pression of personal feeling been so impossible,
the clear vision of the lineaments of human character so difficult; no
other's head and eyes had sunk so far into the pillowy cleft. After a
year of this life he went to London, and by Harvey's advice and
introduction entered the service of the Earl of Leicester, staying for a
while in his house on the banks of the Thames; and it was there in all
likelihood that he met with the Earl's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, still
little more than a boy, but with his head full of affairs of state. One
can imagine that it was the great Earl or Sir Philip Sidney that gave
his imagination its moral and practical turn, and one imagines him
seeking from philosophical men, who distrust instinct because it
disturbs contemplation, and from practical men who distrust everything
they cannot use in the routine of immediate events, that impulse and
method of creation that can only be learned with surety from the
technical criticism of poets, and from the excitement of some movement
in the artistic life. Marlowe and Shakespeare were still at school, and
Ben Jonson was but five years old. Sidney was doubtless the greatest
personal influence that came into Spenser's life, and it was one that
exalted moral zeal above every other faculty. The great Earl impressed
his imagination very deeply also, for the lamentation over the Earl of
Leicester's death is more than a conventional Ode to a dead patron.
Spenser's verses about men, nearly always indeed, seem to express more
of personal joy and sorrow than those about women, perhaps because he
was less deliberately a poet when he spoke of men. At the end of a long
beautiful passage he laments that unworthy men should be in the dead
Earl's place, and compares them to the fox--an unclean feeder--hiding in
the lair 'the badger swept.' The imaginer of the festivals of Kenilworth
was indeed the fit patron for him, and alike, because of the strength
and weakness of Spenser's art, one regrets that he could not have lived
always in that elaborate life, a master of ceremony to the world,
instead of being plunged into a life that but stirred him to bitterness,
as the way is with theoretical minds in the tumults of events they
cannot understand. In the winter of 1579-80 he published _The Shepheards
Calender_, a book of twelve eclogues, one for every month of the year,
and dedicated it to Sir Philip Sidney. It was full of pastoral beauty
and allegorical images of current