years from Chaucer's death little or no poetry was produced in bleeding and exhausted England. A few fine ballads are ascribed to the later part of the century; but in sustained and serious verse the noon of Chaucer is followed by the gray afternoon of Lydgate and the dull twilight of Occleve." Under the strong hand of the Tudor sovereigns the land regained repose, and the long silence was broken by the Satires of Skelton, the Allegory of Sackville, the Amourist verse of Surrey and of Wyatt. All these were hopeful essays of tentative but unpractised genius; the higher literary art of Chaucer, suspended through the fifteenth century, was at last revived by SPENSER.

Edmund Spenser was born in or about the year 1552; born in London, as we know from himself:

At last they all to mery London came,

To mery London, my most kyndly nurse,
That to me gave this Life's first native sourse,
Though from another place I take my name,
A house of auncient fame.

Of his father we know nothing; of his mother only that her name was Elizabeth; but he claims kindred in the lines above with the Spenser family, afterwards Spencers of Wormleighton and of Althorp, already high in rank and "of auncient fame." To the youngest daughter of Sir John Spenser, Alice, afterwards Lady Derby, he dedicated his "Tears of the Muses"; before this lady and her son-in-law Milton's "Arcades"

was performed; her granddaughter, the Lady Alice Egerton, heroine of "Comus," became the Lady Carbery who upon the decline of the royal cause sheltered Jeremy Taylor in her home at Golden Grove; this one illustrious family linking together three great and widely parted

names.

Spenser was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School under Dr. Mulcaster, who is said by Warton to have been a careful teacher of the English language; he had as schoolfellows Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. In the May of 1569 he was admitted Sizar, or inferior scholar, at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, supported there by benefactions from the munificent Nowell family, and befriended by the late Master of the College, Grindal, then Bishop of London. If the translations from Petrarch and Du Bellay published in his Works are his, he had already, as a schoolboy, tried his hand on not unmelodious verse, and attained considerable proficiency in both the Italian and the French languages. It was a time of storm and stress both within and without the University. In the year of his matriculation occurred the great Rising of the North; in the previous year Mary of Scots had been imprisoned at Fotheringay; in the year following Pope Pius V issued his Bull of Deposition against Elizabeth, and his emissaries were preaching everywhere that the Queen was illegitimate, and that the English throne belonged to captive Mary. Within the University, Cartwright, Margaret Professor, was

not only denouncing the received church ritual and order, but propagating political opinions such as no civil Government could tolerate. This conduct led to his expulsion two years later, and ultimately, while it enriched our literature with the "Ecclesiastical Polity" of his great opponent, Hooker, impelled Elizabeth's advisers into what Green calls the worst blot upon her reign, their establishment of the High Commission Court.

It was an atmosphere not favourable to the development of a dreamy, meditative young poet; of its effect upon him we can only guess. His allegiance to Alexander Nowell, and his devoted attachment to Grindal, whom his poetry celebrates affectionately as a model Christian pastor, leads us to rank him with the "conforming Puritans," as they were called, who trod peacefully the cool, sequestered middle way between Geneva and Rome. He was a Puritan only in his negation of Papal rule; the stern austerities of Calvinism were to his taste no more than they would have been to Chaucer's. At Cambridge, however, he formed two intimate friendships: with a younger student, Edward Kirke, who edited his earliest works; and with Gabriel Harvey, Fellow of Pembroke, and a lecturer at Trinity Hall. Harvey was a learned, pedantic, amiable, absurd college Don, of the sort described by Sir Thomas Overbury thirty years later as a "Meere Fellow of a House." Intellectually, the intimacy was perilous, for Harvey had thrown himself eagerly into the effort which