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hands of her people. To such as bade God save her Grace!' she said again, ‘God save them all!' so that on either side there was nothing but gladness, nothing but prayer, nothing but comfort.”

:

Such was the fit opening of a reign for which was reserved a glory which shall fade only with the world itself, the glory that rose upon our race in the genius of Edmund Spenser and William Shakspeare. To the period usually comprehended in what is styled the age of Queen Elizabeth, no less than about two hundred poets are assigned by a catalogue which by high authority is thought not to exceed the true number. With reference to English literature, we speak of the age of Queen Elizabeth; but it is proper to discriminate, by noticing that there was in this particular a decided contrast between the early and late portion of the reign, and that it is only the last half to which this lustre properly belongs. It is this consideration which alone enables us to reconcile with a true estimate of the times Sir Philip Sydney's earnest complaint of the degraded condition of poetry. It was during the last twenty years of the reign that the flood of poetic light burst in the large luminary of Spenser's genius had scarce mounted high enough above the horizon for its beams to kindle all they touched, when there arose the still more glorious shape of Shakspeare's imagination, like Milton's seraplı,-" another morn risen on mid-noon." In treating of this period of literature, the nature of these lectures will oblige me to limit my views to these two poets, the matchless types of their age, while, in doing so, I must pass in silence by not a few whose fame would have shone more brightly in a less perfect day. There was much to make the age eminently propitious to a great intellectual development. The language had gradually reached its full stature. It was not only adequate to the common wants of speech, but it was affluent in expressions which had become incorporated with it from the literature of antiquity. Classical learning in its best forms had been made, as it were, part of the modern mind of Europe; and in England, under Elizabeth, the great universities, which during the immediate previous reigns suffered from violence, which had pierced even those tranquil abodes, were gathering anew their scattered forces. The attainments of the queen herself, acquired by the superior education which Henry VIII. had the sagacity to give his daughters (and, as it is one of the few good things to be said of him, let us not pass it by), created a sympathy, one of many, between her and the people. Besides the treasures of classical literature, necessarily limited somewhat to the learned, there was scattered through the realm a literature familiar to the popular mind, the Gothic, as distinguished from classical lore, the

early metrical romance, the ballads, and the minstrelsy in all its forms, -tales told by the fireside in the long English winter evenings, and songs sung, as Shakspeare tells us, by women, as they sat spinning and weaving in the sun. The civil and religious condition of the country furnished another impulse to its mental advancement, for it abounded with all that could cheer and animate a nation's heart. There was the repose from the agony of ecclesiastical persecution, and it mattered little what might be the foreign danger; for there was the proud sense of national independence and national power,-its moral force mightier than even its physical. The spiritual communion with Rome was broken for ever, and England was once more standing on the foundations of its ancient British church. The Thames, his tide no longer governed by the distant waves of Tiber, glided at his own sweet will." The language, I have remarked, was enriched by phraseology of classical origin; but it had also gained what was more precious than aught that could come from the domains of extinct paganism. The word of God had taken the form of English words, and thus a sacred glory was reflected upon the language itself. The fitness of the language for versification had been greatly developed by the refinement and multiplicity of its metres, so that the rich and varied melody of English words became audible as the ancient rudeness of early dialects was cleared away.

دو

The life of Edmund Spenser was nearly coïncident with the last half of the sixteenth century. Born in 1553, he died in 1598. The work which won for him rank among the poets was the now almost-forgotten poem entitled "The Shepherd's Calendar,' -a series of twelve eclogues adapted to the twelve months of the year. Having closed his collegiate career at Cambridge, he dwelt for about the space of two years in the north of England, perhaps in the region whence in this century has issued so noble a strain of poetry. One proof of the poetic temperament was here given in his susceptibility to the attractions of a fair one, immortalized, though unrelenting, under the fanciful name of Rosalind. The suit, though unsuccessful, stands recorded in as sweet a line as ever told a poet's love: he

"Woo'd the widow'd daughter of the glenne."

The opening of Spenser's literary career strikes me as eminently characteristic of his gentle spirit; for there was all the modesty of genius, conscious of powers already proved by retired efforts and whispering to itself mightier achievements in days to come, and yet withal timid in trusting to the world's rude handling its secret communings with the Muse. There was no precipitancy in rushing into the arena

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of authorship. Not till about his twenty-seventh year was his first poem published; and then it came forth without his name, dedicated in the feigned and humble signature," Immerito," to Sir Philip Sydney:"Goe, little booke; thyselfe present,

As childe whose parent is unkent,
To him that is the president
Of noblenesse and chivalrie;
And if that Envie barke at thee,

As sure it will, for succour flee
Under the shadow of his wing."

The dread of malignant tongues or of unimaginative indifference, painfully as they seem to have presented themselves to the poet's sensitive apprehensions, was not strong enough to silence the voice of his genius, which sought utterance, as genius always speaks, alone from its own inward promptings :

"For, pyping low in shade of lowly grove,

I play to please myselfe, all be it ill."

He sent forth the "Calendar" not in boastful emulation of more famous productions which had preceded it, not to gain indiscriminate applause, but the esteem of the wise and good of his own day by its deferential imitation of those whom he looked up to as the masters of English song:

-

"Followe them farre off, and their high steps addore;
The better please, the worse despise: I ask no more."

The aspirations of Spenser did not fail; he acquired not the mere favour, not the mere patronage, but that which comprehended both,―— the friendship of a great and a good man, that model of the perfect gentleman in a state of society where somewhat of the spirit of chivalry was passing away, with its forms, and giving place to the habits of more modern days,-Sir Philip Sydney.

"The Shepherd's Calendar" is a pastoral in little more than name; for, containing but few descriptive passages, either of the seasons or of natural scenery, it is in a great measure made up of allegorical allusions to the political history and religious differences of his own times,—the clergy of the Roman Catholic and Protestant communions being respectively portrayed under the transparent guise of two classes of shepherds. The reader of early English poetry will find in these eclogues two fables-" The Oak and the Bramble" and "The Kid and the Fox"-not surpassed in any period of our literature for the graceful pleasantry essential to that species of composition. It is worthy of

remark, that the phraseology of the “Calendar" ́is much antiquated
beyond the time of its author,—so much so as to require at the date of
its publication an explanatory glossary. This may be attributed partly
to a desire common to poets of various ages, to give a kind of quaint
dignity to their effusions by removing them from the familiarity of
contemporary speech; such, for instance, as the slightly-obsolete language
affected by Lord Byron in the first books of "Childe Harold." It
may also be traced to the instinctive disgust with the fashionable style
of the pastoral poetry in vogue throughout Europe, in which the
thoughts and the expressions of courtiers and scholars were, in a
language inflated, pedantic, and over-refined, put in the mouths of
shepherds,- -a false taste censured in one of his other poems :-
:-

"Heapes of hughe wordes uphoorded hidiously,
With horrid sound, though having little sense,
They thinke to be chiefe praise of Poetry;
And thereby, wanting due intelligence,
Have marr'd the face of goodly Poesie

And made a monster of their fantasie."

In shunning this error and aiming at a Doric simplicity, the author of "The Shepherd's Calendar" ran into the opposite extreme of un. couth rusticity. This poem may be regarded as experimental of the author's powers and of the capacity of his countrymen to receive him. Ten years elapsed before it was followed by the great work on which his fame rests. During this interval the genial influence of Sydney's friendship was shed on Spenser's spirit, inspiring him to loftier efforts than his unpretending pastorals. If ever poet had reason to thank God for the gift of a true friend, it was the author of the "Fairy Queen." The chief value of Sydney's friendship was in the intellectual sympathy it gave to one who seems to have borne his genius meekly on him. It also brought the royal patronage; and Spenser accompanied to Ireland the lord-lieutenant, the good Lord Gray, as his secretary, in which capacity he rendered services on which was conferred the grant of a large tract of land, taken from the forfeited estates of one of the Irish earls, subject, however, to the condition of cultivation and consequently personal obedience to the proprietor. For several years Spenser's dwelling-place was the ruined castle of Kilcolman, on the banks of the river Mulla, commemorated in his poems. The real value, to a scholar, of his three thousand Irish acres cannot easily be judged of; but when I consider that the English dominion over Ireland was at that time maintained only by dint of military occupation, the country, with all its goodly lakes and fair islands, swarming with the fierce untamable na

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tives, lawless, revengeful, and treacherous, sparing no peaceful house-
hold, the land devastated, dwellings plundered and in flames, the
churches in ruins, and religion depraved, it seems to me that the royal
bounty to the poet might not unfairly be likened to a plantation in Cen-
tral Florida,-
‚—as fair a region as fiercely tenanted by the prowling bands
of Indians, scarce more ferocious than the native Irish whom Queen
Elizabeth spent her thousands sterling to subdue. In Spenser's well-
written prose treatise on the state of Ireland he says, "At the execution
of a notable traitor I saw an old woman, which was his foster-mother,
take up his head, while he was quartered, and suck up all the blood
that ran thereout, saying, 'This earth was not worthy to drink it,' and
therewith also steeped her face and breast and tore her hair, crying out
and shrieking most terribly." When, in his immortal allegory, he de-
scribes the abode of Temperance," a goodly castle, plaste foreby a
river, in a pleasant dale, and the bruitish rabble that beleagured it,"-
"Loe; with outrageous cry,

A thousand villeins round about them swarm'd
Out of the rockes and caves adjoining nye :-
Vile caitive wretches, ragged, rude, deform'd
All threatning death, all in strange manner arm'd:
Some with unwieldy clubs, some with long speares,
Some rusty knives, some staves in fier warm'd.

Sterne was their looke; like wild amazed steares,

Staring with hollow eies and stiffe upstanding heares."

In all this the imagination may have contented itself with the mere function of the eye looking from the ruined turrets of Kilcolman Castle. It was uncouth society and a strange abiding-place for the gentle spirit of Edmund Spenser to be consigned to; but he has left, in the prose treatise just referred to, proof that he contemplated the evil plight of that ill-fated island with a manly spirit; and we find not the petty querulousness of his personal grievances, but a patriotic zeal in the service of his sovereign and a Christian hopefulness to better the condition of his fellow-men. If the natives were savage and debased, the face of nature in the Green Isle was happy and smiling; and happier and brighter still was the country into which the poet's imagination gained entrance, the sunny, shadowy vales, the fair lakes, with their floating islands, the delectable mountains, of Faery Land. Looking upon the royal bounty to Spenser as little better than virtual banishment from all he held dear in his native land, I feel sometimes inclined to regard Queen Bess as a heartless pedant, craving adulation and yet ready to remove from her English realm its brightest ornament. But Spenser had not achieved the work which has endeared him to after-times; and,