d to put side by side with
"that good old poet," Chaucer, the "loadstar of our language." The other
point is the absolute reliance which he places on the powers of the
English language, handled by one who has discerned its genius, and is
not afraid to use its wealth. "In my opinion, it is one praise of many,
that are due to this poet, that he hath laboured to restore, as to their
rightful heritage, such good and natural English words, as have been
long time out of use, or almost clean disherited, which is the only
cause, that our mother tongue, which truly of itself is both full enough
for prose, and stately enough for verse, hath long time been counted
most bare and barren of both." The friends, Kirke and Harvey, were not
wrong in their estimate of the importance of Spenser's work. The "new
poet," as he came to be customarily called, had really made one of those
distinct steps in his art, which answer to discoveries and inventions in
other spheres of human interest--steps which make all behind them seem
obsolete and mistaken. There was much in the new poetry which was
immature and imperfect, not a little that was fantastic and affected.
But it was the first adequate effort of reviving English poetry.

The _Shepherd's Calendar_ consists of twelve compositions, with no other
internal connexion than that they are assigned respectively to the
twelve months of the year. They are all different in subject, metre,
character, and excellence. They are called _AEglogues_, according to the
whimsical derivation adopted from the Italians of the word which the
classical writers called Eclogues: "_AEglogai_, as it were =aigon= or
=aigonomon logoi=, that is, Goatherd's Tales." The book is in its form
an imitation of that highly artificial kind of poetry which the later
Italians of the Renaissance had copied from Virgil, as Virgil had copied
it from the Sicilian and Alexandrian Greeks, and to which had been given
the name of Bucolic or Pastoral. Petrarch, in imitation of Virgil, had
written Latin Bucolics, as he had written a Latin Epic, his _Africa_. He
was followed in the next century by Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516), the
"old Mantuan," of Holofernes in _Love's Labour's Lost_, whose Latin
"Eglogues" became a favourite school-book in England, and who was
imitated by a writer who passed for a poet in the time of Henry VIII.,
Alexander Barclay. In the hands of the Sicilians, pastoral poetry may
have been an attempt at idealizing country