From this detection, we may infer that the Commentary was an innocent ruse of the zealous friend to overcome the resolute timidity of our poet.[1] His youthful muse, teeming with her future progeny, was, however, morbidly sensible in the hour of parturition. Conscious of her powers, thus closes the address “To his Booke:”—
| And when thou art past jeopardie, Come tell me what was said of me, And I will send more after thee. |
After several editions, the work still remained anonymous, and the unnamed poet was long referred to by critics of the day only as “the late unknown poet,” or “the gentleman who wrote ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar.’”
In Sir Philip Sidney the youthful poet found a youthful patron. The shades of Penshurst opened to leisure and the muse. “The Shepherd’s Calendar” at length concluded, “The Poet’s Year” was dedicated to “Maister Philip Sidney, worthy of all titles, both of learning and chivalry.” Leicester, the uncle of Sidney, was gained, and from that moment Spenser entered into a golden servitude.
The destiny of Spenser was to be thrown among courtiers, and to wear the silken trammels of noble patrons—a life of honourable dependence among eminent personages. Here a seductive path was opened, not easily scorned by the gentle mind of him whose days were to be counted by its reveries, and the main business of whose life was to be the cantos of his “Faery Queen.”
Of the favours and mortifications during his career of patronage, and of his intercourse with the court, too little is known; though sufficient we shall discover to authenticate the reality of his complaints, the verity of his strictures, and all the flutterings of the sickening heart of him who moves round and round the interminable circle of “hope deferred.”
Our poet was now ascending the steps of favouritism; and the business of his life was with the fair and the great. He looked up to the smiles of distinguished ladies, for to such is the greater portion of his poems dedicated. If her Majesty gloried in “The Faery Queen,” we are surprised to find that the most exquisite of political satires, “Mother Hubbard’s Tale,” should be addressed to the Lady Compton and Monteagle; that “The Tears of the Muses” were inscribed to Lady Strange; and that “The Ruins of Time” are dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke. For others, their nuptials were graced by the music of his verse, or their sorrows were soothed by its elegiac tenderness.[2] In the Epithalamion on his own marriage, the poet reminds
| The sacred sisters who have often times Been to the aiding others to adorn, Whom ye thought worthy of your graceful rymes, That even the greatest did not greatly scorn To hear their names sung in your simple lays, But joyed at their praise. |
“The Tears of the Muses,” as one of his plaintive poems is called, had possibly been spared had the poet only moved among that bevy of ladies whose names are enshrined in his volumes, around the Queen, whose royalty so frequently rises with splendour in his verse. Unawares, perhaps, the gentle bard discovered that personal attachments by cruel circumstances were converted into political connexions; that a favourite must pay the penalty of favouritism; and that in binding himself more closely to his patrons, he was wounded the more deeply by their great adversary; and in gaining Sidney, Leicester, and Essex, Spenser was doomed to feel the potent arm of the scornful and unpoetic Burleigh.