hemes peculiarly congenial to its taste,
received in all its plenitude that homage of contemporary applause which
has sometimes failed to reward the efforts of the noblest masters of the
lyre. The adventures of chivalry, and the dim shadowings of moral
allegory, were almost equally the delight of a romantic, a serious and a
learned age. It was also a point of loyalty to admire in Gloriana queen
of Faery, or in the empress Mercilla, the avowed types of the graces and
virtues of her majesty; and she herself had discernment sufficient to
distinguish between the brazen trump of vulgar flattery with which her
ear was sated, and the pastoral reed of antique frame tuned sweetly to
her praise by Colin Clout. Spenser was interred with great solemnity in
Westminster abbey by the side of Chaucer; the generous Essex defraying
the cost of the funeral and walking himself as a mourner. That
ostentatious but munificent woman Anne countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and
Montgomery, erected a handsome monument to his memory several years
afterwards; the brother-poets who attended his obsequies threw elegies
and sonnets into the grave; and of the more distinguished votaries of
the muse in that day there is scarcely one who has withheld his tribute
to the fame and merit of this delightful author. Shakespeare in one of
his sonnets had already testified his high delight in his works; Joseph
Hall, afterwards eminent as a bishop, a preacher, and polemic, but at
this time a young student of Emanuel college, has more than one
complimentary allusion to the poems of Spenser in his "Toothless
Satires" printed in 1597. Thus, in the invocation to his first satire,
referring to Spenser's description of the marriage of the Thames and
Medway, he inquires,

..."what baser Muse can bide
To sit and sing by Granta's naked side?
They haunt the tided Thames and salt Medway,
E'er since the fame of their late bridal day.
Nought have we here but willow-shaded shore,
To tell our Grant his banks are left forlore."

And again, in ridiculing the imitation of some of the more extravagant
fictions of the Orlando Furioso, he thus suddenly checks himself;

"But let no rebel satyr dare traduce
Th' eternal legends of thy faery muse,
Renowned Spenser! whom no earthly wight
Dares once to emulate, much less dares despight.
Salust of France[127] and Tuscan Ariost,
Yield up the laurel garland ye have lost."

[Note 127: Du Bartas