanac of the time. It was not
published ostensibly by Spenser himself, though it is inscribed to
Philip Sidney in a copy of verses signed with Spenser's masking name of
_Immerito_. The avowed responsibility for it might have been
inconvenient for a young man pushing his fortune among the cross
currents of Elizabeth's court. But it was given to the world by a friend
of the author's, signing himself E. K., now identified with Spenser's
fellow-student at Pembroke, Edward Kirke, who dedicates it in a long,
critical epistle of some interest to the author's friend, Gabriel
Harvey, and after the fashion of some of the Italian books of poetry,
accompanies it with a gloss, explaining words, and to a certain extent,
allusions. Two things are remarkable in Kirke's epistle. One is the
confidence with which he announces the yet unrecognized excellence of
"this one new poet," whom he is not afrai