Ireland_ sticking in their stomachs, drove Spenser out of doors and
burnt his house, one of his children, as tradition has it, dying in the
fire. He fled to England, and died some three months later in January,
1599, as Ben Jonson says, 'of lack of bread.'

During the last four or five years of his life he had seen, without
knowing that he saw it, the beginning of the great Elizabethan poetical
movement. In 1598 he had pictured the Nine Muses lamenting each one
over the evil state in England, of the things that she had in charge,
but, like William Blake's more beautiful _Whether on Ida's shady brow_,
their lamentations should have been a cradle-song. When he died _Romeo
and Juliet_, _Richard III._, and _Richard II._, and the plays of Marlowe
had all been acted, and in stately houses were sung madrigals and love
songs whose like has not been in the world since. Italian influence had
strengthened the old French joy that had never died out among the upper
classes, and an art was being created for the last time in England which
had half its beauty from continually suggesting a life hardly less
beautiful than itself.

III

When Spenser was buried at Westminster Abbey many poets read verses in
his praise, and then threw their verses and the pens that had written
them into his tomb. Like him they belonged, for all the moral zeal that
was gathering like a London fog, to that indolent, demonstrative Merry
England that was about to pass away. Men still wept when they were
moved, still dressed themselves in joyous colours, and spoke with many
gestures. Thoughts and qualities sometimes come to their perfect
expression when they are about to pass away, and Merry England was dying
in plays, and in poems, and in strange adventurous men. If one of those
poets who threw his copy of verses into the earth that was about to
close over his master were to come alive again, he would find some
shadow of the life he knew, though not the art he knew, among young men
in Paris, and would think that his true country. If he came to England
he would find nothing there but the triumph of the Puritan and the
merchant--those enemies he had feared and hated--and he would weep
perhaps, in that womanish way of his, to think that so much greatness
had been, not as he had hoped, the dawn, but the sunset of a people. He
had lived in the last days of what we may call the Anglo-French nation,
the old feudal nation that had been established when the Norman a