In the Elizabethan days even a poet of Spenser’s genius, whom the nation ardently admired, could not hope to live by poetic writing. In our own day Longfellow received from a weekly paper $4,000, or $20 a line, for his “Hanging of the Crane,” but Spenser’s pen could not have produced poems fast enough to have guaranteed him a living. Substantial favors from the royal court were indispensable unless he turned his mind and hand to other employments. Queen Elizabeth made it her established policy to encourage literature by special bequests, and Sir Philip Sidney, her confidential counselor, proposed an award to Spenser’s loyalty and genius, and she instructed Lord Cecil of the treasury to give him £100, but he remonstrated that it was too much for such indulgence as poetry, whereupon she permitted him to give what was reasonable, and consequently he gave nothing which measured his value of verse. Spenser’s need was so great that he was forced to remind the queen of her neglect, which he did in these lines:
“I was promised on a time,
To have reason for my rhyme;
From that time unto this season
I received nor rhyme nor reason.”
This spicy reminder brought him his £100, and Lord Cecil a sharp expression of her dissatisfaction. He was eventually given an estate—Kilcolman Castle—of three thousand acres, in Ireland. He was also laureated, with a pension of £50. When circumstances at last favored his enjoyment of peace, that had been denied him from childhood, he fell on evil times. Tyrone, a bold and crafty Irish chieftain, rose in rebellion, attacking Kilcolman Castle so unexpectedly that the poet and his wife barely escaped with their lives, after their infant child had perished in the cruel flames. He was now forty-six years of age, and a grief-stricken, broken-hearted mourner for his castle, library and babe, he went to London in poverty, and before his friends realized that he was in the metropolis, this great bard, Queen Bess’s laureate, died of starvation, in a rude, comfortless room, on a cold day, without a friend to minister to his necessities. After death, honors innumerable were paid to his memory.
Thus lived and died the first who wore the laurel in the royal household of that long line that has graced the court circle for three hundred years. Of the poets who have worn the wreath in sunshine and shadow under the Tudors, Stuarts and Brunswicks, a second article will treat.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]