A sage of the antiquarian school imagined that he could solve the enigma of Spenser’s sorrows, by arranging, with dates and accounts of salaries, the official situations which the poet held. To remove the odium attached to Burleigh’s prepossessions against the poet, he assumes that without the Lord Treasurer’s consent Spenser could not have received his lands or his pensions. But the royal grant of the forfeited lands was obviously the reward for his conduct, suggested by those under whose eye he had served: the patronage of Sidney and the Lords Leicester and Grey may be imagined to have greatly outweighed any cavils of Burleigh. George Chalmers infers that all the complaints of the poet are “too highly coloured, if they really were complaints respecting himself!” and concludes that all the poet’s querulousness must be ascribed, not to Burleigh, but to the Irish rebellion. But the calamity of the Irish rebellion occasioned no complaints from the poet—only his death! for we have not a line by Spenser during the short interval which elapsed between his flight from Ireland and his decease in London.
It was not by an estimate of salaries and an arrangement of dates, which yield no result, but by a statement of feelings, in which the “secret sorrows” of Spenser lie concealed, that we can decide on the real source of his continued complaints. The poet must be judged by the habits of his mind, and by those interior conflicts which are often unconnected with those external circumstances open to common observers. Of all the tuneful train Spenser was the most poetical in the gentlest attributes of the poet. That robust force which the enterprise of active life demands was not lodged in that soul of tenderness; and worldly cares, like that cancer in the breast which the sufferer hides from others, dejected the fancy which at all times was working ceaselessly among its bright creations. His vein was inexhaustible, and we have lost perhaps more than we possess of his writings. The author of “The Faery Queen” required above all things leisure and the muse. His first steppings into life were auspicious. To Sir Philip Sidney he had opened the first cantos of his romantic epic; the catastrophe of that poet-hero made our poet a mourner all his days. There was no substitute for a congenial patron: all other patrons could be but the very statues of patronage, cold representatives of the departed, but no longer the bosom companion of the poet’s thoughts, and the generous arbiter of his fortunes.
In his last days Spenser has not dropped even one “melodious tear;” but he was wept by his brothers the poets, who held his pall and bestrewed his hearse with their elegies, and beheld in the fate of their great master their own. And thus truly, though ambiguously, Phineas Fletcher described his destiny—
Poorly, poor man! he lived; poorly, poor man! he died.
So many living details of that golden bondage into which our poet was thrown, from his earliest to his latter days, discover the real source of his “secret sorrows”—his unceasing and vain solicitation at court, the suitor of so many patrons; the res angusta domi perpetually pressed on the morbid imagination of the fortuneless man.
I know of no satire aimed at Spenser; a singular fate for a great poet: even “satyric Nash” revered the character of the author of “The Faery Queen.” I have often thought that among the numerous critics of Spenser, the truest was his keen and witty contemporary; for this town-wit has stamped all our poet’s excellences by one felicitous word—“Heavenly Spenser.”
[1] A strange personage has been fixed on as the commentator. Spenser lodged with a Mrs. Kerke, where his parcels were directed. E. K. has been conjectured to be Mr. Kerke, her husband!
It is a proof of the deficient skill of the modern editors of Spenser, Hughes and Aikin, that they have omitted the curious and valuable Commentary of E. K. It has been judiciously restored to the last and best edition, by Mr. Todd. The woodcuts might also have been preserved.
[2] These complimentary sonnets, evidently composed “for the nonce,” are not the happiest specimens in our language of these minor poems, no more than they are of the real genius of Spenser. I have seen a German reprint, consisting only of Spenser’s Sonnets, by the learned Von Hammer. Foreign critics often startle one by their fancies on English poetry.