The materials for the personal history of Edmund Spenser^[11] are very scanty; and it may not be amiss to warn the reader of what he will find exemplified in the present article, that early biography, with any pretension to authenticity, must partake nearly as much of a negative as of a positive character.

As to the year of Spenser’s birth, we are thrown for any thing like admissible evidence on the date of his matriculation at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in 1569, which, according to the usual age of admission in those days, would place his birth about 1553. The monument erected to him by the Countess of Dorset, afterwards of Pembroke and Montgomery, places his birth in 1510, and his death in 1596. This monument, having been erected only thirty years after the poet’s death, might have been expected not to be very inaccurate as to dates; but its authority is completely put down by the college entry. It is altogether at variance with university practice at any period, that a man should be matriculated at the age of fifty-nine, for the purpose of passing through his seven years in statu pupillari, and proceeding to the degree of M.A. at the ripe age of sixty-six. Neither do any facts on record give countenance to the supposition that the poet lived to the advanced age of eighty-six.

The parentage of Spenser is supposed to have been obscure: the only information he has given us on that point is confined to the unimportant fact, that his mother’s name was Elizabeth. But although his silence respecting his parents, and his entering the university as a sizar, give reason to suppose that his nearest connexions had fallen into humble life, his claim of alliance with “an house of ancient fame” indicated that his blood was not altogether plebeian. The dedications of his ‘Muiopotmos’ to Lady Carey, of his ‘Tears of the Muses’ to Lady Strange, and of ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale’ to the

Lady Compton and Mounteagle, express affection and bounden duty, on the score of kindred, to the house whence those ladies sprang, who were three sisters, and daughters of Sir John Spencer of Althorpe.

Spenser took the degree of Bachelor in 1572, and that of Master of Arts in 1576, in which year it is said that he was an unsuccessful competitor for a fellowship; but Mr. Church, student of Christ Church in Oxford, who has been more minute in his inquiries than Spenser’s other biographers, thinks that the story has no foundation. It is agreed on all hands that Sir Philip Sidney was the person who drew the poet from obscurity, and introduced him at court. On this subject we are told that Spenser sent a copy of the ninth canto of the first book of the ‘Faery Queene’ to Leicester House; and that Sidney was so transported at the discovery of such astonishing genius, as, after having read a stanza or two, to order his steward to give the author fifty pounds: after the next stanza the sum was doubled. The steward was not so enthusiastic as his master, and therefore in no hurry to make the disbursement; but one stanza more raised the gratuity to two hundred pounds, with a command of immediate payment, lest a further perusal should tempt the gallant knight to give away his whole estate. The obvious drift of this story is to magnify the genius of its subject; but it is rather hard on Sir Philip, that a reputation fully capable of standing by itself should have been unnecessarily propped at the expense of his character for common sense. The plain fact is, that the celebrated Gabriel Harvey, Spenser’s college friend, introduced him to Sidney; that he wrote part of his ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ at Penshurst, and under the modest name of Immerito, inscribed it to his patron. The general strain of this poem is serious and pensive, but with occasional bursts of amorous complaint. Without the latter it was considered that there could be no pastoral poetry; but in this instance the wailings are thought not to have been altogether fictitious. The name of Rosalinde is said to have shadowed forth a mistress who had deserted him, as that of Colin Clout both there and elsewhere denoted himself. Sidney lost no time in introducing his new friend to the Earl of Leicester, and finally to Queen Elizabeth. On his presenting some poems to her, the Queen ordered him a gratuity of a hundred pounds. Lord Treasurer Burleigh, better qualified to appreciate the useful than the ornamental, said, “What! all this for a song?” The Queen in anger repeated the order; and the minister from that time became the personal enemy of the poet, who alludes to this misfortune in several parts of his works.

The Earl of Leicester seems to have undertaken to provide for Spenser by sending him abroad. A letter to Gabriel Harvey from Leicester House fixes this to the year 1579; but either there is a mistake in the date, or the scheme must have been abandoned; for in 1580 he was appointed secretary to Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, who was sent as lord-deputy to Ireland. While in that country he wrote his ‘Discourse on the State of Ireland,’ a judicious treatise on the policy then best suited to the condition of that country. His services were rewarded with a grant of 3028 acres in the county of Cork, out of the forfeited lands of Gerald Fitz Gerald Earl of Desmond. Spenser’s residence was at the castle of Kilcolman, near Doneraile. The river Mulla, which he has more than once introduced into his poems, ran through his grounds. Here he contracted an intimacy with Sir Walter Raleigh, who was then a captain under Lord Grey. ‘Colin Clout’s come Home again,’ in which Sir Walter is described as the Shepherd of the Ocean, is a beautiful memorial of this friendship, founded on a similarity of taste for the polite arts, and described with equal delicacy and strength of feeling. The author acknowledges services at court rendered to him by Raleigh; probably the confirmation of the grant of land, which he obtained in 1586. The friends returned to England together, and Spenser wished to have obtained a settlement at home, rather than to have continued in a country at that time little better than barbarous. To mortifications, and ultimate disappointment in his attendance at court, we probably owe the well-known lines in ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale.’ If his forced return to Ireland was the cause of his writing the ‘Faery Queene,’ his country was benefited, and his fame immeasurably enhanced by the disappointment of his wishes. On the publication of the first three books the Queen rewarded him with a pension of fifty pounds a year; and in him the office of Laureate may be considered to have commenced, although not conferred under that title.

Spenser’s marriage is placed by most biographers in 1593; by Mr. Church in 1596: the year of his death, if we could rest our faith in the monument. All we know of the lady is, that her Christian name was Elizabeth: a name, he says in his 74th sonnet, which has given him three graces, in his mother, his queen, and his mistress. In his ‘Epithalamion’ he says,

He probably dwells the more on this latter circumstance, because the Queen’s hair was yellow. But even if the marriage took place in 1593, his term of domestic happiness was very short. In the Earl of Tyrone’s rebellion, in 1598, he was plundered and deprived of his estate. No direct or authentic account of the circumstances attending this calamity has come down to us; but among the heads of a conversation between Ben Jonson and Drummond at Hawthornden, given in the works of the latter, Jonson, after saying that neither Spenser’s stanzas pleased him, nor his matter, is stated to have given the following appalling description of his misfortune: that “his goods were robbed by the Irish, and his house and a little child burnt: he and his wife escaped, and after died for want of bread in King Street, Westminster.” Jonson however adds a circumstance, the strangeness of which throws suspicion over the former part of the story: “He refused twenty pieces sent him by my Lord Essex, and said he was sure he had no time to spend them.” But whether these particulars be true or not, it is certain that he died in London, ruined, and a victim to despair, according to Camden, in 1598, but according to Sir James Ware, who wrote the preface to the ‘View of the State of Ireland,’ in 1599. Sir James, after having given a high character of his poetry, says, “With a fate peculiar to poets, Spenser lived in a continual struggle with poverty: he was driven away from his house and plundered by the rebels: soon after his return in penury to England he died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey near Chaucer, at the expense of the Earl of Essex; the poets of the time, who attended his funeral, threw verses into his grave.” In order to account for the inaccuracy of the dates on the monument, it is alleged that the inscription had been defaced, perhaps by the Puritans in revenge for the descriptions of the Blatant Beast; and that on its renewal, the carver (the year of birth being illegible) put ten at a venture, and ninety-six instead of ninety-eight or ninety-nine.

Respecting Spenser’s private character, conversation and manners, his contemporaries leave us nearly in the dark. We know that Burleigh was his enemy, that Sidney and Raleigh were his friends: and from the dignity of sentiment and moral tendency prevailing throughout his works, we may reasonably infer that his virtue was not unworthy of his genius. Milton speaks of him as “our sage and serious poet, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.” ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar,’ the first of Spenser’s works in print, is generally said to have come out in 1579. It is a series of pastorals, formed on no uniform plan, but lowered to the standard supposed to be appropriate to that style of composition. But the rustic language of these pieces renders them so utterly untunable to a modern ear, that what obtained the applause of Sidney would not have saved the author’s name from oblivion, had it not been borne up to imperishable fame by the splendour of the ‘Faery Queene,’ the three first books of which were published in 1590. Six years afterwards three other books came out; and after his death two other cantos, and the beginning of a third. The poem, therefore, exists as a fragment: there is a traditionary story that he had completed his design in twelve books, as was his avowed intention; but that the last six books were lost by a servant who had the charge of bringing them over to England. Yet, unfinished as the poem is, any one canto has merit and beauties enough to have secured its author’s fame. In 1591 a quarto volume was published, containing the following nine pieces:—‘The Ruines of Time;’ ‘The Tears of the Muses;’ ‘Virgil’s Gnat;’ ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale;’ ‘Ruines of Rome;’ ‘Muiopotmos;’ ‘Visions of the World’s Vanitie;’ ‘Bellay’s Visions;’ ‘Petrarche’s Visions.’ ‘Daphnaida,’ published in 1592, was dedicated to the Marchioness of Northampton, on the death of her niece, Douglas Howard. The pastoral elegy of ‘Astrophel’ was devoted wholly to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney, and inscribed to Lady Essex. To enter on the subject of his Sonnets, &c. &c. would carry us far beyond our prescribed limits.

In a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, Spenser sets forth the general design of the ‘Faery Queene,’ and settles the scheme of the whole twelve books. But the following passage proves that he contemplated twelve more. “I labour to pourtraict in Arthur, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve Moral Vertues, as Aristotle devised, the which is the purport of these first twelve books: which if I find to be well accepted, I may perhaps be encouraged to frame the other part of Politic Vertues in his person, after that he came to be king.” He also says, “In the person of Prince Arthur I set forth Magnificence in particular.” By magnificence Dryden understands him to mean magnanimity, in succouring the representatives of the particular moral virtues when in distress, and considers his interposition in each legend as the only bond of uniformity in a design, which in all other respects insulates his allegorical heroes, without subordination or preference. This plan gave him much opportunity of drawing flattering portraits of individual courtiers, though few of the likenesses have been recognized, and the originals seem to have shown but little gratitude for the compliment. It is generally allowed that Prince Arthur was meant for Sir Philip Sidney, who was the poet’s chief patron. The prevailing beauty of this great poem consists in its vein of fabulous invention, set off by a power of description and force of imagination, so various and inexhaustible, that the reader is too much pleased and distracted to be sensible of the faults into which his judgment is betrayed by occasional excess. It is remarked by Sir William Temple, in his ‘Essay on Poetry,’ that “the religion of the Gentiles had been woven into the contexture of all the ancient poetry with an agreeable mixture, which made the moderns affect to give that of Christianity a place in their poems; but the true religion was not found to become fictions so well as the false one had done, and all their attempts of this kind seemed rather to debase religion than heighten poetry.” Critics in general, and common sense itself, have confirmed Temple’s remark as to the hazard, which it required such a mind as Milton’s successfully to face, of giving a poetical colouring to the solemn truths of religion. To a feeling of this difficulty we probably owe the peculiarity of Spenser’s epic, if so it may be called. In other epics, instruction is subordinate to story, and conveyed through it; in the ‘Faery Queene,’ morality is the avowed object, to be illustrated by the actions of such shadowy personages, that but a thin veil is thrown over the bare design. Whatever may be thought of allegorical poetry as a system, the execution in this instance is excellent, the flights of fancy brilliant, and often sublime. Rymer finds fault with Spenser for having suffered himself to be “misled by Ariosto;” and says that “his poem is perfect Fairyland.” The readers of poetry in the present day will probably receive that censure as praise: marvels and adventures, even if probability be not made matter of conscience, may have more attraction than classic regularity and strict adherence to the unities. But though Spenser frequently imitated both Tasso and Ariosto in descriptions of battles, and his general delineation of knight-errantry, the plan and conduct of his poem deviated widely from Ariosto’s model, and, it is generally thought, not on the side of improvement. Ariosto narrates adventures as real, however extravagant, and only occasionally intermixes portions of pure allegory. But allegory is the staple of Spenser’s design; and his legendary tales are interwoven with it so far only as they are connected with his one human hero. With the exception of Prince Arthur, his heroes are abstractions; they bear the names of knights, but are in reality Virtues personified. Dryden finds fault with Spenser’s obsolete language, and the ill choice of his stanza. The poems of the Elizabethan age, now considered as the golden age of poetry, are so much more read and better understood in these later times, than they were in Dryden’s days, that the language is no longer felt as a serious obstacle to the pleasures of perusal. With respect to the form of stanza, it was natural for Dryden, the mighty master of the couplet, to condemn it; and it may be in itself objectionable as favouring redundancy of style, not only in respect of expletives and tautology, but of ideas. Its fulness of melody however, and sonorous majesty, have of late brought it into favour both with writers and readers.

Of all critics, none can be better worth hearing, on such a subject as that of the Faery Queene, than the historian of English poetry. Warton writes thus:—“If the Faery Queene be destitute of that arrangement and economy which epic severity requires, yet we scarcely regret the loss of these, while their place is so amply supplied by something which more powerfully attracts us; something which engages the affections, the feelings of the heart, rather than the cold approbation of the head. If there be any poem whose graces please, because they are situated beyond the reach of art; and where the force and faculties of creative imagination delight, because they are unassisted and unrestrained by those of deliberate judgment, it is this: in reading Spenser, if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported.”

The principal editions of Spenser are Upton’s ‘Faery Queene, with a Glossary and Notes,’ London, 1751; and Mr. Todd’s Variorum Edition of his Works, 8 vols. 8vo. 1805.