Although the printing presses at Beirut are working night and day they cannot supply the demand for the Arabic Bible.
EDMUND SPENSER.
(English Literature Papers.)
JUST three hundred years ago, and just one hundred years after Columbus discovered America and planted his flag on San Salvador, there stood in the middle of a wide, boggy Irish plain a building better than most of those anywhere near it, called Kilcolman Castle. It was a time when the English Government was having a hard time to keep the Irish under their control, and we shall see after a while how the poor people of the castle suffered on account of this fact. But there lived at Kilcolman, in those days from 1586 to 1598, one of the most celebrated of the poets about whom we shall talk in our English Literature Papers. It was Edmund Spenser, and the old picture of him that has come down to us shows him to be a kind, gentle looking man, with a long thin nose and a high forehead, dressed in a black robe, and with a great lace collar coming up above his ears, which must have been very uncomfortable in warm weather.
Spenser was born in a part of London called East Smithfield, right under the shadow of the great Tower; and it is a very disagreeable fact to one who is trying to write about him, that we know almost nothing about the little events of his life, and especially of his boyhood. Three hundred years ago, you know, people did not take notes of themselves so much as we do nowadays, or as they did even in the last century; or if they did they have not been kept for us. Just a few people have told us anything about Edmund Spenser, and the probability is that even his picture is not any better than many of those which we see nowadays in the newspapers.
One of the few things which we find about him was that he entered one of the colleges at Cambridge when he was seventeen, as what was then called a “sizar.” These sizars were the poorer students, who had to work for their living in a much more disagreeable way than any students do now, by waiting on the older and richer ones at their meals and elsewhere, and were paid by their tuition in the college and the fragments of food which their employers left for them. I suppose if the student on whom Edmund Spenser waited could come back to earth for a little while he would be considerably surprised and perplexed to find that the only reason why the world would like to know more about him would be on account of the little sizar whom he used to have at Cambridge!
When he had left college, in which we find that he was a very good scholar, Spenser taught for a while in the northern part of England, and began to write the first poetry which made him at all famous; it was a long poem in twelve parts, about the twelve months of the year, and he called it at first “The Poet’s Year,” and afterward the name by which we know it, “The Shepherd’s Calendar.” It was a very pretty poem, and described the scenery and the country life of England in a way that made all good Englishmen like the author. So Spenser fell in with some good friends, and was introduced to Queen Elizabeth. It is a curious thing that in those days the best writers did not depend for their payment upon the number of books which were sold, or what their publishers paid them; but it was the custom of the king or queen, whenever an especially good writer appeared, to support him at the royal court or elsewhere, in return for which the writer served his sovereign in any way he could, especially by paying him any number of compliments in his writings. It is as though whenever a promising young author should appear in New York or Boston, he should find a Congressman who would introduce him to the President at Washington; and if he found that he was likely to be a pleasing writer and a convenient friend to have near him, he should invite him to stay in the city, and should see that he had all the money he needed.
