THOMAS SACKVILLE

The Induction. But it is the two poems by Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) that have justified to posterity Sidney's verdict on A Mirror for Magistrates as "meetly furnished of beautiful parts." Baldwin relates that after the first edition had been suppressed, Sackville, who had apparently already written The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham, "purposed to have gotten at my handes all the tragedies that were before the duke of Buckingham's, which hee would have preserved in one volume. And from that time backward, even to the time of William the Conquerour, he determined to continue and perfect all the story him selfe, in such order as Lydgate (following Bochas) had already used." Sackville did not carry out his design, but fortunately in anticipation of it he wrote the seventy-nine stanzas in rhyme-royal which were to serve as Induction or Prologue. The poet, walking abroad in a winter night, meets Sorrow, who guides him quaking to the underworld. Here," within the porch and jaws of hell," he first beholds Revenge, Old Age, Death, War, and other grisly shapes. Then they are ferried by Charon across Acheron, and come

to the horror and the hell,

The large great kingdoms, and the dreadful reign
Of Pluto in his throne where he did dwell,

The wide waste places, and the hugy plain.

Here, among a thousand sorts of sorrows," are "princes of renown . . . now laid full low," and from the throng first stalks forth the Duke of Buckingham to tell his doleful tale. In the Complaint the historical material proves somewhat intractable; but the reflective passages, and those in which Sackville illustrates his theme from classical examples, Alexander, Dionysius, and the rest, are finely wrought. Nor is there anything in the Induction to surpass the three beautiful stanzas beginning:

Midnight was come, and every vital thing

With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest.

The exquisite peace of a wholly tranquil world passes into the very rhythm of the verse.

Sackville's Position as a Poet.-In his own province Sackville is worthy of all the praise that has been showered on him. He has vision, dignity, the true craftsman's instinct for modelling his figures, and, above all, an astonishing mastery of his wellworn instrument, the rhyme-royal stanza, which in the hands of his colleagues produced little better than "lean and flashy songs." Dante himself need not disdair to salute this grave young singer from a northern land who followed in his steps to the Inferno. For it is as a poetic descendant of Dante and Chaucer, born out of due time, that the Sackville of A Mirror for Magistrates should take rank, even if in the blank verse of the last two acts of Gorboduc he points the way to Kyd,

Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Thereafter, as Lord Buckhurst, and later Earl of Dorset, as ambassador, privy councillor, and statesman, he was claimed by the 1 court and state affairs till his death in 1608. Spenser in 1590 might well lament the silence of his "learned Muse." What we have lost thereby none can tell. ' But as it is, Sackville is not in the direct line of poetic succession. Spenser's mediævalism, wherein he touches the writer of the Induction, is mainly on the surface, a matter of language and machinery; essentially he belongs to the Renaissance, and brings to fulfilment all that was heralded in the new orientation under Henry VIII.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST

Texts.-Tottel's Miscellany (Arber's English Reprints, 1903).—WYATT, SIR T.: The Poems, ed. A. K. Foxwell (2 vols., University of London Press, 1913); The Works of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, and of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, ed. G. F. Nott (2 vols. 1815-16); Poetical Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. R. Bell (Bell, 1854); Poetical Works of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey . . . and Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, ed. R. Bell (Bell, 1854).-PADELFORD, F. M.: The Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (University of Washington Publications in Language and Literature, Vol. I., 1920).-SACKVILLE, THOMAS, LORD BUCKHURST: Works, ed. R. W. Sackville-West (" Old Authors," 1859); Mirror for Magistrates, ed. J. Haslewood (3 vols., 1815).

Studies. SAINTSBURY, G.: History of English Prosody, Vol. I., Book iv., ch. i. and iii.; Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. III., ch. viii. and ix.—BERDAN, J. M.: Early Tudor Poetry, 1485-1547 (Macmillan, 1920).-FoXWELL, A. K.: A Study of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poems (Hodder, 1911).—TRENCH, W. F.: A Mirror for Magistrates: its Origin and Influence (privately printed, 1898).

CHAPTER 4. EDMUND SPENSER

Earlier Life. Most of our information about the life of Edmund Spenser is derived from his own writings. A reference in Sonnet LX. of his Amoretti, written in 1593, indicates that he was born forty-one years previously, i.e. in 1552. He was a Londoner by birth though not by descent. In his Prothalamion he speaks of

mery London, my most kyndly nurse,

That to me gave this lifes first native sourse,
Though from another place I take my name,

An house of auncient fame.

This "house" was that of the Spencers of Althorp, Northampton. Its head was Sir John Spencer, to three of whose daughters Spenser, as a kinsman, dedicated poems. His own branch of the family was connected with North-east Lancashire; but his father, John Spenser, had settled in London, probably in East Smithfield, near the Tower. His mother's Christian name was Elizabeth, and there were three children of the marriage.

Edmund, with a younger brother, was sent to the newly founded Merchant Taylors' School, of which Richard Mulcaster was headmaster. Here he was grounded in the

tongues," Greek, Latin, and French, and may have taken part in the dramatic performances which were a feature of Mulcaster's educational system. In 1569 Spenser proceeded as a sizar to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. He took his B.A. in 1573, and his M.A. in 1576. The most powerful influence on him at Cambridge was Gabriel Harvey, a Fellow of Pembroke, and a noted humanist. In spite of Harvey's strain of pedantry and his aggressive Puritanism, his wide culture and enthusiasm for letters were spiration to his younger fellow-collegian.

Edmund Spenser.

On leaving Cambridge Spenser paid a visit to "the North Country," doubtless the Lancashire district, with which he had family ties. Here he fell in love with a maiden whose name he disguises under the anagram of "Rosalinde." She appreciated the intellectual gifts of her "Segnior Pegaso," but gave her heart

to a rival, and The Shepheardes Calender contains the poetic record of Spenser's hapless suit.

In or about 1578 he returned, on Harvey's pressure, to the South, and it was probably through his friend's introduction that the young Cambridge student became attached to the train of the Earl of Leicester and his nephew, Sir Philip Sidney. In a letter to Harvey, dated from Leicester House in the Strand on October 15, 1579, he alludes to his "late beeing with hir Maiestie," and to his familiar relations "with the twoo worthy Gentlemen, Master Sidney and Master Dyer." Under such powerful patronage he expected advancement at court, but by some indiscretion, perhaps personal and political allusions in the satire which a dozen years afterwards was printed as Mother Hubberds Tale in the volume of Complaints, he seems to have offended the powerful minister, Burghley.

Spenser in Ireland. Hence when preferment came, in the summer of 1580, it was in the "questionable shape" of the private secretaryship to Lord Grey of Wilton, the newly appointed Lord-Deputy of Ireland. Thus by a singular whim of fortune Spenser, a son of London, with Lancastrian blood in his veins, became the first of the memorable line of Anglo-Irish poets and playwrights that stretches from him through Congreve, Sheridan, and Moore to W. B. Yeats and Bernard Shaw. But it is part of the age-long ironic tragedy of the relations between the two islands that Ireland was to Spenser merely a " salvage soil," peopled by barbarous aliens. The poet who was drawing inspiration from the high histories of Ulysses and Æneas, Arthur and Orlando, should have found delight in the heroic tales of Cuchulinn and the Red Branch. The brilliant metrist might have explored with a craftsman's interest the complicated rhyme-systems of Gaelic verse. But between Spenser and all this stood the barrier of an unknown tongue, and the no less fatal barrier of religious and political prejudice. Spenser was a convinced partisan, and later, in his prose View of the Present State of Ireland, an eloquent defender, of Lord Grey's sternly repressive policy, which after two years led to his recall. The secretary did not follow his master. By his appointment in 1581 as clerk of Decrees and Recognizances of the Dublin Court of Chancery he had become a permanent public servant of the Irish Government. Grants of land and houses on lease in the counties of Wexford and Kildare and in Dublin followed, and in 1589 Spenser was chosen to succeed Ludovic Bryskett as clerk of the council of Munster. The council was planting the southern province with English settlers, and Spenser's share of the spoil was the manor and castle of Kilcolman, an estate of about 3,000 acres, in county Cork, which was henceforth to be the poet's home.

His allusions, under the fanciful names of "Mole " and " Mulla," to the neighbouring hills and river, show that Spenser had an appreciative eye for the soft beauty of Munster scenery. But he was now doubly an exile. Dublin might not be London, but it was at any rate a centre where he could meet kindred spirits, as at that gathering at Bryskett's cottage immortalized by the host in his Discourse of Civil Life,

where Spenser declined a request to discourse on the benefits of moral philosophy, because he had already undertaken a work tending to the same effect, "which is in heroical verse under the title of a Faerie Queene." At Kilcolman Spenser, a lonely "undertaker" amidst a hostile population, must have been thrown chiefly on his own society. Here, in the autumn of 1589, another undertaker, Sir Walter Raleigh, temporarily "out of suits with fortune" at court, found him banished "into that waste where I was quite forgot." Posterity has curiously varied debts to Sir Walter, and not least for his swift recognition of Spenser's noble poetic achievement in the earlier books of The Faerie Queene, and his insistence that the poet should return with him to London bearing his precious manuscript. Early in 1590 it was published by William Ponsonby, with a dedication to the queen, and a series of commendatory sonnets to illustrious patrons. The success of the poem was immediate and resounding; but again Spenser was disappointed of his hopes of preferment at court, though he was awarded a pension of fifty pounds a year.

Later Life. He returned to Kilcolman, probably in the latter part of 1591, disillusioned but not permanently embittered, to find consolation in the practice of his art, and later in the wooing of Elizabeth Boyle, which, after more than a twelvemonth of fluctuating hopes and fears, was crowned by his marriage on June II, 1594. In the same year he resigned his clerkship to the council of Munster, and thus, freed from official duties, he was able in 1595 to pay another and longer visit to London. Early in 1596 the "Second Part of The Faerie Queene" (Books IV.-VI.) was published by Ponsonby, with a re-issue of Books I.-III.; and some minor poems followed in the same year. In one of these, the Prothalamion, he inserts a panegyric on the Earl of Essex," great Englands glory and the worlds wide wonder," fresh from his triumph at Cadiz. But Essex could do no more for Spenser's advancement at court than Leicester or Raleigh, and once again the poet, after a "long fruitlesse stay," went back to Kilcolman, probably in 1597.

As before, he had consolations-the company of his "countrey lasse" and their children, the leisure to continue his half-finished masterpiece, and the prospect of becoming Sheriff of Cork, for which office he was recommended by the queen in September 1598. But in October Munster rose in rebellion; Kilcolman was burnt to the ground, and Spenser with his family had to flee to Cork. Thence he set forth. for London in December, with dispatches for the President of Munster and a paper setting forth his own views on the situation. Shaken doubtless in health by the harsh experiences through which he had just gone, he died suddenly on January 16, 1599. As with so many of the great Elizabethans, his life ended tragically, but not in such abject want as tradition would have us believe. He was laid, through the generosity of Essex, in the most fitting of resting-places, near his master Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.

Extant and Lost Works.-The following works of Spenser were published in his