JUST three hundred years ago, and just one hundred years after Columbus discovered America and planted his flag on San Salvador, there stood in the middle of a wide, boggy Irish plain a building better than most of those anywhere near it, called Kilcolman Castle. It was a time when the English Government was having a hard time to keep the Irish under their control, and we shall see after a while how the poor people of the castle suffered on account of this fact. But there lived at Kilcolman, in those days from 1586 to 1598, one of the most celebrated of the poets about whom we shall talk in our English Literature Papers. It was Edmund Spenser, and the old picture of him that has come down to us shows him to be a kind, gentle looking man, with a long thin nose and a high forehead, dressed in a black robe, and with a great lace collar coming up above his ears, which must have been very uncomfortable in warm weather.

Spenser was born in a part of London called East Smithfield, right under the shadow of the great Tower; and it is a very disagreeable fact to one who is trying to write about him, that we know almost nothing about the little events of his life, and especially of his boyhood. Three hundred years ago, you know, people did not take notes of themselves so much as we do nowadays, or as they did even in the last century; or if they did they have not been kept for us. Just a few people have told us anything about Edmund Spenser, and the probability is that even his picture is not any better than many of those which we see nowadays in the newspapers.

One of the few things which we find about him was that he entered one of the colleges at Cambridge when he was seventeen, as what was then called a “sizar.” These sizars were the poorer students, who had to work for their living in a much more disagreeable way than any students do now, by waiting on the older and richer ones at their meals and elsewhere, and were paid by their tuition in the college and the fragments of food which their employers left for them. I suppose if the student on whom Edmund Spenser waited could come back to earth for a little while he would be considerably surprised and perplexed to find that the only reason why the world would like to know more about him would be on account of the little sizar whom he used to have at Cambridge!

When he had left college, in which we find that he was a very good scholar, Spenser taught for a while in the northern part of England, and began to write the first poetry which made him at all famous; it was a long poem in twelve parts, about the twelve months of the year, and he called it at first “The Poet’s Year,” and afterward the name by which we know it, “The Shepherd’s Calendar.” It was a very pretty poem, and described the scenery and the country life of England in a way that made all good Englishmen like the author. So Spenser fell in with some good friends, and was introduced to Queen Elizabeth. It is a curious thing that in those days the best writers did not depend for their payment upon the number of books which were sold, or what their publishers paid them; but it was the custom of the king or queen, whenever an especially good writer appeared, to support him at the royal court or elsewhere, in return for which the writer served his sovereign in any way he could, especially by paying him any number of compliments in his writings. It is as though whenever a promising young author should appear in New York or Boston, he should find a Congressman who would introduce him to the President at Washington; and if he found that he was likely to be a pleasing writer and a convenient friend to have near him, he should invite him to stay in the city, and should see that he had all the money he needed.

But we shall be sorry to find that although Queen Elizabeth received Spenser very pleasantly, and although he paid her any number of pretty compliments in his after life, she never did very much for him. The first piece of good fortune which seemed to come to him was when he was appointed secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, who was the Governor of Ireland. After that he was also given Kilcolman Castle, which we spoke of at the beginning, where he spent so many years. We shall see that he did a good deal of writing while there, and also acted as the agent of the English Government, in looking after whatever matters needed his attention. It was this that probably made the Irishmen dislike him, rather than any one thing which he did, for when he had been there twelve years there was a rebellion among them, and they burned the castle and forced the poet to run away to England. The saddest thing about it was that his baby was burned at the same time, and they tell us that the lonely father never recovered from his sorrow over this event. At any rate he died the next year in London, in a small lodging-house, and probably with very little money left. It was with him as with so many, many others, both in those days and now: the people did not begin to think enough of him until he was dead, and then they gave him a magnificent funeral, and buried him in Westminster Abbey, where the graves of all the greatest Englishmen are.

We know nothing but what is good about Edmund Spenser; he seems to have been a kind man, loving everything true and beautiful, and when we have a chance to read his writings we shall feel certain that this is so. Besides the “Shepherd’s Calendar” he wrote a book in prose about Ireland while he was there, and it was also at Kilcolman Castle that his great poem, “The Faery Queene,” or as we should say “The Fairy Queen,” was written. This is a long, long poem, and was planned to be written in twelve parts, but it is probable that only six of them were ever finished. At any rate that is all which has come down to us; and some one has said that in this work “the half is better than the whole,” meaning that although Spenser wrote six very nice books, he could scarcely have written six more anywhere nearly so good.

The “Fairy Queen” is what people call an allegory; those of us who have read “The Pilgrim’s Progress” have probably found out what is meant by that. In allegories the story seems to be about real people, but all the time the people stand for good or bad qualities, or something of that sort—like Christian and Mr. Greatheart, or the Fairy Queen and the Red Cross Knight. If we look in Webster’s Dictionary under “allegory,” we shall find that the “Pilgrim’s Progress” and “The Faery Queene” are spoken of as the most celebrated examples.

I am sorry to say that we shall find the “Faery Queene” rather hard reading; not because the story is not interesting, but because there were so many good English words in those days that we have forgotten all about now. Then the spelling, as we have already guessed from the name of the poem, seems more like one of our Pansy “Queer Stories” than anything else. We will try to read just one very pretty verse, at the beginning of the second Canto, which describes the sunrise. Spenser put quaint little rhymed headings at the top of his cantos; the one here is—

In reading the description of the sunrise we shall want to remember that there was an old story that the sun was a golden wagon driven up the sky by the god Phoebus, and also that “chanticleer,” or “chaunticlere,” was the old-fashioned word for rooster. Here is the verse, and we will bid Spenser good-by with it:

An Englishman visiting Sweden and noticing their care for children, who were gathered up from the streets and highways and placed in school, inquired if it was not costly. “Yes,” was the answer, “it is costly, but not dear. We are not rich enough to allow a child to grow up in ignorance, misery and crime, to become a scourge to society as well as a disgrace to himself.”