That here in sorrow art foresunk so deep, 'Come, come,' quoth she, 'and see what I shall show, Come, hear the plaining and the bitter bale Of worthy men by Fortune overthrow : They were but shades that erst in mind thou roll'd: Flat down I fell, and with all reverence A goddess, sent by godly providence, In earthly shape thus show'd herself to me, To wail and rue this world's uncertainty: And, while I honour'd thus her godhead's might, With plaining voice these words to me she shright. 'I shall thee guide first to the grisly lake, Where thou shalt see, and hear, the plaint they make Thence come we to the horrour and the hell, With sighs, and tears, sobs, shrieks, and all yfear, Lo here, quoth Sorrow, princes of renown, COMPLAINT OF THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM. So long as fortune would permit the same, Lo, what avails in riches floods that flows? And simple sort must bear it as it is. For hard mishaps, that happens unto such For of my birth, my blood was of the best, First born an earl, then duke by due descent: To swing the sway in court among the rest, Dame Fortune me her rule most largely lent, And kind with courage so my corpse had blent, That lo, on whom but me did she most smile? And whom but me, lo, did she most beguile ? Now hast thou heard the whole of my unhap, SLEEP. By him lay heavy Sleep, the cousin of Death, Of high renown but as a living death, The body's rest, the quiet of the heart, Reaver of sight, and yet in whom we see Things oft that tide, and oft that never be: Without respect, esteeming equally EDMUND SPENSER. [ELMUND SPENSER was born in London about 1552. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School: his first oetical performances, translations from Petrarch and Du Bellay, published without his name in a miscellaneous collection, belong to the time of his leaving school in 1569. From that year to 1576 he was at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. In 1579 he was in London, acquainted with Philip Sidney, and in Lord Leicester's house. hold In 1580 was published, but without his name, The Shepheards Calender; and in the autumn of that year he went to Ireland with Lord Grey of Wilton, as his private secretary. The remainder of his life with the exception of short visits to England, was spent in Ireland, where he held various subordinate offices, and where he settled on a grant of forfeited land at Kilcolman in the county of Cork. In 1589 he accom panied Sir Walter Ralegh to London. and in 1590 published the first three books of The Faerie Que ne. In 1591 he returned to Ireland and a mi-cellaneous collection of compositions of earlier and later dates (Complaints) was published in London. In June 1594 he married, and the next year, 1595, he again visited London, and in Jan. 1395-6 published the second instalment of The Faerie Queene (iv vi). With the same date. 1595, were published his Colin Clouts Come Home again, an account of his visit to the Court in 1589 90, and his Amoretti Sonnets. and an Epithalamion, relating to his courtship and marriage. At the end of 1598 his house was sacked and burnt by the Muster rebels, and he returned in great distress to London. He died at Westminster, Jan. 16, 1598-9, and was buried in the Abbey.] Spenser was the first who in the literature of England since the Reformation made himself a name as a poet which could be compared with that of Chaucer, or of the famous Italians who then stood at the head of poetical composition. National energy had revived under the reign of Elizabeth, and with it had come a burst of poetical enthusiasm. Many persons tried their hand at poetry. Versification became a fashion. It was encouraged in the Court circles. The taste for poetry shows itself in a popular shape in ballads, and among scholars in translation; and amid a good deal of bad poetry there was some written which was genuine and beautiful, and which has survived to charm us still. The poetical spirit and feeling came out most naturally in short love poems, of which many of great grace and fire are preserved in the collections of the time; the other form which it took at this time was the expression of the pathetic incidents and conditions of human greatness and fortune. Sir Philip Sidney, one of the most accomplished and most rising of the young men about the Court, encouraged an interest in poetry in his circle of friends, and some of them, Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville, have, like Sidney himself, left poems of merit. But while there was much poetical writing, and not a little poetical power even among men engaged in the business and wars of the time, such as Walter Ralegh, no successful attempt had been made to produce a great poetical work which might challenge comparison with the Canterbury Tales at home, or the Orlando Furioso abroad. Spenser was the first who had the ambition and also the power for such an enterprise. His earliest work, The Shepherd's Calendar, a series of what were called pastoral poems, after the fashion of the Italian models and some English imitators, partly original, partly translated or paraphrased, though very immature and very unequal in its composition, was at once felt to be something more considerable as a poetical achievement than anything which the sixteenth century had yet seen in England. The 'new poet' became almost a recognised title for the man who had shown, not merely by a few spirited fugitive stanzas, but in a sustained work, that he could write so sweetly and so well. The fame and the associations of The Shepherd's Calendar clung to him even to the end of his career. To the end he had a predilection for its pastoral colouring and scenery; to the end he liked to give himself the rustic name by which he had represented himself in its dialogues, and called himself Colin Clout. But The Faery Queen was something beyond the expectations raised by The Shepherd's Calendar. In its plan, its invention, and its execution, it took the world of its day by surprise. It opened a new road to English poetry, and new kingdoms to be won by it. The name of Spenser stands in point of time even before that of Shakespeare in the roll of modern English poets. A discoverer of something new to be done, he first did what all were trying to do, and broke down the difficulties of a great and magnificent art. But the first are not always the greatest in poetry, any more than |