friend Sidney, or the great court favourite Leicester.

It has long been a received opinion that Spenser was nominated Poet Laureate before 1586; and this appears to have some countenance from the writings of some of his contemporaries.Nash, in particular, in his supplication of Pierce Pennilesse, published in 1586, says that he intended to "decipher the excesse of gluttonie at large, but that a new Laureat saved him the labor," evidently alluding to " the gulfe of greedinesse" described in Spenser's Faeirie Queene.

But the real fact is as Mr. Malone has stated; "Elizabeth had no poet-laureat till in February, 1590-1, she conferred on Spenser a pension of fifty pounds a year, the grant of which was discovered some years ago in the chapel of the Rolls; from which time to his death in 1598-9, he may properly be considered as filling this office, though like most of his predecessors, and his two immediate successors, he is not expressly styled Laureate in his patent.*

Here Spenser's biographer introduces the well known story of the laureate and the lord treasurer Burleigh, as follows: "that Burleigh told the queen the pension was beyond example, and too great to be given to a ballad maker; that the payment of the pension was intercepted by Burleigh; that when the queen, upon Spenser's

* Malone's Life of Dryden, p. 84.

presenting

presenting some poems to her, ordered him the gratuity of an hundred pounds, his lordship asked with some contempt of the poet, "What all this for a song?" And that the queen replied, "then give him what is reason;" that Spenser having long waited in vain for the fulfilment of the royal order, presented to her Majesty these

verses:

I was promis'd on a time

To have reason for my rhime;
From that time unto this season,

I've received nor rhime nor reason.

It is added, that these magical numbers produced the desired effect, in the immediate direction of payment to the insulted poet, as well as in the reproof of the adverse lord treasurer.

Such, says Mr. Todd, is the substance of this marvellous opposition to the privilege conferred on Spenser by Elizabeth, varied and improved by the biographers, of which opposition the account originates it seems in the facetious Dr. Fuller's Worthies of England (a work published at the distance of more than seventy years afterwards) unsupported by requisite authority."

The ingenious editor very strangely mentions in opposition to this story, the silence of Puttenham in his Art of English Poesie, which writer, he thinks, would not have failed to celebrate

*Life of Spenser, prefixed to his Works.