Song. The Father of Modern French Songs, C. F. Panard (1691-1765).
Song. What! all this for a song? So said William Cecil, Lord Burghley, when Queen Elizabeth ordered him to give Edmund Spenser £100 as an expression of her pleasure at some verses he had presented to her. When a pension of £50 a year was settled on the poet, Lord Burghley did all in his power to oppose the grant. To this Spenser alludes in the lines following:--
O, grief of griefs! O, gall of all good hearts!
To see that virtue should despisèd be
Of him that first was raised for virtuous parts;
And now, broad-spreading like an aged tree,
Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be.
Oh, let the man of whom the Muse is scorned,
Alive nor dead be of the Muse adorned!
Spenser, The Ruins of Time (1591).