CHAPTER XII

SPENSER

EDMUND SPENSER was born at the end of Edward VI.'s reign, and was about six years old at the time of Elizabeth's accession. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, under the severe and famous headmaster, Dr. Mulcaster, and on the 20th of May 1569, he was admitted as a sizar to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge.

There he was partly kept by the kindness of Dr. Nowell, the Dean of St. Paul's, who had, no doubt, recognised the unusual ability of the London schoolboy, and he also received friendly notice from Archbishop Grindal, who had succeeded Parker at Canterbury.

Grindal is evidently Spenser's model in his "Shepherd's Calendar" for Algrind, the faithful Christian pastor who bids the clergy "not live ylike as men of the laye."

Spenser's sympathies, during the years he spent at Cambridge, seem to have been stirred by

longing for a holier and more consistent life among

the clergy.

"The time was once" (he writes), "and may again retorne

(For ought may happen that hath bene beforne),
When shepeheards had none inheritaunce,

Ne of land, nor fee in sufferaunce,

But what might arise of the bare shepe

(Were it more or lesse) which they did keepe.
Well ywis was it with shepheards thoe :
Nought having, nought feared they to forgoe;
For Pan himselfe was their inheritaunce.
The shepheards God so wel them guided,
That of nought they were unprovided."

He suffered from weak health while at the University, but nevertheless he took his degree, and left Cambridge, as an M.A., in 1576.

He made two life-long friendships while at Pembroke Hall, one with Edward Kirke, who edited his "Shepherd's Calendar," and the other with Gabriel Harvey, to whom he was deeply attached throughout his life, and who is represented as Hobbinoll in the "Shepherd's Calendar," while Kirke is Cuddie in the same work.

On leaving Cambridge, Spenser paid a visit to the North of England, where he met and loved the Rosalind to whose memory he always remained faithful, even after his marriage, although she refused him for love of another.

And from the Northern moors he returned to the pleasant home county of Kent, and to London, where he had been born, and of which he wrote:

"At length they all to merry London came,
To merry London, my most kindly nurse.”

And describes how he

"Walkt forth to ease my pain

Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames."

In London he had opportunity for cultivating the friendship of his hero, Philip Sidney, whose noble and chivalrous nature may have well formed the model for Spenser's Red Cross Knight. The love of the high-souled, beautyloving poet for the stainless knight lasted unimpaired until the fatal battle-field of Zutphen, and noble were the lines in which Spenser sang the virtues and mourned the loss of his dead friend :

"To praise thy life, or waile thy worthie death,
And want thy wit, thy wit high, pure, divine,

Is far beyond the power of mortall line,
Nor any one hath worth that draweth breath."

So he wrote of him in his epitaph, and in his Elegie, or Friend's Passion, for his Astrophel, written upon the death of the right honourable