friend Sidney, or the great court favourite Leicester.

It has long been a received opinion that Spenser was nominated Poet Laureate before 1586; and this appears to have some countenance from the writings of some of his contemporaries.— Nash, in particular, in his supplication of Pierce Pennilesse, published in 1586, says that he intended to "decipher the excesse of gluttonie at large, but that a new Laureat saved him the labor," evidently alluding to "the gulfe of greedinesse" described in Spenser's Faeirie Queene.

But the real fact is as Mr. Malone has stated; "Elizabeth had no poet-laureat till in February, 1590-1, she conferred on Spenser a pension of fifty pounds a year, the grant of which was discovered some years ago in the chapel of the Rolls; from which time to his death in 1598-9, he may properly be considered as filling this office, though like most of his predecessors, and his two immediate successors, he is not expressly styled Laureate in his patent.

*

Here Spenser's biographer introduces the well known story of the laureate and the lord treasurer Burleigh, as follows: "that Burleigh told the queen the pension was beyond example, and too great to be given to a ballad maker; that the payment of the pension was intercepted by Burleigh; that when the queen, upon Spenser's

Malone's Life of Dryden, p. 84.

presenting

presenting some poems to her, ordered him the gratuity of an hundred pounds, his lordship asked with some contempt of the poet, "What all this for a song ?" And that the queen replied, "then give him what is reason," that Spenser having long waited in vain for the fulfilment of the royal order, presented to her Majesty these

verses :

I was promis'd on a time

To have reason for my rhime;
From that time unto this season,

I've received nor rhime nor reason.

It is added, that these magical numbers produced the desired effect, in the immediate direction of payment to the insulted poet, as well as in the reproof of the adverse lord treasurer.

Such, says Mr. Todd, is the substance of this marvellous opposition to the privilege conferred on Spenser by Elizabeth, varied and improved by the biographers, of which opposition the account originates it seems in the facetious Dr. Fuller's Worthies of England (a work published at the distance of more than seventy years afterwards) unsupported by requisite authority."*

The ingenious editor very strangely mentions in opposition to this story, the silence of Puttenham in his Art of English Poesie, which writer, he thinks, would not have failed to celebrate

*Life of Speuser, prefixed to his Works.

Elizabeth's generosity, had the story been true. Now that book was printed in 1589, and Spenser's patent was not granted till February, 1590-1, so that Puttenham could not well praise a liberal action before it took place.

And with regard to Fuller, his authority is not quite so contemptible as is here intimated; for though his book did not appear till after his death, he spent many years in collecting the materials for it. Fuller entered of Queen's-college, Cambridge, in 1520, not much above twenty years after Spenser's death, so that he might have heard the anecdote from very sufficient authority.

But if it shall appear that our poet himself conceived a strong resentment against Burleigh for treating him with contempt, the story may not be quite so ridiculous as is represented, even though told by the facetious Dr. Fuller.

In his "Ruines of Rome," certainly written. after the year 1591, Spenser thus severely characterises the lord Treasurer:-

For he that now wields all things at his will,
Scorns th' one, and th' other in his deeper skill;
O griefe of griefes! O gall of all good hearts!
Of him that first was raisde for vertuous partes,
And now broad spreading like an aged tree,
Let's none shoot up that nigh him planted bee;
O let the man, of whom the muse is scorned,
Nor alive nor dead, be of the muse adorned.

The

The two last lines, perhaps, may be thought a pretty good confirmation of the story; at least they prove that the poet felt a keen resentment against Burleigh for "scorning his muse."

Not long after this poor Spenser returned to Ireland, where he married in 1594, and in 1596 we find him filling the office of clerk of the council of the province of Munster, but the rebellion of Tyrone breaking out in October, 1598, he was obliged to fly to England, and that with such precipitation, as to leave his goods and an infant behind him. The sanguinary rebels, after carrying off the property, set fire to the house, and the child perished in the flames. Spenser arrived in England with a heart broken in consequence of these misfortunes, and died at a public house in King-street, Westminter, the sixteenth of January following. Two days afterwards his remains were interred in Westminsterabbey, near the tomb of Chaucer; the pall being held up by some of the principal poets of the time.

The accurate Camden has said that Spenser returned to England poor, "in Angliam inops reversus ;" and Drummond, of Hawthernden, relates the following story :

"Ben Jonson told me, that Spenser's goods were robbed by the Irish in Desmond's [Tyrone's] rebellion, his house and a little child of his burnt, and he and his wife nearly escaped; that

he afterwards died in King-street, by absolute want of bread, and that he refused twenty pieces sent him by the earl of Essex, and gave this answer to the person who brought them, "that he was sure he had no time to spend them.*"

Though this relation confirms the general account of the extreme poverty which embittered the close of Spenser's eventful life, it is hardly to be credited that a man in such circumstances would refuse the earl's bounty, for though he might be sensible of his own approaching dissolution, he could not but feel for the distresses of his surviving family.

But Spenser's last able editor will not allow that he was reduced to absolute indigence. He thinks that the poet laureat must have had some claims for arrears of his pension, which supposition, however, is unsupported by any evidence, and it may as well be supposed on the other hand, that nothing was due to him, or that the scanty pittance was soon exhausted.

Another reason alleged against the wretched poverty of Spenser, after his last return to England, is the wealthy condition of his relations, the Spensers, of Althorpe. But how happened it that these relations suffered Spenser, the pride of their house, to be a dependant on the bounty of Sidney; and how was it that they neither de

* Drummond's Works, p. 224.

frayed