[P. 21.] Spenser flourished, etc. Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599), served as secretary to Sir Henry Sidney in Ireland in 1577, and went again in 1580 as secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton, the Queen’s new deputy to Ireland. He was driven out by a revolt of the Irish in 1598. “A View of the State of Ireland, written dialogue-wise between Eudoxus and Irenæus ... in 1596” was first printed in 1633.
description of the bog of Allan. “Faërie Queene,” II, ix, 16.
Treatment he received from Burleigh. Hazlitt refers to this treatment specifically in the essay “On Respectable People” (XI, 435): “Spenser, kept waiting for the hundred pounds which Burleigh grudged him ‘for a song,’ might feel the mortification of his situation; but the statesman never felt any diminution of his sovereign’s favour in consequence of it.” The facts, as they are recorded in the “Dictionary of National Biography,” are as follows: “The queen gave proof of her appreciation by bestowing a pension on the poet. According to an anecdote, partly reported by Manningham, the diarist (Diary, p. 43), and told at length by Fuller, Lord Burghley, in his capacity of treasurer, protested against the largeness of the sum which the queen suggested, and was directed by her to give the poet what was reasonable. He received the formal grant of £50 a year in February 1590-1.” Cf. Spenser’s lines in “Mother Hubbard’s Tale,” 895 ff.
Though much later than Chaucer. The rest of this paragraph and most of the points elaborated in this lecture appeared in Hazlitt’s review of Sismondi’s “Literature of the South” in 1815 (X, 73 ff.).
Spenser’s poetry is all fairyland. In a lecture delivered in February, 1818, three years after Hazlitt’s remarks had appeared in the Edinburgh Review, Coleridge spoke as follows: “You will take especial note of the marvellous independence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the Faery Queene. It is in the domains neither of history or geography; it is ignorant of all artificial boundary, all material obstacles; it is truly in the land of Faery, that is, of mental space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep, and you neither wish, nor have the power, to inquire where you are, or how you got there.” Works, IV, 250.
[P. 22.] clap on high. “Faërie Queene,” III, xii, 23.
In green vine leaves. I, iv, 22.
Upon the top. I, vii, 32.
[P. 23.] In reading the Faërie Queene, etc. See III, ix, 10; I, vii; II, vi, 5; III, xii.
and mask. “L’Allegro.”