However it
may be with these verses, certainly nothing else of Spenser's appeared in
print for ten years. His Cambridge life, except for some vague allusions
(which, as usual in such cases, have been strained to breaking by
commentators and biographers), is equally obscure; save that he certainly
fulfilled seven years of residence, taking his Bachelor's Degree in 1573,
and his Master's three years later. But he did not gain a fellowship, and
the chief discoverable results of his Cambridge sojourn were the thorough
scholarship which marks his work, and his friendship with the notorious
Gabriel Harvey--his senior by some years, a Fellow of Pembroke, and a
person whose singularly bad literary taste, as shown in his correspondence
with Spenser, may be perhaps forgiven, first, because it did no harm, and
secondly, because without him we should know even less of Spenser than we
do. It is reasonably supposed from the notes of his friend, "E. K."
(apparently Kirke, a Pembroke man), to _The Shepherd's Calendar_, that he
went to his friends in the north after leaving Cambridge and spent a year
or two there, falling in love with the heroine, poetically named Rosalind,
of _The Calendar_, and no doubt writing that remarkable book. Then
(probably very late in 1578) he went to London, was introduced by Harvey
to Sidney and Leicester, and thus mixed at once in the best literary and
political society. He was not long in putting forth his titles to its
attention, for _The Shepherd's Calendar_ was published in the winter of
1579, copiously edited by "E. K.," whom some absurdly suppose to be Spenser
himself. The poet seems to have had also numerous works (the titles of
which are known) ready or nearly ready for the press. But all were
subsequently either changed in title, incorporated with other work, or
lost. He had already begun _The Faerie Queene_, much to the pedant Harvey's
disgust; and he dabbled in the fashionable absurdity of classical metres,
like his inferiors. But he published nothing more immediately; and powerful
as were his patrons, the only preferment which he obtained was in that
Eldorado-Purgatory of Elizabethan ambition--Ireland. Lord Grey took him as
private secretary when he was in 1580 appointed deputy, and shortly
afterwards he received some civil posts in his new country, and a lease of
abbey lands at Enniscorthy, which lease he soon gave up. But he stayed in
Ireland, notwithstanding the fact that his immediate patron G