OF MINOR POEMS the poems attributed to Spenser earlier than 1579 nothing except the titles has been preserved. His first notable production, stamping him as the New Poet, and marking an adequate effort at the revival of English verse as revealed two hundred years before by Chaucer, we have seen to be "THE SHEPHEARDS CALENDER," published in 1579-80 by Hugh Singleton, "in twelve Æglogues proportionable to the twelve monethes.' It bore no author's name, was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, with a Commentary and Introductory Letter by E. K., known now to be Edward Kirke, Spenser's fellow student at Pembroke-Hall. In estimating this, as in all other of Spenser's poems, let us begin by admitting that it was artificial. For it was the product of a time and of a society in which life was a brilliant masquerade, With pomp, and feast, and revelry, With masque, and antique pageantry, naked simplicity an unpardonable indecorum. In Elizabeth's Court all was unreality. She herself was a sham, loving to be called the Queen of Beauty long after middle age had planted crowsfeet in her face; posing as the chaste Diana while she stooped to flirt with every handsome young Endymion whose feet led him to her Latmos. The fine ladies and gentlemen round her were a sham; they moved and spoke like actors in a play, conspiring to make believe that life was all Arcadian, all "turneys and trophies," knight-errantry and love-making; the men all victorious and brave, the women all chaste, innocent and lovely. And so the culture of the age reflected its conventionality; English habits were too vulgar, English words too coarse, English models and imagery too savage for artistic and poetic rendering: the spirit which had humbled Spain and was colonizing a New World might only appear upon the literary stage in a classic or a mediaeval mask. Hence, no doubt, the Pastoral mould in which Spenser cast his lesser poems. It bore the stamp of many mints. To the Grecian poets, Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, it was a genuine presentment of Sicilian shepherd life; was then recast by Virgil in an artificial and sometimes an allegorical form, with exquisitely polished language such as no shepherd could ever have expressed. To the earlier Poets of the Renaissance its allegorizing was as attractive as its melody; the Bucolics of Virgil were copied by Petrarch, Marot, Ronsard, and became text books in the grammar schools along with the not less popular Eclogues of Baptiste Spagnuoli, who under his better-known name of Mantuanus is affectionately quoted by the pedant Holofernes in "Love's Labour Lost." His cult passed to England: "Could the learned," says Lodge, "bear the loss of Homer, or our younglings the wrytings of Mantuan?" In 1563 a volume of Eclogues was published by Barnabee Googe; and, thus induced, the Muse of Spenser imped her wing in the "Shepheard's Calender," the title taken from a curious almanac, meteorological, practical, and moral, then and long afterwards popular amongst real shepherds and agriculturists. This homage to fashion, which increased the popularity of his poem at the time, impairs it somewhat amongst ourselves; we must season our ears to the shepherds' prattle, our eyes to the uncouth names of the shepherds' selves, before we can taste the undoubted sweetness of the verse. The poems, though all in pastoral style, are on unconnected topics and in varied metres. Three of them, I, III, VI, are amatory, bepraising the charms or bewailing the cruelty of some shepherd maid. The lass is Spenser's unknown first love; of the shepherds, Colin Clout-a name borrowed from Skeltonis Spenser himself; Hobbinol stands for Harvey. The Sixth Eclogue contains a tribute to Chaucer: The God of Shepheards, Tityrus, is dead, |