What battells eke atchieved did he tell!
And but my minde was fixt immovablie
Never with wight in wedlocke for to joine,
Sithe my first love me lefte by deth disseverid,
Yf bridal bowndes and bed me lothed not,
To this one fawlt perchannce yeet might I yeld;
For I will graunt sith wretched Syche's dethe,
My spouse and hawse with brother slaughter stained,
This onley man hath made my senses bend,
And pricketh forthe the mind that gan to slide:
Feelinglie I taste the steppes of mine old flame.
But first I wishe the erth me swallow downe,
Or with thunder the mighty Lord me send
To the pale gostes of hell and darkness depe,
Or I thee stayne shamefastness, or the lawes."
If we turn to Sackville's "Gorboduc," acted before Queen Elizabeth in 1561, we shall see how thoroughly blank verse had asserted its freedom of the language. Even Greene, in his "Friar Bacon," in 1594, has passages that in their rich and harmonious diction display the wonderful power of blank verse. The true vehicle for the deathless dramas of Shakespeare was established, and already he had taken possession of it with some of his noblest imaginings, for Nash, as early as 1589, alludes to "Hamlet."
But before coming to Shakespeare, we must add another word regarding Sackville. In 1559 he had published "The Mirrour for Magistrates." He was then a mere youth, but the poetical preface to this work, which he called "The Induction," and the "Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham," displayed the most remarkable powers of poetry, and at once arrested the public attention. The work itself was a mere series of the lives of personages prominent in English history, supposed to be an imitation of Lydgate's "Fall of Princes;" but expanded by the loftier genius of the author, and the induction so illustrated by allegory, as to give rise to the belief that Spenser was greatly indebted to him.
Edmund Spenser, the greatest of our allegoric poets, was born in East Smithfield, in London, and was educated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. He had the good fortune to secure the friendship of the all-powerful Earl of Leicester, of Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Walter Raleigh. By their introduction to Queen Elizabeth, he obtained an annuity of £50 a year; and besides being employed by Leicester on a mission to France, went to Ireland in 1580, with Lord Grey de Wilton. We have noticed his "Views on the State of Ireland" under the head of the prose writers of this period, and for that able work, as well as for other services, he received a grant of the abbey and manor of Enniscorthy, in Wexford, which the same year, probably under pressure of necessity, he transferred to a Mr. Lynot. The estate, at the time of Gilbert's survey of Ireland, was worth £8,000 a year. Afterwards he obtained the grant of the Castle of Kilcolman, in the county of Cork, part of the estate of the unfortunate Earl of Desmond, with 3,000 acres of land. On this property Spenser went to live, and his dear friend Sir Philip Sidney being just then killed at the battle of Zutphen, he wrote his pastoral elegy of "Astrophel" in his honour. Ho also wrote his great work the "Faerie Queen" there; but in 1597 ho was chased by the exasperated Irish from his castle, which was burned over his head, his youngest child perishing in the cradle. He reached London, with his wife and two boys and a girl, and thus broken down by his misfortunes, he sank and died at an inn or lodging-house in King Street, Westminster. Ben Jonson says "he died for lake of bread, yet refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of Essex, adding he was sorry he had not time to spend them."
It has been asked how he could die of "lack of bread" with an annuity of £80 a year. The thing is very possible. Burleigh was his life-long enemy. He hated him as the commonplace soul instinctively hates the man of genius, and this hatred was aggravated by his being patronised by Leicester, Essex, and Raleigh, all men who were detested by him. Nothing was, therefore, easier than for Burleigh to withhold the dying poet's pension, or his son Robert Cecil, who now possessed his power, for Burleigh was in his last days, and Cecil inherited all his meanness. Spenser has recorded the malice of Burleigh in various places. In his "Ruins of Time" he says:—
"The rugged foremost that with grave foresight
Wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state,
My looser verse, I wot, doth sharply wite
For praising love."
And at the close of the sixth book of "The Faerie Queen," he declares there is no hope of escaping "his venomous despite." Spenser's verses in "Mother Hubbard's Tales," describing the miseries of court dependence, have often been quoted:—
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried
What hell it is in suing long to byde;
To lose good days that might be better spent;
To waite long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow;
To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peeres';
To have thy asking, yet wait many years;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy heart with comfortless despairs;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."
The minor poems of Spenser beside the "Astrophel," are the "Epithalamion" on his own marriage; four "Hymns to Love and Beauty;" "Sonnets;" "Colin Clout come Home again;" "The Tears of the Muses;" "Mother Hubbard's Tales," which refer to court characters of the time; "The Ruins of Time;" "Petrarch's Visions," "Bellaye's Visions," &c. In all these there is much beauty and fancy, mingled with much that is far-fetched and fantastic—the inevitable fault of that age. The "Faerie Queen" rises above all these as the cathedral over the lesser churches of a great city. It was written in a stanza which from him has over since been called the Spenserian, a stanza so capable of every grace, strength, and harmony, that there are few poets who have not essayed it: Thomson's "Castle of Indolence," Beattie's "Minstrel," Mrs. Tyghe's "Psyche," Campbell's "Gertrude of Wyoming," and Byron's "Childe Harold," have made it the vehicle of many immortal thoughts.
To the modern reader, nevertheless, the "Faerie Queen" would prove a tedious task in a continuous persual. It is of a fashion and a taste so entirely belonging to the age in which it was written, that of courtly tourneys, of parade of knighthood, at least in books, and of a fondness of high-flown allegory, that it unavoidably strikes a reader of this more realistic age as visionary, formal in manner, and descriptive not of actual human life.
