verses as were circulating in manuscript and published them in a small volume, protesting to the "gentle reader" that his object in so doing was "the better increase and accomplishment of your delights."

Spenser sent his "Shepheard's Calendar " into the world anonymously, but he claimed the parentage of the "Faerie Queene" from the day of publication. His earlier work had been attributed to various writers; there should be no mystery about this child of his fancy. Not only does he avow his ownership of the poem in his famous explanatory letter to Raleigh, but he sets his name boldly to the dedication addressed to the Queen. That dedication was amplified in a later edition, its original reading being: "To the most mightie and magnificent Empresse Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queene of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc. Her most humble Servant: Ed. Spenser." It would be unjust to attribute this dedication, and the laudation of Elizabeth in the poem itself, to base motives; Spenser was but writing in harmony with the manner of his day. It is true, as Dean Church remarked, that there is nothing in history which can be compared to the "gross, shameless, lying flattery paid to the Queen," but the poet did

not set that fashion; his is only the negative blame of not rising above it.

There was no hesitation or diffidence about the welcome given to Spenser's new work. Spenser's cup was once more overflowing with praise, as it had done ten years before, when he had approved himself England's new poet. But was praise to be all? Not quite. Elizabeth, close-fisted as she was, evidently thought she must do something for the poet who had done so much for her; and it was like Spenser's luck that his Queen was persuaded to make her bounty less than she had intended. Tradition affirms that Elizabeth ordered a goodly sum to be given to the poet, but that on Lord Burghley murmuring, "What! all this for a song?" the order was changed into, "Well, let him have what is reason." In the end, Spenser was awarded a pension of £50 a year, which he began to enjoy in February, 1591.

A pension of £50 a year was better than nothing, but that Spenser was bitterly disappointed in not being offered some State employment in his native England is beyond doubt. But there was to be no success for him at court; and when he reached his lonely home in Ireland again, and had time to think calmly over the experiences through which

he had passed, he was enabled to reach the sane conclusion that things were best as they were.

had no easy conquest. At first he appears to have had as little hope of success as with Rosalind, and his verse is overclouded with the somber hues of anticipated rejection.

In June, 1594, he gladly assumed the bonds of wedlock. For wedding present he gave his wife that bridal ode, his " Epithalamion," which has no rival in any language, to be

Unto her a goodly ornament,

And for short time an endlesse moniment. For such a gift surely high-born ladies would be content to forego the choicest coronet or the costliest crown. Sonnets and ode were sent across to Ponsonby the publisher, and Spenser had not been a married man six months before the rich fruit of his love passion had been garnered in the store of English literature.

Early in the year 1591 Spenser returned to his Irish home at Kilcolman, and before the year was out he had, in "Colin Clouts Come Home Againe," found sufficient reasons for thinking that he ought to be at least moderately contented with his lot. It is pleasant to suppose that he was not altogether lonely in his exile. There are reasons for believing that a sister kept house for him; and probably congenial friends, such as Gabriel Harvey and Ludowick Bryskett, visited him now and then. But for such ameliorations as these, and his delight in verse, his lot would have been almost unendurable. The fact that he was an Englishman would be sufficient to embitter the natives of the district against him, and that feeling must have been intensified a thousand-fold by his occupancy of Kilcolman, a castle which had once belonged to the Earls of Desmond. The poet's name, like that of Cromwell, is still a word of scorn in Ireland, and such living records as we have of his Kilcolman days are tinged with hatred. One inveterate enemy he had in the person of Lord Roche, who forbade his people to have any trade or conference with Spenser or his tenants, and, in true Irish fashion, killed an animal belonging to a man who had dared to give the poet a night's lodging when returning from the Limerick sessions.

Rosalind has been lost sight of during these years of exile, but not forgotten by Spenser. The closing passages of " Colin Clouts Come Home Againe" describe, as has been seen, the anger of Colin's fellow-shepherds for Rosalind's cruel treatment of their friend, and his defense of his mistress. More, in almost his last words he bids his comrades

Unto the world for ever witness bee
That hers I die.

Alas for the inconstancy of man! Spen-
ser was not destined to remain faithful
to his ideal. Not long after he wrote
those words there crossed his path a
lady whose name recalled his mother
and his Queen, an Elizabeth who was
to supplant Rosalind in his life and verse.
There is no record of his courtship save
that darkly hinted at in his sonnets, but
that record is sufficient to prove that he

Almost as soon as the "Amoretti and Epithalamion" volume had been entered at Stationers' Hall, the poet himself was in London again. Perhaps the increased responsibilities of wedded life made him long once again for "more preferment," or perhaps the cause for his visit must be sought in the fact that he had finished the other three

books of the "Faerie Queene," and was anxious to see them through the press himself.

We have only one picture of Spenser during this second visit home, and that was drawn by himself. Towards the end of 1596 he wrote a "spousal verse" in honor of the marriage, at Essex House, of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, and in that poem he refers to himself when

Sullein care,

Through discontent of my long fruitless stay In Princes Court, and expectation vayne Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away, Like empty shaddowes, did afflict my brayne. Although Leicester had not done much for him, he generously implies, now he is dead, that he had been a helpful friend, and thinks of him as one "whose want too well now feeles my freendles case.' An undercurrent of sadness runs through this "spousal verse;" the poet is conscious of the incongruous effect; he tries to subdue the discord with a higher note of melody; but the feeling left when the music ceases is more akin to pathos than joy. For this, had he known it, was really Spenser's swan-song. There was to be no life of leisured ease for him, nor any home in his smiling native land. He must return to that half-ruined castle on the wild plain at the foot of the Galtee hills, must face the ill-omened scowls of aliens again, and live on as best he might amid sights and sounds of wretchedness made all the more painful by the remembered contrasts of his beloved England.

In one matter Spenser may have thought himself fortunate. With that inaptitude which was ingrained in his character, King James of Scotland actually asked that the poet should be arrested and punished for the pic ture he had drawn of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, in the character of Duessa. The passage which had so moved the Scots King is that in Canto 1X., Book IV., of the "Faerie Queene;" he thought little, apparently, of the earlier sketch in the eighth canto of the first book! Having so many friends, and probably some enemies, at court, Spenser no doubt heard of his danger, and in those uncertain times he must have fully appreciated the narrow escape he had had. But was not Kilcolman prison enough for such a spirit?

Back, then, to Kilcolman again, and now for the last time. The date is uncertain, but it was probably early in 1597. He lived quietly through that year, and as the next

year was waning to its close there came the welcome news that he had been appointed Sheriff of the County of Cork. Lord Burghley was dead, and now, perchance, he was on the highroad to that "more preferment" he had sought so long. In this year of new hope he had prepared, for the Queen's special guidance, a brief paper on the state of Ireland, and its proem is the last sigh we catch from his lips: "Out of the ashes of desolation of wasteness of this your wretched Realm of Ireland, vouchsafe, most mighty Empress, our dread sovereign, to receive the voices of a few most unhappy ghosts (of whom is nothing but the ghost now left), which lie buried in the bottom of oblivion, far from the light of your gracious sunshine." That deepshadowed picture is suddenly illumined by the promise of brighter days for the poet. But it is only such a rift in the clouds as heralds the denser darkness before the storm.

That autumn of 1598, which seemed so full of hope for Spenser, saw the culmination of another of those wild rebellions which swept over Ireland so frequently in the reign of Elizabeth. Spenser was "living amid ruins. An English home in Ireland, however fair, was a home on the sides of Etna or Vesuvius; it stood where the lava flood had once passed, and upon no distant fires." The poet was not blind to the dangers amid which he lived. His report to Elizabeth, and his prose work giving a " View of the Present State of Ireland," witness to his clear knowledge of the political unrest by which he was surrounded. Still, he can hardly have thought that danger was so near, for the wild onrush of the rebels in October found him utterly unprepared to resist their attack on Kilcolman Castle. That attack was only too successful. The poet, with his wife and children, had to fly for their lives, and the building was given to the flames. Ben Jonson told that a new-born child of Spenser's perished in the burning castle, but, happily, there are no valid reasons for crediting that assertion; the picture is dark enough without that added touch.

It is a mistake to think that the Munster rebellion drove Spenser from Ireland. He and his family made their way to Cork, and there they were secure from further attack. The fact that his wife and children did not leave the country is proof that the rebels had done their worst by burning Kilcolman, and that there was no more to fear from them. Also, it is to be remembered that Sir Thomas Norreys, the President of Munster, sought

Spenser across the Irish Channel again; he went as the bearer of a dispatch from Sir Thomas Norreys, being chosen for that errand, probably, because his personal knowledge might be useful to the authorities in London. Norreys wrote his dispatch on December 9, and committed it to Spenser's care. The poet was going home for the last time.

Between the writing of the dispatch and its delivery at Whitehall, fifteen days elapsed. Perchance the poet had a stormy passage, and, with nerves and body shattered by the

it seems, to deliver his dispatch on December 24, and then we lose sight of him until the 16th of the following month. On that day he died.

Tradition, in the person of Ben Jonson, has invested the death-bed of Spenser with uncalled-for and unbelievable pathos. "He died," Jonson told Drummond, "for want of bread, in King Street; he refused twenty pieces sent him by my lord Essex, and said he was sure he had no time to spend them." This legend of starvation was repeated by other

writers, but no evidence has been adduced in its support. No student of Spenser's life could so far forget his facts as to affirm that the poet had attained a state of affluence at his death; on the other hand, it is impossible for him to believe that death ensued from actual want of bread. Spenser was now Sheriff of the County of Cork, and he had come to London as messenger of the President of Munster to the English court. If he had been in extreme monetary need on his arrival in London, there were many in the capital who would at once have relieved his wants. The scene of his death, a tavern in King Street, Westminster, also tells against the starvation legend. King Street, then the only highway between the Royal Palace of Whitehall and the Parliament House, was a street of considerable importance, and Spenser's presence there is explained by Stow's remark that "for the accommodation of such as come to town in the terms, here are some good inns for their reception, and not a few taverns for entertainment, as is not unusual in places of great confluence." There are ample proofs, too, that King Street was the usual resort of those who were messengers to the Court, such as Spenser then was. pily, then, there are no grounds for believing that the poet died for want of bread; it was tragedy enough that such a life should have gone out at so early an age.

Hap

There was but one burial-place for Spenser-that Abbey in which the dust of Chaucer had already consecrated Poets' Corner to be the sepulture of England's sweet singers. It is said that Spenser asked a resting-place near that sacred dust, and such a wish was naturalin one who knew that he was Chaucer's lineal successor. Lord Essex defrayed the charges of the funeral, and poets bore the pall and cast upon the coffin their elegies and the pens with which they were written. Spenser did not lack for a monument, although it was more than twenty years after his death before such a memorial was supplied, through the generosity of Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset. A hundred and fifty years after, that monument had fallen into decay, but its appearance is faithfully reproduced by the existing marble, which was erected by subscription in 1778, at the instigation of the poet Mason. The inscription differs in two particulars from the accepted dates of Spenser's life, giving 1553 instead of 1552 as the date of his birth, and 1598 instead of 1599 as the year of his death.

Several portraits (in oils) of Spenser are in existence, and at least one miniature. The latter may be dismissed at once as wholly unsatisfactory. There is nothing of the Elizabethan atmosphere about it, and its subject is a nondescript character wholly out of keeping with the pronounced personality of the author of the "Faerie Queene." The other portraits may be divided into two classes, represented respectively by the canvas at Duplin Castle and that which was formerly in the possession of Lord Chesterfield. It is impossible to reconcile these portraits; they are of men utterly dissimilar; they have absolutely nothing in common. All who have compared them must regard it as little short of a misfortune that the Lord Chesterfield painting is that which has generally been followed in the engraved portraits of the poet; it is hardly more satisfactory than the miniature. On the other hand, the Duplin portrait seems to prove its own authenticity. There is an excellent replica of this portrait, from the brush of Sir Henry Raeburn, in the possession of Earl Spencer at Althorp, and the accompanying reproduction of a photograph taken recently from that canvas may be confidently left to create its own justification as the most reliable likeness of the poet. There is a note on the back of the portrait, which, taken in conjunction with the fact that Raeburn made the copy in 1820, appears to offer inferential evidence in favor of this likeness. The note is to the following effect: "Another original portrait of this great poet was known to have been at Castle Saffron in the county of Cork, Ireland, situated in the neighborhood of Kilcolman Castle, the resi dence of Spenser, which was destroyed by fire before his death. This picture, in consequence of the roof of Castle Saffron falling in from neglect, was utterly destroyed, a fact ascertained by Admiral Sir Benjamin Halliwell during the period of his command-in-chief of the port of Cork in 1818, at the request of George John, Earl Spencer, K.G."

Perhaps the chief evidence for the autherticity of the portrait accompanying this article is the surprising manner in which it harmonizes with the character of Spenser. This, at any rate, is a man of whom the "Faerie Queene" might be expected. There is an aloofness in the expression which may well have mirrored to the outward world the spirit of one who dwelt apart in a "happy land of Faerie."