too. The poem is not an easy one from which to quote, it must be read as a whole if one would understand its full beauty, and it is a strange mixture of religious fervour and classical and mediæval allusion: as in the beautiful stanzas in Book I. where the old man, Contemplation, leads the Red Cross Knight up into the Mountain which he compares first to Mount Olivet, and then, in the same verse, to Parnassus. But, in spite of this incongruity, he paints more fairly than had yet been done the picture of the New Jerusalem :

"The new Hierusalem, that God has built
For those to dwell in that are chosen his,
His chosen people, purg'd from sinful guilt
With pretious blood, which cruelly was spilt
On cursed tree, of that unspotted lam,
That for the sinnes of al the world was kilt."

"Like that sacred hill, whose head full hie,
Adorned with fruitfull Olives all around,
Is, as it were, for endlesse memory

Of that deare Lord who oft thereon was fownd,
For ever with a flowing girlond crownd:
Or like that pleasant Mount, that is for ay
Through famous Poets verse each where renownd,
On which the thrise three learned Ladies play

Their heavenly notes, and make full many a lovely lay."

And so the poem rolls grandly on, stanza after stanza, in magnificent monotony, that reminds one, says Dean Church, "of the grand monotony of the

seashore, where billow follows billow. . . . and spreads and rushes up in a last long line of foam upon the beach."

The perfect knight of the poem may well be drawn from Sidney, with touches too of Raleigh, and of Spenser's own beloved master, Lord Grey; the scenery and many of the scenes recall his wild Irish surroundings, and his wistful longing for pure religion shows his sympathy with the struggles of the Church.

Thus there is historic interest underlying the work, apart from its poetic beauty, which should lead it to be studied even by those who may not be born with power to catch its full music.

One would like to be able to picture the poet to the end, working out the great epic as he had planned it, in the lonely beauty of his Celtic home.

But each one who loves the "Faerie Queene" must create for himself those last scenes which the master's hand was never to depict. Kilcolman had been his home, but it was not to be his last resting-place.

Those to whom the castle had once belonged still harboured jealousy of the Saxon interloper; in 1598 a fresh insurrection in Munster took place under the new Earl of Desmond, and the

castle of Kilcolman was plundered, and burned to the ground. According to the account of Ben Jonson, a tiny new-born child of Spenser's was burned within the ruins.

The poet and his wife fled to England; but his spirit was gone, his heart was broken. He died in want and sorrow on January 16, 1599.

One more career blighted, one more heart broken, "one task more unfilled, one more footpath untrod," by association with that land which seems to carry hidden among the beauties of its outward show a robe of Nessus dipped in poison more fatal to the Saxon knight than was ever that of the Centaur to Attic hero.

But of Spenser one cannot feel that the end clouded for long the glory of his memory. He lives, and will live always, in the stainless grandeur of his own Red Cross Knight, lighted by the soft radiance of his Faerie World in the land his fancy created for all time.

It is not as the tired wanderer, fleeing across the sea in fear of his life, and dying poor and broken-hearted in the London which no longer knew him as its own, that we think of such as Edmund Spenser, but rather we hear his voice, still echoing down the ages from his time to ours, in those grand words he wrote so near the end,

and which have the solemn majesty of prophecy

about them :

"Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd
Upon the pillours of Eternity,

That is contrayr to Mutabilitie;

For all that moveth doth in Change delight:
But thence-forth all shall rest eternally

With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight:

O! that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabaoths sight."

CHAPTER XIII

MARLOWE

RATHER more than ten years after Spenser, was born Christopher Marlowe, the greatest of Shakspere's forerunners, who for the few short years of his life gave to the world dramatic work full of noble promise.

Kit Marlowe, as he was often called, was the son of John Marlowe, a shoemaker, and was born at Canterbury, where his mother's father was rector of St. Peter's Church. The boy was educated first at King's School, Canterbury, and later at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which was then Benet College, where he took his B.A. degree in 1583, and his M.A. in 1587.

It is probable that he was intended to follow the profession of his grandfather, and to become a clergyman, after receiving a classical training at the University, but as his character developed, it led him to follow a very different line of life.

He went to London, and there became one of a brilliant and dissipated band of young men, play