the internal administration of the kingdom. The consequences of the durable internal peace thus established were astonishing. Men began to trade, farm, and build with renewed vigour ; a great breadth of forest land was reclaimed; travellers went forth to discover islands far away,' and to open new outlets for commerce; wealth, through this multiplied activity, poured into the kingdom; and that general prosperity was the result which led her subjects to invest the sovereign, under whom all this was done, with a hundred virtues and shining qualities not her own. Of this feeling Shakspere became the mouthpiece and mirror :

She shall be loved and feared; her own shall bless her;
Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,

And hang their heads with sorrow: good grows with her;
In her days every man shall eat in safety

Under his own vine, what he plants, and sing

The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours.

There is indeed a reverse to the picture. Ireland was devastated in this reign with fire and sword; and the minority in England who adhered to the ancient faith became the victims of an organised system of persecution and plunder. Open a book by Cardinal Allen, and a scene of martyred priests, of harried and plundered laymen, of tortured consciences and bleeding hearts, will blot out from your view the smiling images of peace and plenty above portrayed. The mass of the people, however, went quietly with the government, believing -and the circumstances of the time were such as to lend some colour to the belief-that to adhere to the pope meant, not merely preference for the old religion, but also sympathy with Spain, disloyalty to England, and aid and comfort to her enemies all over the world.

Wealth and ease brought leisure in their train; and leisure demanded entertainment, not for the body only, but also for the mind. The people, for amusement's sake, took up the old popular drama, which had come down from the very beginning of the middle ages; and, after a process of gradual transformation and elaboration by inferior hands, developed it, in the mouths of its Shakspere, Jonson, and Fletcher, into the worldfamed romantic drama of England. As the reading class increased, so did the number of those who strove to minister to its desires; and although the religious convulsions which society had undergone had checked the movement towards a complete and profound appreciation of antiquity, which had

1 Henry VIII, act v. sc. 5,

been commenced by Colet, More, and Erasmus, in the universities, so that England could not then, nor for centuries afterwards, produce scholars in any way comparable to those of the Continent, yet the number of translations which were made of ancient authors proves that there was a general taste for at least a superficial learning, and a very wide diffusion of it. Translation soon led to imitation, and to the projection of new literary works on the purer principles of art disclosed in the classical authors. The epics of Ariosto and Tasso were also translated, the former by Harrington, the latter by Carew and Fairfax; and the fact shows both how eagerly the Italian literature was studied by people of education, and how general must have been the diffusion of an intellectual taste. Spenser doubtless framed his allegory in emulation of the Orlando of Ariosto, and the form and idea of Bacon's Essays were probably suggested to him by the Essays of Montaigne.

Let us now briefly trace the progress, and describe the principal achievements, in poetry and in prose writing, during the period under consideration.

Poets :-Spenser, Shakspere, Southwell, Warner, Daniel, Drayton, Donne, Davies, Lodge, Chapman, Marston, Gascoigne, Sidney, Tusser, Marlowe, Raleigh; Translators. 3. Among the poets of the period, Spenser holds the first rank. The appearance of his Shepheard's Calender, in 1579, was considered by his contemporaries to form an epoch in the history of English poetry. This poem is dedicated to Sidney, and in an introductory epistle, feigned to come from a third hand, addressed to his friend Gabriel Harvey,' the poet enters into some curious particulars respecting the diction of his work. He commences the epistle by quoting from the old famous poet' Chaucer, and also from Lydgate, whom he calls 'a worthy scholar of so excellent a master.' The Calender itself, partly by the large use of alliteration, partly by an

1 Harvey was a native of Saffron Walden, and an early and firm friend of Spenser, who celebrates him as 'Hobbinol' in the Shepheard's Calender. In his youth he wrote Gratulationes Valdinenses,-Congratulations from Saffron Walden,-a Latin elegiac poem in honour of Elizabeth. In another early production,-Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets,-he desires that he may be 'epitaphed the inventour of the English hexameter,' an absurd form of that metre which Stanihurst and others adopted (see below, § 24), but which did not long hold its ground. Harvey introduced Spencer to Sir Philip Sidney, perhaps also to Leicester. With Spenser he published in 1580 Three proper and wittie familiar Letters, on an earthquake that had recently occurred, and on our English reformed versifying,' by which was chiefly meant the hexameter. (Warton's English Poetry, iv. 205; Haslewood's Ancient Critical Essays, Lond. ì815.)

express allusion in the epilogue, supplies us with evidence that he was a diligent reader and admirer of the Vision of Piers Plowman by Langland. These three were his English models: he was young and full of enthusiasm, and there is little wonder if their poetical diction, which, if obsolete, was eminently striking and picturesque, commended itself to his youthful taste more than the composite English current in his own day. His words are as follows: :

'And first of the wordes to speake, I graunt they bee something hard, and of most men unused, yet both English, and also used of most excellent authours and most famous poets. In whom, whereas this our poet hath bin much travailed and thoroughly read, how could it be (as that worthy oratour sayde), but that walking in the sunne, although for other cause he walked, yet needes he mought be sunburnt; and having the sound of those auncient poets still ringing in his eares, he mought needes in singing hit out some of their tunes ? But whether he useth them by such casualtie and custome, or of set purpose and choise, as thinking them fittest for such rusticall rudenesse of shepheards, either for that their rough sound would make his rimes more ragged and rusticall, or else because such old obsolete wordes are most used of country folke, sure I thinke, and thinke I thinke not amisse, that they bring great grace, and, as one would say, authoritie to the verse.... But if any will rashly blame his purpose in choise of old and unwonted wordes, him may I more justly blame and condemne, or of witlesse headinesse in judging, or of heedles hardinesse in condemning; for, not marking the compasse of his bent, he will judge of the length of his cast: for, in my opinion, it is one especial praise of many which are due to this poet, that he hath laboured to restore, as to their rightfull heritage, such good and naturall English wordes as have beene long time out of use, and almost clean disherited, which is the only cause that our mother tongue, which truly of itself is both full enough for prose and stately enough for verse, hath long time been counted most bare and barren of both. Which default, when as some endeavoured to salve and recure, they patched up the holes with pieces and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the French, there of the Italian, everywhere of the Latin; not weighing how ill those tongues accorded with themselves, but much worse with ours; so now they have made our English tongue a gallimaufrey,' or hodge-podge of all other speeches.'

The twelve eclogues of the Shepheard's Calender (Spenser, 1 From the French Galimafrée; but the origin of the word is unknown.

relying on an erroneous etymology, spells the word æglogues) are imitations, so far as their form is concerned, of the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil. As with these poets, the pastimes, loves, and disappointments of his shepherds, Cuddie, Colin, Hobbinol, and Piers, form the subject-matter of several eclogues. In others, more serious themes are handled. In the fifth, seventh, and ninth, for instance, the abuses both of the old and the new Church are discussed, the chief ground of attack being the laziness and covetousness of prelates and clergy; the fourth is a panegyrical ode on Queen Elizabeth'; in the tenth is set forth the perfect pattern of a poet;' the eleventh is an elegy on a lady who is named Dido.1 In the tenth, the poet anticipates, as Milton afterwards did, the loftier strain to which he felt that his genius would ere long impel him.

4. In 1580, Spenser attained the object of his desires, being appointed Secretary to the Lord Grey of Wilton, on his nomination to the vice-royalty of Ireland. To this stay in Ireland we owe Spenser's only prose work, his View of the State of Ireland, which, though presented to the Queen in manuscript in 1596, was for political reasons held back from publication till the year 1633. His connection with great men was now established, and we cannot doubt that his great intellect and remarkable powers of application made him a most efficient public servant. Nor were his services left unrewarded. He received, in 1586, a grant of Kilcolman Castle, in the county of Cork, together with some three thousand acres of land, being part of the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond. From this time to his death, in 1599, few particulars are known about him, but he seems to have resided chiefly in Ireland, and there to have composed his greatest work, The Faerie Queene. His friend Sir Walter Raleigh, to whom The Faerie Queene is dedicated, is thought to have introduced him to Queen Elizabeth, who granted him, in 1591, a pension of fifty pounds a year. In 1598 occurred a rising of the Irish, headed by O'Neill, the famous Earl of Tyrone, which, after the defeat of the English general, Bagnal, extended to Munster; for a time there was no safety for English settlers outside the walls of fortified places. Spenser had to flee from his castle, which was taken and burnt by the insurgents; his infant child is said to have perished in the flames. In the greatest_trouble and affliction, he crossed over to England, and died a few months afterwards in a lodging-house in London, being only in his forty-sixth year.

1 Extract Book, art. 54.

5. Out of the twelve books composing, or which ought to compose, The Faerie Queene, we have but six in an entire state, containing the Legends' of the Red Cross Knight, Sir Guyon, Britomartis, a lady knight, Cambel and Triamond, Sir Artegall, and Sir Calidore. In the characters and adventures of these heroic personages, the virtues of holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy are severally illustrated and portrayed. Of the remaining six books, we possess, in two cantos on Mutability, a fragment of the Legend on Constancy. Whether any or what other portions of them were ever written, is not certainly known.

It would be vain to attempt, within the limits here prescribed to us, to do justice to the variety and splendour of this poem, which, even in its unfinished state, is more than twice as long as the Paradise Lost. The allegorical form, which, as we have seen, was the favourite style of the mediæval poets, is carefully preserved throughout; but the interest of the narrative, as full of action and incident as an old romance, and the charm of the free, vagrant, open-air life described, make one think and care little for the hidden meaning. 'There is something,' said Pope, 'in Spenser, that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read The Faerie Queene when I was about twelve with a vast deal of delight, and I think it gave me as much when I read it over about a year or two ago." An account in some detail of a portion of the second book will be found at a later page.2

Spenser devoted himself with ardour to the support of the religious system and policy adopted by Elizabeth and her ministers. From his youth upwards he was an aspirant for public employment,-at first with little success, if the wellknown complaint3 in Mother Hubberd's Tale may be taken to apply to his own case. He would neither have succeeded in entering the public service, nor, having entered it, could he have retained his position, had he not shown himself zealously affected to the new state of things. Again, as a holder of confiscated lands in Ireland, he personally benefited by that great public crime, which, commenced under Elizabeth, was consummated under William of Orange, the eviction of the Irish people from nearly the whole of its own soil, under the pretext of imposing upon them a purer faith. It need not, therefore, surprise us to find Spenser typifying by Una,' first, Truth and its oneness, secondly, the newly established Church of England and Ireland, and by 'Duessa,' first, Falsehood and its 2 See Crit. Sect. ch. I., Narrative Poetry. Extract Book, art, 54.

1 Spence's Anecdotes.