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With sighs, and tears, sobs, shrieks, and all yfear,
That, oh, alas, it was a hell to hear.

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Lo here, quoth Sorrow, princes of renown,
That whilom sat on top of fortune's wheel,
Now laid full low, like wretches whirled down,
Ev'n with one frown, that stay'd but with a smile:
And now behold the thing that thou, ere while,
Saw only in thought: and what thou now shalt hear,
Recount the same to kesar, king and peer.'

COMPLAINT OF THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.

So long as fortune would permit the same,
I liv'd in rule and riches with the best :
And pass'd my time in honour and in fame,
That of mishap no fear was in my breast:
But false fortune, when I suspected least,
Did turn the wheel, and with a doleful fall
Hath me bereft of honour, life, and all.

Lo, what avails in riches floods that flows?
Though she so smil'd, as all the world were his:
Even kings and kesars biden fortune's throws,
And simple sort must bear it as it is.

Take heed by me that blith'd in baleful bliss:
My rule, my riches, royal blood and all,
When fortune frown'd, the feller made my fall.

For hard mishaps, that happens unto such
Whose wretched state erst never fell no change,
Agrieve them not in any part so much

As their distress, to whom it is so strange
That all their lives, nay, passed pleasures range,
Their sudden woe, that aye wield wealth at will,
Algates their hearts more piercingly must thrill.

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For of my birth, my blood was of the best, First born an earl, then duke by due descent: To swing the sway in court among the rest, Dame Fortune me her rule most largely lent, And kind with courage so my corpse had blent, That lo, on whom but me did she most smile? And whom but me, lo, did she most beguile ?

Now hast thou heard the whole of my unhap,
My chance, my change, the cause of all my care:
In wealth and woe, how fortune did me wrap,
With world at will, to win me to her snare :
Bid kings, bid kesars, bid all states beware,
And tell them this from me that tried it true:
Who reckless rules, right soon may hap to rue.

SLEEP.

By him lay heavy Sleep, the cousin of Death,
Flat on the ground, and still as any stone,
A very corpse, save yielding forth a breath:
Small keep took he, whom Fortune frowned on,
Or whom she lifted up into the throne
Of high renown: but as a living death,
So, dead alive, of life he drew the breath.

The body's rest, the quiet of the heart,
The travail's ease, the still night's fear was he,
And of our life on earth the better part :
Reaver of sight, and yet in whom we see

Things oft that tide, and oft that never be:
Without respect, esteeming equally

King Croesus' pomp, and Irus' poverty.

EDMUND SPENSER.

[EDMUND SPENSER was born in London about 1552. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School: his first poetical performances, translations from Petrarch and Du Bellay, published without his name in a miscellaneous collection, belong to the time of his leaving school in 1569. From that year to 1576 he was at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. In 1579 he was in London, acquainted with Philip Sidney, and in Lord Leicester's household. In 1580 was published, but without his name, The Shepheards Calender; and in the autumn of that year he went to Ireland with Lord Grey of Wilton, as his private secretary. The remainder of his life, with the exception of short visits to England, was spent in Ireland, where he held various subordinate offices, and where he settled on a grant of forfeited land at Kilcolman in the county of Cork. In 1589 he accompanied Sir Walter Ralegh to London, and in 1590 published the first three books of The Faerie Queene. In 1591 he returned to Ireland, and a miscellaneous collection of compositions of earlier and later dates (Complaints) was published in London. In June 1594 he married, and the next year, 1595, he again visited London, and in Jan. 1595-6 published the second instalment of The Faerie Queene (iv-vi). With the same date, 1595, were published his Colin Clouts Come Home again, an account of his visit to the Court in 1589-90, and his Amoretti Sonnets, and an Epithalamion, relating to his courtship and marriage. At the end of 1598 his house was sacked and burnt by the Munster rebels, and he returned in great distress to London. He died at Westminster, Jan. 16, 1598-9, and was buried in the Abbey.]

Spenser was the first who in the literature of England since the Reformation made himself a name as a poet which could be compared with that of Chaucer, or of the famous Italians who then stood at the head of poetical composition. National energy had revived under the reign of Elizabeth, and with it had come a burst of poetical enthusiasm. Many persons tried their hand at poetry. Versification became a fashion. It was encouraged in the Court circles. The taste for poetry shows itself in a popular shape in ballads, and among scholars in translation; and amid a good

deal of bad poetry there was some written which was genuine and beautiful, and which has survived to charm us still. The poetical spirit and feeling came out most naturally in short love poems, of which many of great grace and fire are preserved in the collections of the time; the other form which it took at this time was the expression of the pathetic incidents and conditions of human greatness and fortune. Sir Philip Sidney, one of the most accomplished and most rising of the young men about the Court, encouraged an interest in poetry in his circle of friends, and some of them, Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville, have, like Sidney himself, left poems of merit. But while there was much poetical writing, and not a little poetical power even among men engaged in the business and wars of the time, such as Walter Ralegh, no successful attempt had been made to produce a great poetical work which might challenge comparison with the Canterbury Tales at home, or the Orlando Furioso abroad. Spenser was the first who had the ambition and also the power for such an enterprise. His earliest work, The Shepherd's Calendar, a series of what were called pastoral poems, after the fashion of the Italian models and some English imitators, partly original, partly translated or paraphrased, though very immature and very unequal in its composition, was at once felt to be something more considerable as a poetical achievement than anything which the sixteenth century had yet seen in England. The 'new poet' became almost a recognised title for the man who had shown, not merely by a few spirited fugitive stanzas, but in a sustained work, that he could write so sweetly and so well. The fame and the associations of The Shepherd's Calendar clung to him even to the end of his career. To the end he had a predilection for its pastoral colouring and scenery; to the end he liked to give himself the rustic name by which he had represented himself in its dialogues, and called himself Colin Clout.

But The Faery Queen was something beyond the expectations raised by The Shepherd's Calendar. In its plan, its invention, and its execution, it took the world of its day by surprise. It opened a new road to English poetry, and new kingdoms to be won by it The name of Spenser stands in point of time even before that of Shakespeare in the roll of modern English poets. A discoverer of something new to be done, he first did what all were trying to do, and broke down the difficulties of a great and magnificent art.

But the first are not always the greatest in poetry, any more than

in painting, in music, in science, in geographical discovery: they lead the way and make it possible to greater men and greater things. Spenser delighted Shakespeare: he was the poetical master of Cowley and then of Milton, and, in a sense, of Dryden and even Pope. None but a man of strength, of originality, of rare sense of beauty and power of imagination and music, could have been this. But he was the great predecessor of yet greater successors. The Faery Queen is a noble and splendid work. When we think that it was the first of its kind, and that Spenser had no master of English, except in antiquity, to show him how to write, it is an astonishing one. But it has the imperfections and shortcomings of most original attempts to do what is new and hard, and what none have yet succeeded in; and it has the imperfections which actually belonged to the genius, the mind and character of the writer.

The Faery Queen is, as every one knows, an allegorical poem ; and in this it differs from the Italian models then talked of and famous, from the works of Ariosto and Tasso, as well as from Chaucer. The idea and framework was taken from them; the machinery, like theirs, was borrowed from the days, or rather the literature, of chivalry; and like theirs, the story rolled on in stanzas, and Spenser invented for his purpose a new form of stanza, one of nine lines, instead of the eight-line one of the Italians. But, unlike them, Spenser avowedly designed to himself a moral purpose and meaning in his poem. It was not merely a brilliant and entertaining series of adventures, like the Orlando. It was not merely a poetical celebration of a great historical legend, a religious epic, like the Gerusalemme. It professed to be a veiled exposition of moral philosophy. It was planned, and all its imaginative wealth unfolded, in order to pourtray and recommend the virtues, and to exhibit philosophical speculations. It was intended to be a book, not for delight merely, but for instruction. Such a view of poetry was characteristically in harmony with the serious spirit of the time in England, which welcomed heartily all intellectual efforts, but which expected in them a purpose to do more than amuse, and had fashion on its side in putting the note of frivolity on what did not bear this purpose distinctly in view. Spenser thought it right to declare to his friends, and to set down in writing, the aim and intention of his poem. He described it as a work which 'is in heroical verse under the title of a Faery Queen to represent all the moral

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