nserian
stanza, which has been imitated by many great poets since, and by Byron,
the greatest of them, in his Childe Harold. Of his language it has already
been said that he designedly uses the archaic, or that of Chaucer; or, as
Pope has said,

Spenser himself affects the obsolete.

The plan of the poem, neglecting the unities of an epic, is like that of a
general history, rambling and desultory, or like the transformations of a
fairy tale, as it is: his descriptions are gorgeous, his verse exceedingly
melodious, and his management of it very graceful. The Gerusalemme
Liberata of Tasso appeared while he was writing the Faery Queene, and he
imitated portions of that great epic in his own, but his imitations are
finer than the original.

HIS OTHER WORKS.--His other works need not detain us: Hymns in honor of
Love and Beauty, Prothalamion, and Epithalamion, Mother Hubbard's Tale,
Amoretti or Sonnets, The Tears of the Muses or Brittain's Ida, are little
read at the present day. His Astrophel is a tender "pastoral elegie" upon
the death of the most noble and valorous knight, Sir Philip Sidney; and is
better known for its subject than for itself. This was a favorite theme of
the friendly and sensitive poet; he has also written several elegies and
aeglogues in honor of Sidney.

SPENSER'S FATE.--The fate of Spenser is a commentary upon courtiership,
even in the reign of Elizabeth, the Faery Queene. Her requital of his
adoration was an annual pension of fifty pounds, and the ruined castle and
unprofitable estate of Kilcolman in Ireland, among a half-savage
population, in a period of insurrections and massacres, with the
requirement that he should reside upon his grant. An occasional visit from
Raleigh, then a captain in the army, a rambler along the banks of the
picturesque Mulla, and the composition and arrangement of the great poem
with the suggestions of his friend, were at once his labors and his only
recreations. He sighed after the court, and considered himself as hardly
used by the queen.

At length an insurrection broke out, and his home was set on fire: he fled
from his flaming castle, and in the confusion his infant child was left
behind and burned to death. A few months after, he died in London, on
January 16, 1598-9, broken-hearted and poor, at an humble tavern, in King
Street. Buried at the expense of the Earl of Essex, Ann Countess of Dorset
bore the expense of his monument in Westminster Abbey, in gra