persons of distinction. Todd remarks that in that age of adulation, it was usual for the author to present, with a copy of his publication, poetical addresses to his superiors, and to print them afterwards.

It appears certain that these three books of the Faerie Queene were written in Ireland. In a conversation extracted from his friend Ludowick Bryskett's Discourse of Civill Life, Spenser is made to say: "I have already undertaken a work in heroical verse, under the title of a Faerie Queene; tending to represent all the morall virtues, assigning to every virtue a knight to be patron and defender of the same, in whose actions, feats of arms, and chivalry, the operations of that virtue whereof he is the protector are to be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against the same to be beaten downe and overcome.'

Such was his original design in this undertaking; and having prepared three books for the press, it is probable that he accompanied Raleigh to England with a view to publish the work. Raleigh afterwards introduced him to Queen Elizabeth, whose favour is supposed by some to have extended to his being appointed poet laureate ; but Elizabeth, as Malone has proved, had no poet laureate. She indeed, in February 1591, conferred on Spenser a pension of 50l. a year, which he enjoyed till his death; but the title of laureate is not given in his patent.

The terms of this patent, which was discovered some years since in the Rolls Chapel, tends to rescue the character of Lord Burleigh from the imputation of having been hostile to our poet. The oldest date of this reproach is in Fuller's Worthies, a book published at the distance of more than seventy years from the event; yet on this authority, which has been copied by almost all the biographers of Spenser, it has been said that Burleigh intercepted the pension, as too much to be given to a "ballad-maker;" and that when the queen, upon Spenser's presenting some poems to her, ordered him the gratuity of 1007., Burleigh asked, “What! all this for a song!" on which the queen replied, "Then give him what is reason. The story concludes, that Spenser having long waited in vain for the fulfilment of the royal order, presented to her the following ridiculous memorial:

"I was promised on a time

To have reason for a rhime:

From that time unto this season

I received nor rhime nor reason;"

on which he was immediately paid; but for the whole of this representation there appears no foundation.

After the publication of the Faerie Queene, and Spenser's return to Ireland, the fame he had now obtained induced a publisher to col

lect and print his smaller pieces (one of which only is said to have been a republication), under the title of Complaints: containing sundrie small poems of the World's Vanitie; viz. 1. The Ruins of Time; 2. The Teares of the Muses; 3. Virgil's Gnat; 4. Prosopopaia, or Mother Hubbard's Tale; 5. The Ruines of Rome, by Bellay; 6. Minopotmos, or the Tale of the Butterflie; 7. Visions of the World's Vanitie; 8. Bellay's Visions; 9. Petrarch's Visions.

Spenser appears to have returned to London about the end of 1591, as his next publication, the beautiful elegy on Douglas Howard, daughter of Henry Lord Howard, entitled Daphnaida, is dated Jan. 1, 1592. From this period there is a long interval in the history of our poet, which was probably passed in Ireland, but of which we have no account. It would appear, however, that he did not neglect those talents of which he had already given such favourable specimens. In 1595 he published the pastoral of Colin Clouts come Home again, and with it the pastoral elegy of Astrophel, devoted entirely to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney.

It is conjectured that in the same year appeared his Amoretti, or Sonnets, in which the poet gives the progress of his addresses to a less obdurate lady than Rosalind, and whom he afterwards married, if the Epithalamion, published with the sonnets, is allowed to refer to that event. Mr. Todd deduces from various passages that his mistress's name was Elizabeth, and that the marriage took place in Ireland, on St. Barnabas' Day, 1594. Other biographers seem to be of opinion that he had lost a first wife, and that the courtship of a second inspired the Amoretti. Where we have no other evidence than the expression of a man's feeling, and that man a poet of excursive imagination, the balance of probabilities may be equal. Spenser was now at the age of forty-one, somewhat too late for the ardour of youthful passion so feelingly given in his sonnets; but, on the other hand, if he had a first wife, we have no account of her, and the children he left were by the wife he now married.

The Four Hymns on Love and Beauty, which the author informs us were written in his youth as a warning to thoughtless lovers; and the Prothalamion, in honour of the double marriages of the Ladies Elizabeth and Catherine Somerset, to H. Guildford and W. Peter, Esqs., were published in 1596. In the same year the second part of the Faerie Queene appeared, with a new edition of the former part. This contained the fourth, fifth, and sixth books. Of the remaining six, which were to complete the original design, two imperfect cantos of Mutabilitie only have been recovered, and were first introduced into the folio edition of the Faerie Queene printed in 1609, as a part of the lost book entitled the Legend of Constancy.

It is necessary, however, in this place to notice a question which has been contested with much eagerness by Spenser's biographers and critics, namely, whether any part of the Faerie Queene has been lost, or whether the author did not leave the work unfinished as we now have it. Sir James Ware informs us that the poet finished the latter part of the Faerie Queene in Ireland, "which was soon after unfortunately lost by the disorder and abuse of his servants, whom he had sent before him into England." This statement has been controverted by various biographers; but it is materially corroborated by an epigram written by Sir John Stradling, and published in 1607, cited by Todd, which plainly intimates that certain manuscripts of Spenser were burnt in the rebellion of 1598.

The same year, 1596, appears to have been the time when Spenser presented his political and only prose work, The View of the State of Ireland, to the queen. Mr. Todd having seen four copies of it in manuscript, concludes that he presented it also to the great officers of state, and perhaps to others. Why it was allowed to remain in manuscript so long as until 1603, when Sir James Ware published it from Archbishop Usher's copy, has not been explained. If, as Mr. Todd conjectures, it was written at the command of the queen, and in order to reconcile the Irish to her government, why did it not receive the publicity which so important an object required? It is more probable, from the perusal of the work as we now have it, that it was not considered by the court as of a healing tendency; and the extract from some of the manuscript copies which Todd had an opportunity of procuring, seems to confirm this conjecture. Viewed in another light, it displays much political knowledge, and traces the troubles of that country, in many instances, to their real causes. It is valuable also on account of the author's skill in delineating the actual state of Ireland. "Civilisation," says Mr. Ledwitch, the learned Irish antiquary, "having almost obliterated every vestige of our ancient manners, the remembrance of them is only to be found in Spenser; so that he may be considered, at this day, as an Irish antiquary." It ought not to be omitted that in a note on one of the manuscript copies of this work, Spenser is styled "clerke of the counsell of the province of Mounster."

In 1597 he is said to have returned to Ireland; and in a letter from Queen Elizabeth to the Irish government, dated Sept. 30, 1598, was recommended to be sheriff of Cork. The rebellion of Tyrone, however, took place in October, and with such fury as to compel Spenser and his family to leave Kilcolman. In the confusion of flight, manuscripts would be forgotten, for even one of the children was left behind; and the rebels, after carrying off the goods, burnt

the house and this infant in it. Spenser arrived in England with a heart broken by these misfortunes, and died January following, 1599, in the forty-sixth year of his age.

There are some circumstances respecting Spenser's death which have been variously represented. Mr. Todd, from unquestionable evidence, has fixed the day January 16, 1599, and the place an inn or lodging-house in King-street, Westminster; the time, therefore, which elapsed from his arrival in England to his death was very short. But it has been asserted that he died in extreme poverty, which, considering how highly favoured he was by the queen only a month before he was compelled to leave Ireland, seems wholly incredible. The only foundation for the report appears to have been an expression of Camden's, intimating that he returned to England poor, which may be quite true, without affording any reason to suppose that he remained poor. His pension of 50l., no inconsiderable sum in those days, continued to be paid; and to conceive that he lost his friends at a time when he was a sufferer in the cause of government, seems a needless imputation on them.

Spenser's remains were interred in Westminster Abbey, near those of Chaucer; and the funeral expenses were defrayed by the Earl of Essex, too much a friend to literature to have allowed Spenser to starve, as has been suggested, and afterwards insult his remains by a sumptuous funeral. The monument was erected by Anne, Countess of Dorset, about thirty years after Spenser's death. His grandson Hugolin, after the restoration of Charles II., was replaced by the Court of Claims in as much of the Irish lands as could be found to have been Spenser's. The property, forfeited by Hugolin for his attachment to James II., was granted to another descendant, William Spenser, by the interest of Montague, Earl of Halifax.

Besides the works already enumerated, Spenser is the author of various sonnets. The lost pieces of Spenser are said to have been: 1. Translation of Ecclesiastes; 2. Translation of the Song of Songs; 3. The Dying Pelican; 4. The Hours of our Lord; 5. The Sacrifice of a Sinner; 6. The Seven Psalms; 7. Dreams; 8. The English Poet; 9. Legends; 10. The Court of Cupid; 11. The Hell of Lovers; 12. Purgatory; 13. A Se`nnight Slumber; 14. Pageants; 15. Nine Comedies; 16. Stemmata Dudleiana; 17. Epithalamion Thamesis. If his pen was thus prolific, there is little reason to suppose that he might not have had leisure and industry to have nearly completed his Faerie Queene before the fatal rebellion which terminated all his labours. "We see nothing in Spenser," writes Proctor, 66 of that strange, irregular spirit which impelled Shakspeare all round the world, and led Milton soaring to the stars; but a dreamy idleness, which fed

on earthly beauty and earthly fortunes, and was content to live for ever on haunted slopes, to thread the mazes of enchantment, and to repose in the chambers of sensual delight.

"Nevertheless, Spenser was a moral poet. He was the poet of moral romance. He aimed at being didactic (after a pleasant fashion), yet he also loved to loiter by the way, and gave himself up to luxurious musings. He did not turn aside from love, or desire, or lust, or gluttony, or a revel; but met and enjoyed them all, or made them subservient to his main design. He steeped his mind in pleasure, and gave forth the result like a distillation, clear and refined; not stripped of its internal nature or original colour, but merely with the husk and coarse deformity left behind. There never was a man who so revelled in description, or whose fancy lived so entirely out of the bustle and resort of the busy world, as Spenser. He is the poet of leaves and flowers; the forests, and the fountains, and the smooth clear lakes are his domain; and these he has peopled with a grotesque race, such as we look for in vain on the dusty and common road of life, creatures of fairy-land and of the Muses, whose lives, like their own laurels, shall flourish and look green for ever."

George Peele was born in or about 1553, it is believed in Devonshire, of obscure parents, by some patron of whom he was sent to