the pastoral form, compares him to a young bird who proves his wings before making a higher and wider flight: "So flew Virgil, as not yet well feeling his wings. So flew Mantuane, as not being full sumd. So Petrarque. So Boccace."

In the "Shepherd's Calendar" we discern much of the future writer of the "Faery Queen." It contains the poetical record of his personal griefs as a lover; it expresses his enthusiasm for his art as a poet; his loyalty to the crown as a servant of the Queen; his loyalty to the Reformation as an English churchman; his delight in natural beauty, and in the fairness of woman. It is now gay and sportive, now staid and serious; sensuous ardour and moral wisdom are united in it; the allegorical form in miniature is already employed; it exhibits a mode of idealised treatment of contemporary public affairs not dissimilar in essentials from that afterwards put to use in his romantic epic. The pastoral, with its ideals of peace and simplicity, possessed a singular charm for Europe in the highwrought and artificial age of the Renaissance. It had a charm for Spenser; but his is not the Arcadian pastoral of Sannazaro and Sidney. Colin and Cuddie keep their flocks upon the hills of Kent; the disdainful Rosalinde, "the widow's daughter of the glen," is a North-country lass. Spenser's power of taking up real objects, persons and incidents, of plunging these in some solvent of the imagination, and then of recreating them -the same and not the same-is manifest throughout. Everything has been submitted to the shaping power of the imagination; everything has been idealised; yet

Spenser does not remove from real life, does not forsake his own country and his own time; he does not shrink from taking a side in controversies then troubling the English Church; he is primarily a poet, but while a poet, he also aspires to be what Milton named him-a teacher. In these poems the little archer, Love, shoots his roguish shafts; Pan is the patron of shepherds; Cynthia sits crowned upon the grassy green. The poet freely appropriates what pleases his fancy in classical or neo-classical mythology; yet at heart he is almost Puritan. Not indeed Puritan in any turning away from innocent delights; not Puritan in casting dishonour on our earthly life, its beauty, its splendour, its joy, its passion; but Puritan as Milton was when he wrote Lycidas," in his weight of moral purpose, in his love of a grave plainness in religion and of humble laboriousness in those who are shepherds under Christ.

The tenth eclogue of the "Calendar," that for the month of October, is especially characteristic of its author. In it, as stated in the argument, is set out "the perfect pattern of a poet." In what way does Spenser conceive of poetry? We know how in periods which are not creative, periods which are not breathed upon by divine ideas, which are not driven by the urge of strong emotions, poetry comes to be looked on as primarily an art, or even as an accomplishment, and it is treated as if its function were to decorate life much as the artistic upholsterer decorates our houses. At such a time great regard is had to the workmanship of verse exclusive of the burden and inspiration of the song, and elegant little specimens of mosaic or of

enamelling are turned out of the workshops of skilled artists; until the thing descends into a trade. In the creative periods there is not less devotion to form and workmanship; but the devotion is of a less self-conscious kind, because generative powers work in the poet with a rapturous blindness of love, and he thinks of himself less as a master of technique (though he is also this) than as a man possessed by some influence out of and beyond himself, some dominant energy of Nature or of God, to which it is his part to submit, which he cannot lay claim to as if it were an attainment of skill, and which he dare not call his own. At such times poetry aims at something more than to decorate life; it is spoken of as if it possessed some imperial authority, a power to bind and to loose, to sway man's total nature, to calm, to regulate and restrain, and also to free, to arouse, to dilate the spirit power not to titillate a particular sense, but to discipline the will and mould a character. In such a tone of high assumption Spenser speaks of poetry. About this time he heard much of experiments in new and ingenious forms of English verse. Sidney and Dyer, Drant and Gabriel Harvey, were full of a scheme for introducing classical metres into our poetry, and Spenser was for a while taken by the scheme. He could not at such a time, he did not ever, despise the craftsman's part of poetry; yet while he thinks of poetry as an art, in the same moment it appears to him to be "no art, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to be gotten by labour and learning, but adorned with both; and poured into the wit by a certain 'Evdovias and celestial inspiration." When

in the eclogue the needy poet complains that Apollo is a poor paymaster, Piers replies in the spirit of Sidney when he maintains that the highest end of literature is to instruct and incite men to virtuous action :

"Cuddie, the prayse is better than the price,
The glory eke much greater than the gayne;
O! what an honor is it to restraine

:

The lust of lawless youth with good advice,
Or pricke them forth with pleasaunce of thy vaine,
Whereto thou list their trayned wills entice.

"Soon as thou gynst to set thy notes in frame,
O, how the rurall routes to thee doe cleave!
Seemeth thou dost their soule of sense bereave;
All as the shepheard that did fetch his dame
From Plutoes balefull bowre withouten leave,
His musicks might the hellish hound did tame."

From the eclogue which contains this pronouncement as to the end of poetry, it appears that Spenser already was meditating verse of a loftier kind, and was even now aware that he should before long change his "oaten reeds" for trumpets :

Abandon, then, the base and viler clowne;

Lift up thy selfe out of the lowly dust,

And sing of bloody Mars, of wars, of giusts;

Turne thee to those that weld the awful crowne,

To doubted knights, whose woundlesse armour rusts,
And helmes unbruzed wexen daily browne."

The "Faery Queen" is here almost promised. Was this to be a mere romance of adventures, like Ariosto's Orlando," but unsupported by the wit and worldly wisdom of an Ariosto? Or did Spenser conceive his great poem as something more than a play of fancy? did he conceive it as capable of winning that praise

which he declares in the "Shepherd's Calendar" to be the true glory of art?

The "Shepherd's Calendar" was dedicated

"To him who is the president

Of Noblesse and of chevalree,"

to Philip Sidney, "the noble and virtuous Gentleman, most worthy of all titles both of learning and chevalrie." It was possibly on the enforcement of Sidney that Spenser undertook his task "to sing of knights and ladies gentle deeds." Now, although we have to regret the loss of the work entitled "The English Poet," in which Spenser treated of his own art, there remains to us the admirable essay by Sidney written in defence of poetry against the well-meant but ill-considered attack of the playwright - turned - precisian, Stephen Gosson. The delight and pride of the Queen, the court, and indeed of all cultivated England, in Sidney, the deep and universal sorrow for his early death, can be accounted for only by some extraordinary personal noblenesses over and above those which dignify the passionate story of the "Astrophel and Stella," and redeem from mannered sentimentality the endless pages of the "Arcadia." Sidney, the radiant "Hesper-Phosphor" of the time of Elizabeth, fades in the brightness of that great morning, yet no radiance that follows is quite so clear and keen. He charmed by a sweet youthful gravity underlying a sweet youthful joyousness of nature. Spenser doubtless he appeared to be the realized ideal of what Spenser admired more than any other earthly thing the chivalric English gentleman. Sidney belonged to both the great movements of his century, and

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