leigh, to 'with your good
countenance protest against the malice of evil mouthes,
which are always wide open to carpe at and misconstrue
my simple meaning.' A passage in the _Ruines of Time_
(see the lines beginning 'O grief of griefs! O full of
all good hearts!') points to the same conclusion; and
so the concluding lines of the Sixth Book of the
_Faerie Queene_, when, having told how the Blatant
Beast (not killed as Lord Macaulay says in his essay on
Bunyan, but 'supprest and tamed' for a while by Sir
Calidore) at last broke his iron chain and ranged again
through the world, and raged sore in each degree and
state, he adds:--

Ne may this homely verse, of many meanest,
Hope to escape his venemous despite,
More then my former writs, all were they clearest
From blamefull blot, and from all that wite,
With which some wicked tongues did it backebite,
And bring into a mighty Peres displeasure,
That never so deserved to endite.
Therfore do you my rimes keep better measure,
And seek to please, that now is counted wisemens
threasure.

In the _Tears of the Muses_ Calliope says of certain
persons of eminent rank:--

Their great revenues all in sumptuous pride
They spend that nought to learning they may spare;
And the rich fee which Poets wont divide
Now Parasites and Sycophants do share.

Several causes have been suggested to account for this
disfavour. The popular tradition was pleased to
explain it by making Burghley the ideal dullard who has
no soul for poetry--to whom one copy of verses is very
much as good as another, and no copy good for anything.
It delighted to bring this commonplace gross-minded
person into opposition with one of the most spiritual
of geniuses. In this myth Spenser represents mind,
Burghley matter. But there is no justification in
facts for this tradition. It may be that the Lord
Treasurer was not endowed with a high intellectual
nature; but he was far too wise in his generation not
to pretend a virtue if he had it not, when
circumstances called for anything of the sort. When
the Queen patronized literature, we may be sure Lord
Burghley was too discreet to disparage and oppress it.
Another solution refers to Burghley's Puritanism as the
cause of the misunderstanding; but, as Spenser too
inclined that way, this is inadequate. Probably, as
Todd and others have thought, what alienated his
Lordship at first was Spenser's connection w