containing his Colin Clout's Come Home Again, the dedication of which to Raleigh is dated "From my house at Kilcolman, December the 27th, 1591," no doubt a misprint for 1594; and also his Astrophel, an elegy upon Sir Philip Sidney, dedicated to his widow, now the Countess of Essex; together with The Mourning Muse of Thestylis, another poem on the same subject. The same year appeared, in 8vo., his sonnets, under the title of Amoretti, accompanied by the Epithalamion. In 1596 he paid another visit to England, bringing with him the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books of his Fairy Queen, which were published, along with a new edition of the preceding three books, in 4to., at London in that year. In the latter part of the same year appeared, in a volume of the same form, a reprint of his Daphnaida, together with his Prothalamion, or spousal verse on the marriages of the Ladies Elizabeth and Catharine Somerset, and his Four Hymns in honour of Love, of Beauty, of Heavenly Love, and of Heavenly Beauty, dedicated to the Countesses of Cumberland and Warwick, in an address dated Greenwich, the 1st of September, 1596. The first two of these Hymns he states had been composed in the greener times of his youth; and, although he had been moved by one of the two ladies to call in the same, as "having too much pleased those of like age and disposition, which, being too vehemently carried with that kind of affection, do rather suck out poison to their strong passion than honey to their honest delight," he "had been unable so to do, by reason that many copies thereof were formerly scattered abroad." At this time it was still common for literary compositions of all kinds to be extensively circulated in manuscript, as used to be the mode of publication before the invention of printing. These Hymns were the last of his productions that he sent to the press. It was during this visit to England that he presented to Elizabeth, and probably wrote, his prose treatise entitled A View of the State of Ireland, written dialogue-wise between Eudoxus and Irenaeus; but that work remained unprinted, till it was published at Dublin by Sir James Ware in 1633.

Spenser returned to Ireland probably early in 1597; and was the next year recommended by the Queen to be sheriff of Cork; but, soon after the breaking out of Tyrone's rebellion in October, 1598, his house of Kilcolman was attacked and burned by the rebels, and, one child having perished in the flames, it was with difficulty that he made his escape with his wife and two sons.

He arrived in England in a state of destitution; but it seems unlikely that, with his talents and great reputation, his powerful friends, his pension, and the rights he still retained, although deprived of the enjoyment of his Irish property for the moment, he could have been left to perish, as has been commonly said, of want the breaking up of his constitution was a natural consequence of the sufferings he had lately gone through. All that we know, however, is that, after having been ill for some time, he died at an inn in King Street, Westminster, on the 16th of January, 1599. Two Cantos, undoubtedly genuine, of a subsequent Book of the Fairy Queen, and two stanzas of a third Canto, entitled Of Mutability, and forming part of the Legend of Constancy, were published in an edition of his collected works, in a folio volume, in 1609; and it may be doubted if much more of the poem was ever written. As for the poem called Britain's Ida, in six short Cantos, which also appeared in this volume, it is certainly not by Spenser. Besides the works that have been enumerated, however, the following compositions by Spenser, now all lost, are mentioned by himself or his friends :-His Pageants, The Canticles Paraphrased, a poetical version of Ecclesiastes, another of the Seven Penitential Psalms, The Hours of our Lord, The Sacrifice of a Sinner, Purgatory, A Se'ennight's Slumber, The Court of Cupid, and The Hell of Lovers. He is also said to have written a treatise in prose called The English Poet.

The most remarkable of Spenser's poems written before his great work, The Fairy Queen, are his Shepherd's Calendar and his Mother Hubberd's Tale. Both of these pieces are full of the spirit of poetry, and his genius displays itself in each in a variety of styles.

The Shepherd's Calendar, though consisting of twelve distinct. poems denominated Eclogues, is less of a pastoral, in the ordinary acceptation, than it is of a piece of polemical or party divinity. Spenser's shepherds are, for the most part, pastors of the church, or clergymen, with only pious parishioners for sheep. One is a good shepherd, such as Algrind, that is, the puritanical archbishop of Canterbury, Grindall. Another, represented in a much less favourable light, is Morell, that is, his famous antagonist, Elmore, or Aylmer, bishop of London. Spenser's religious character and opinions make a curious subject, which has not received much attention from his biographers. His connexion with Sidney and Leicester, and afterwards with Essex, made

him, no doubt, be regarded throughout his life as belonging to the puritanical party, but only to the more moderate section of it, which, although not unwilling to encourage a little grumbling at some things in the conduct of the dominant section of the hierarchy, and even professing to see much reason in the objections made to certain outworks or appendages of the established system, stood still or drew back as soon as the opposition to the church became really a war of principles. Spenser's puritanism seems almost as unnatural as his hexameters and pentameters. It was probably, for the greater part, the product of circumstances, rather than of conviction or any strong feeling, even while it lasted; and it never appears afterwards in such prominence as in his Shepherd's Calendar, the first work that he published. It has even been asserted that his Blatant Beast, in the Sixth Book of the Fairy Queen, is meant for a personification of Puritanism. At any rate, it is evident that, in his later years, his Christianity had taken the form rather of Platonism than of Puritanism. The puritanical spirit of some parts of the Shepherd's Calendar, however, probably contributed to the popularity which the poem long retained. It was reprinted four times during the author's life time, in 1581, 1586, 1591, and 1597. Yet it is not only a very unequal composition, but is, in its best executed or most striking parts, far below the height to which Spenser afterwards learned to rise. We may gather from it that one thing which had helped to give him his church-reforming notions had been his study and admiration of the old poetry of Chaucer and the Visions of Piers Ploughman. One of his personages, who, in one of the Eclogues, discourses much in the style of the principal figure in Langland's poem, is called Piers; and Chaucer is not only in various passages affectionately commemorated under the name of Tityrus, but several of the Eclogues are written in a peculiar versification which appears to be intended as an imitation of that of Chaucer's poetry. So far as Spenser, at this time of his life, can be accounted any authority in such a matter, it may be admitted that he seems to have regarded the verse of his great predecessor as only accentually, not syllabically, regular; but it is still more evident, at the same time, that these intended imitations of Chaucer in the Shepherd's Calendar do not really give a true representation of his prosody, according to any theory of it that may be adopted. The flow of the verse is rather that of the Visions of Piers Ploughman, only without the regular alliteration

and with the addition of rhyme. As a specimen of the Shepherd's Calendar, we will give, from the second Eclogue, which is one of those composed in this peculiar measure, the Tale of the Oak and the Briar, as told by the old shepherd Thenot, who says he conned it of Tityrus in his youth :-

There grew an aged tree on the green,
A goodly Oak sometime had it been,
With arms full strong and lergely displayed,
But of their leaves they were disarrayed;
The body big and mightily pight,'

Throughly rooted, and of wondrous height:
Whilom he had been the king of the field,
And mochel mast to the husband3 did yield,
And with his nuts larded many swine;
But now the grey moss marred his rine ;4
His bared boughs were beaten with storms,
His top was bald and wasted with worms,
His honour decayed, his branches sere.

Hard by his side grew a bragging Brere,
Which proudly thrust into th' element,
And seemed to threat the firmament;
It was embellished with blossoms fair,
And thereto aye wonted to repair
The shepherds' daughters to gather flowers,
To paint their garlands with his colours;
And in his small bushes used to shrowd
The sweet nightingale, singing so loud;
Which made this foolish Brere wex so bold,
That on a time he cast him to scold

And sneb the good Oak, for he was old.

Why stand'st there, quoth he, thou brutish block?

Nor for fruit nor for shadow serves thy stock.

Seest how fresh my flowers been spread,

Dyed in lilly white and crimson red,
With leaves engrained in lusty green,
Colours meet to clothe a maiden queen?
Thy waste bigness but cumbers the ground,
And dirks the beauty of my blossoms round;
The mouldy moss which thee accloyeth 6
My cinnamon smell too much annoyeth:
Wherefore soon, I rede thee, hence remove,
Lest thou the price of my displeasure prove.

So spake this bold Brere with great disdain;
Little him answered the Oak again;

But yielded, with shame and grief adawed '
That of a weed he was over-crawed.

It chanced after upon a day

The husbandman's self to come that way,
Of custom to surview his ground,

And his trees of state in compass round:2
Him when the spiteful Brere had espied,
He causeless complained, and loudly cried
Unto his lord, stirring up stern strife ;—

O my liege lord! the God of my life,
Please of you pond3 your suppliant's plaint,
Caused of wrong and cruel constraint,
Which I your poor vassal daily endure:
And, but your goodness the same secure,
Am like for desperate dole to die,
Through felonous force of mine enemy.

Greatly aghast with this piteous plea,
Him rested the goodman on the lea,
And bade the Brere in his plaint proceed.
With painted words tho1 gan this proud weed
(As most usen ambitious folk)

His coloured crime with craft to cloak :

Ah, my Sovereign! lord of creatures all,
Thou placer of plants both humble and tall,
Was not I planted of thine own hand,
To be the primrose of all thy land,

With flowering blossoms to furnish the prime,"
And scarlet berries in summer time?
How falls it then that this faded Oak,

Whose body is sere, whose branches broke,
Whose naked arms stretch unto the fire,"
Unto such tyranny doth aspire,
Hindering with his shade my lovely light,
And robbing me of the sweet sun's sight?
So beat his old boughs my tender side,

That oft the blood springeth from woundes wide.
Untimely my flowers forced to fall,

That been the honour of your coronal;

And oft he lets his canker-worms light

Upon my branches, to work me more spite;

1 Daunted.

2 Perhaps the true reading is "encompass round," that is, circumambulate.

4 Then.

3 Ponder, consider.
6 The meaning seems to be, are ready for firewood.

5 Spring.