" at her
feet, or of the young lawyer who muses amid the splendours of the
presence over the problems of the "Novum Organum." The triumph at Cadiz,
the conquest of Ireland, pass unheeded as we watch Hooker building up
his "Ecclesiastical Polity" among the sheepfolds, or the genius of
Shakspere rising year by year into supremer grandeur in a rude theatre
beside the Thames.

[Sidenote: Spenser.]

The glory of the new literature broke on England with Edmund Spenser. We
know little of his life; he was born in 1552 in East London, the son of
poor parents, but linked in blood with the Spencers of Althorpe, even
then--as he proudly says--"a house of ancient fame." He studied as a
sizar at Cambridge, and quitted the University while still a boy to live
as a tutor in the north; but after some years of obscure poverty the
scorn of a fair "Rosalind" drove him again southwards. A college
friendship with Gabriel Harvey served to introduce him to Lord
Leicester, who sent him as his envoy into France, and in whose service
he first became acquainted with Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney.
From Sidney's house at Penshurst came in 1579 his earliest work, the
"Shepherd's Calendar"; in form, like Sidney's own "Arcadia," a pastoral
where love and loyalty and Puritanism jostled oddly with the fancied
shepherd life. The peculiar melody and profuse imagination which the
pastoral disclosed at once placed its author in the forefront of living
poets, but a far greater work was already in hand; and from some words
of Gabriel Harvey's we see Spenser bent on rivalling Ariosto, and even
hoping "to overgo" the "Orlando Furioso" in his "Elvish Queen." The
ill-will or the indifference of Burleigh however blasted the
expectations he had drawn from the patronage of Sidney or Leicester, and
from the favour with which he had been welcomed by the Queen. Sidney, in
disgrace with Elizabeth through his opposition to the marriage with
Anjou, withdrew to Wilton to write the "Arcadia" by his sister's side;
and "discontent of my long fruitless stay in princes' courts," the poet
tells us, "and expectation vain of idle hopes" drove Spenser into exile.
In 1580 he followed Lord Grey as his secretary into Ireland, and
remained there on the Deputy's recall in the enjoyment of an office and
a grant of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond.
Spenser had thus enrolled himself among the colonists to whom England
was looking at the time for the regenerat