Where each one seeks with malice and with strife
To thrust down other into foul disgrace

Himself to raise ; and he doth soonest rise
That best can handle his deceitful wit
In subtle shifts

To which him needs a guileful hollow heart
Masked with fair dissembling courtesy,
A filed tongue furnisht with terms of art,
No art of school, but courtiers' schoolery.
For arts of school have there small countenance,
Counted but toys to busy idle brains,

And there professors find small maintenance,
But to be instruments of others' gains,
Nor is there place for any gentle wit
Unless to please it can itself apply.

And, again, in his "Mother Hubberd's Tales,” in the most pithy and masculine verses he ever wrote :

"Most miserable man, whom wicked Fate
Hath brought to Court to sue for Had-I-wist
That few have found and many one hath mist!
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried
What hell it is in suing long to bide;
To lose good days that might be better spent,
To waste long nights in pensive discontent,
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow,
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow,
To have thy Prince's grace yet want her Peers',
To have thy asking yet wait many years,
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares,
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs,

Compare Shakespeare's lxvi. Sonnet.

That curse God send unto mine enemy !"*

When Spenser had once got safely back to the secure retreat and serene companionship of his great poem, with what profound and pathetic exultation must he have recalled the verses of Dante I

"Chi dietro a jura, e chi ad aforismi
Sen giva, e chi seguendo sacerdozio,
E chi regnar per forza e per sofismi,
E chi rubare, e chi civil negozio,
Chi nei diletti della carne involto
S' affaticava, e chi si dava all' ozio,
Quando da tutte queste cose sciolto,
Con Beatrice m' era suso in cielo
Cotanto gloriosamente accolto."t

What Spenser says of the indifference of the court to learning, and literature is the more remarkable because he himself was by no means an unsuccessful suitor. Queen Elizabeth bestowed on him a pension of fifty pounds, and shortly after he received

* This poem, published in 1591, was, Spenser tells us in his dedication, "long sithens composed in the raw conceit of my youth." But he had evidently retouched it. The verses quoted show a firmer hand than is generally seen in it, and we are safe in assuming that they were added after his visit to England. Dr. Johnson epigrammatised Spenser's indictment into

"There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail,"

but I think it loses in pathos more than it gains in point.

+ Paradiso, xi. 4-12. Spenser was familiar with the "Divina Commedia," though I do not remember that his commentators have pointed out his chief obligations to it.

the grant of lands already mentioned. It is said, indeed, that Lord Burleigh in some way hindered the advancement of the poet, who more than once directly alludes to him either in reproach or remonstrance. In "The Ruins of Time," after

speaking of the death of Walsingham,

"Since whose decease learning lies unregarded,

And men of armes do wander unrewarded,"

he gives the following reason for their neglect :—

"For he that now wields all things at his will,
Scorns th' one and th' other in his deeper skill.
O grief of griefs! O gall of all good hearts,
To see that virtue should despised be

Of him that first was raised for virtuous parts,
And now, broad-spreading like an aged tree,
Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be:
O let the man of whom the Muse is scorned

Nor live nor dead be of the Muse adorned !"

And in the introduction to the fourth book of the "Faery
Queen" he says again :—

"The rugged forehead that with grave foresight
Wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state,
My looser rhymes, I wot, doth sharply wite
For praising Love, as I have done of late,—

By which frail youth is oft to folly led

Through false allurement of that pleasing bait,
That better were in virtues discipled

Than with vain poems' weeds to have their fancies fed.

"Such ones ill judge of love that cannot love
Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame;

Forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove,
Ne natural affection faultless blame

For fault of few that have abused the same:

For it of honour and all virtue is

The root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame
That crown true lovers with immortal bliss,

The meed of them that love and do not live amiss."

If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of nightingales' tongues as the "Faery Queen," he is very much more to be pitied than Spenser. The sensitive purity of the poet might indeed well be wounded when a poem in which he proposed to himself "to discourse at large" of "the ethick part of Moral Philosophy" could be so misinterpreted. But Spenser speaks in the same strain, and without any other than a general application, in his "Tears of the Muses," and his friend Sidney undertakes the defence of poesy because it was undervalued. But undervalued by whom? By the only persons about whom he knew or cared anything, those whom we should now call Society, and who were then called the Court. The inference I would draw is that, among the causes which contributed to the marvellous efflorescence of genius in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the influence of direct patronage from above is to be reckoned at almost nothing.+ Then, as when the same phenomenon has happened elsewhere, there must have been a sympathetic public. Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of countless generations (οἴη περ φύλλων γενεή), and not from any top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface at some

* His own words as reported by Lodowick Bryskett. (Todd's Spenser, I. lx.) The whole passage is very interesting as giving us the only glimpse we get of the living Spenser in actual contact with his fellow-men. It shows him to us, as we could wish to see him, surrounded with loving respect, companionable and helpful. Bryskett tells us that he was "perfect in the Greek tongue," and "also very well read in philosophy both moral and natural." He encouraged Bryskett in the study of Greek, and offered to help him in it. Comparing the last verse of the above citation of the "Faery Queen" with other passages in Spenser, I cannot help thinking that he wrote, "do not love amiss."

"And know, sweet prince, when you shall come to know,
That 't is not in the power of kings to raise
A spirit for verse that is not born thereto;
Nor are they born in every prince's days."

Daniel's Dedic. Trag. of "Philotas."

master's bidding.* England had long been growing more truly insular in language and political ideas when the Reformation came to precipitate her national consciousness by secluding her more completely from the rest of Europe. Hitherto there had been Englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly hating foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom they were proud or not as the case might be, but there was no England as a separate entity from the sovereign who embodied it for the time being. But now an English people began to be dimly aware of itself. Their having got a religion to themselves must have intensified them much as the having a god of their own did the Jews. The exhilaration of relief after the long tension of anxiety, when the Spanish Armada was overwhelmed like the hosts of Pharaoh, while it confirmed their assurance of a provincial deity, must also have been like sunshine to bring into flower all that there was of imaginative or sentimental in the English nature, already just in the first flush of its spring. ("The yonge sonne

Had in the Bull half of his course yronne.")

And just at this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty with the golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy. If Keats could say, when he first opened Chapman's Homer

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise;"

Louis XIV. is commonly supposed in some miraculous way to have created French literature. He may more truly be said to have petrified it so far as his influence went. The French renaissance in the preceding century was produced by causes similar in essentials to those which brought about that in England not long after. The grand siecle grew by natural processes of development out of that which had preceded it, and which, to the impartial foreigner at least, has more flavour, and more French flavour too, than the Gallo-Roman usurper that pushed it from its stool. The best modern French poetry has been forced to temper its verses in the colder natural springs of the ante-classic period.

In the Elizabethan drama the words "England" and "France" are constantly used to signify the kings of those countries.