n he also delivered to him now or later 'the meaning of the
Allegory in papers.' The poem enchanted the visitor, who offered to
become the author's sponsor to Elizabeth. Together, if Colin Clout is to
be believed, they crossed the sea, and repaired to the Court. There--

The Shepheard of the Ocean--quoth he--
Unto that Goddesse grace me first enhanced,
And to my oaten pipe enclin'd her eare.

The first three books of the _Faerie Queene_ were published early in
1590, with an expository letter from the most humbly affectionate author
to the Right Noble and Valorous Sir Walter Ralegh. First of all the
copies of commendatory verses prefixed to the poems stood two signed
W.R.

Spenser, in _Colin Clout_, lauded Ralegh as a poet:--

Full sweetly tempered is that Muse of his,
That can empierce a Princes mightie hart.

[Sidenote:_Cynthia._]

[Sidenote:_Date of the Poem._]

Ralegh must have shown him part of a poem addressed to Elizabeth as
Cynthia, and estimated to have contained as many as 15,000 lines when
completed, if ever. This prodigious elegy was never published by Ralegh,
and no entire manuscript of it is known to exist. Some years ago a paper
was found in the Hatfield collection, endorsed as 'in Sir Walter's own
hand.' The handwriting resembles that of Ralegh in 1603. It comprises
altogether 568 verses. Two short poems, of seven and fourteen lines,
come first; and the manuscript terminates with an unfinished poem of
seven stanzas in a variety of terza rima. The body of the contents
consists of 526 elegiac verses, described in the manuscript as 'The
twenty-first and last book of the Ocean, to Cynthia.' Archdeacon Hannah,
in his _Courtly Poets from Ralegh to Montrose_, concludes, with some
hesitation, that the whole was composed as a sequel, between 1603 and
1612, to a much earlier poem. He sees in it allusions to the death of
the Queen, which would more or less fix the date. Mr. Edmund Gosse, in
the _Athenaeum_, in January, 1886, has contested that hypothesis. He
thinks, in the first place, that the twenty-one lines which precede, and
the twenty-one which follow, the so-called twenty-first book, have no
relation to the poem of _Cynthia_. The rest he holds to be not a
continuation of _Cynthia_, but an integral portion of the original work.
That work, as a whole, he has convinced himself, was produced during the
author's transient disgrace, between August, 1589, and its end, which
may be taken