THE AUTHOR OF THE FAERY QUEENE.
But we shall be sorry to find that although Queen Elizabeth received Spenser very pleasantly, and although he paid her any number of pretty compliments in his after life, she never did very much for him. The first piece of good fortune which seemed to come to him was when he was appointed secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, who was the Governor of Ireland. After that he was also given Kilcolman Castle, which we spoke of at the beginning, where he spent so many years. We shall see that he did a good deal of writing while there, and also acted as the agent of the English Government, in looking after whatever matters needed his attention. It was this that probably made the Irishmen dislike him, rather than any one thing which he did, for when he had been there twelve years there was a rebellion among them, and they burned the castle and forced the poet to run away to England. The saddest thing about it was that his baby was burned at the same time, and they tell us that the lonely father never recovered from his sorrow over this event. At any rate he died the next year in London, in a small lodging-house, and probably with very little money left. It was with him as with so many, many others, both in those days and now: the people did not begin to think enough of him until he was dead, and then they gave him a magnificent funeral, and buried him in Westminster Abbey, where the graves of all the greatest Englishmen are.
We know nothing but what is good about Edmund Spenser; he seems to have been a kind man, loving everything true and beautiful, and when we have a chance to read his writings we shall feel certain that this is so. Besides the “Shepherd’s Calendar” he wrote a book in prose about Ireland while he was there, and it was also at Kilcolman Castle that his great poem, “The Faery Queene,” or as we should say “The Fairy Queen,” was written. This is a long, long poem, and was planned to be written in twelve parts, but it is probable that only six of them were ever finished. At any rate that is all which has come down to us; and some one has said that in this work “the half is better than the whole,” meaning that although Spenser wrote six very nice books, he could scarcely have written six more anywhere nearly so good.
The “Fairy Queen” is what people call an allegory; those of us who have read “The Pilgrim’s Progress” have probably found out what is meant by that. In allegories the story seems to be about real people, but all the time the people stand for good or bad qualities, or something of that sort—like Christian and Mr. Greatheart, or the Fairy Queen and the Red Cross Knight. If we look in Webster’s Dictionary under “allegory,” we shall find that the “Pilgrim’s Progress” and “The Faery Queene” are spoken of as the most celebrated examples.
I am sorry to say that we shall find the “Faery Queene” rather hard reading; not because the story is not interesting, but because there were so many good English words in those days that we have forgotten all about now. Then the spelling, as we have already guessed from the name of the poem, seems more like one of our Pansy “Queer Stories” than anything else. We will try to read just one very pretty verse, at the beginning of the second Canto, which describes the sunrise. Spenser put quaint little rhymed headings at the top of his cantos; the one here is—
“The guilefull great Enchaunter parts
The Redcrosse Knight from Truth:
Into whose stead faire Falshood steps,
And workes him woefull ruth.”
In reading the description of the sunrise we shall want to remember that there was an old story that the sun was a golden wagon driven up the sky by the god Phœbus, and also that “chanticleer,” or “chaunticlere,” was the old-fashioned word for rooster. Here is the verse, and we will bid Spenser good-by with it: