| On whose mighty shoulders most doth rest The burden of this kingdom’s government, Unfitly I these idle rimes present, The labour of lost time and wit unstay’d. |
If Spenser had complained of former cold neglect, now he had to endure, what a poet can never forgive, bitter disdain.
Wounded in spirit, the poet composed, immediately after the first appearance of the “Faery Queen,” “The Ruins of Time;” there, eulogising the departed Sir Francis Walsingham for his love of learning and care of “men of arms,” he launches forth a thunderbolt against the wary and frigid Burleigh—
| For he that now wields all things at his will, Scorns one and th’ other, in his deeper skill. |
And he repeats the accusation in “Mother Hubbard’s Tale”—
| Oh, grief of griefs! Oh, gall of all good hearts! To see that virtue should despised be Of him, that first was raised for vertuous parts; And now, broad spreading like an aged tree, Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be. Oh, let the man by whom the Muse is scorn’d, Nor alive nor dead be of the Muse adorn’d. |
We have, too, a more finished portrait of an evil minister who “lifted up his lofty towers,”
| That they begin to threat the neighbour sky; |
in which unquestionably we find some of the deformities of Burleigh’s political physiognomy.