great master. The twelfth eclogue
opens thus:

The gentle shepheard sat beside a springe
All in the shadow of a bushye brere,
That Colin height, which well could pype and singe,
For hee of Tityrus his songs did lere.

Tityrus, on E.K.'s authority, was Chaucer. It is
evident from the language--both the words and verbal
forms--used in this poem that Spenser had zealously
studied Chaucer, whose greatest work had appeared just
about two centuries before Spenser's first important
publication. The work, however, in which he imitates
Chaucer's manner is not the _Shepheardes Calendar_, but
his _Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale_, which he
says, writing in a later year, he had 'long sithens
composed in the raw conceipt of my youth.' The form
and manner of the _Shepheardes Calendar_ reflected not
Chaucer's influence upon the writer, but the influence
of a vast event which had changed the face of
literature since the out-coming of the _Canterbury
Tales_--of the revival of learning. That event had put
fresh models before men, had greatly modified old
literary forms, had originated new. The classical
influence impressed upon Europe was by no means an
unmixed good; in some respects it retarded the natural
development of the modern mind by overpowering it with
its prestige and stupefying it with a sense of
inferiority; while it raised the ideal of perfection,
it tended to give rise to mere imitations and
affectations. Amongst these new forms was the
Pastoral. When Virgil, Theocritus, 'Daphnis and
Chloe,' and other writers and works of the ancient
pastoral literature once more gained the ascendancy,
then a modern pastoral poetry began to be. This poetry
flourished greatly in Italy in the sixteenth century.
It had been cultivated by Sannazaro, Guarini, Tasso.
Arcadia had been adopted by the poets for their
country. In England numerous _Eclogues_ made their
appearance. Amongst the earliest and the best of these
were Spenser's. It would perhaps be unjust to treat
this modern pastoral literature as altogether an
affectation. However unreal, the pastoral world had
its charms--a pleasant feeling imparted of
emancipation, a deep quietude, a sweet tranquillity.
If vulgar men discovered their new worlds, and
trafficked and bustled there, why should not the poet
discover his Arcadia, and repose at his ease in it,
secure from the noises of feet coming and going over
the roads of the earth?

That