EDMUND, one of the greatest of English poets, was born probably in East Smithfield, London, about the year 1553. There is no record in which the admirers of his genius may trace the incidents of his early years; but there is reason to suppose that they were clouded by poverty and dependence. On the 20th of May 1569, he entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in the humble character of a sizer; a circumstance which is alone sufficient to rescue those luckless scholars from despondency, and to render them respectable in the eyes of their more fortunate companions. Some poems, in a collection of fugitive pieces entitled, The Theatre for Worldlings, which appeared during this year, are ascribed to Spenser, upon internal evidence. On the 10th of January 1572-3 he took the degree of A.B., and on the 26th of June 1576 that of A.M. From a letter of his friend Gabriel Harvey, himself a poet of some reputation in his time, it appears that, in consequence of having made enemies, who had both the will and power to injure him, he quitted Cambridge in despair of academical preferment. He had luckily some friends in the north of England, among whom he now found a temporary asylum. Whether he was received as an honoured guest, or compelled to turn his learning to account in the way of tuition, is unknown; but the latter supposition is the more probable of the two.

During his retirement in the north, Spenser wrote The Spenser's Colender. Nothing is more common than for poets to deprecate the barbarity of a phantom, and to be reduced to despair, because some angelic nonentity turns a deaf ear to their entreaties; but it is said that "Rosalind" was a real mistress, at whose feet Spenser sighed in vain. The successful rival of the needy sonneteer was, in all likelihood, some substantial yeoman. At this period of his history, Harvey advised him to try his fortune in London; and it is probable that he abandoned without reluctance the scene of his unrequited passion. Upon his arrival in the metropolis, he was fortunate enough to obtain an introduction to Sir Philip Sidney, who invited him to become his guest at Penshurst, the seat of the family in Kent. As a token of gratitude for this hospitality, the Shepherd's Calendar, published in 1579, by E. R., was "entitled to the noble and virtuous gentleman, most worthy of all titles, Maister Philip Sidney."

Till long after the time of Spenser, the poet depended upon the casual gratuities of distinguished persons, who sometimes exerted their influence in procuring for a favourite hard some less precarious means of subsistence. Recommended, as it is conjectured, by the Earl of Leicester, uncle to Sir Philip Sidney, the poet went to the continent, as Keightley conjectures, in 1579-80, and subsequently proceeded to Ireland with Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, who was appointed deputy of that kingdom in 1580. During this year he had begun his Faerie Queen, for he writes to Harvey, April 10, 1580, asking him to return it. Spenser was the secretary of the viceroy, and discharged the duties of his office with greater promptitude and exactness than poets usually display in the ordinary business of life.

His View of the State of Ireland, a treatise written in the form of a dialogue, probably between 1593 and 1596, displays no inconsiderable portion of political sagacity. By the interest of Lord Grey, Leicester, and Sidney, Spenser obtained, in 1586, a grant of 3028 acres of the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond. This piece of good fortune was imbibed by the death of his patron, the gallant Sidney, who fell in the same year at the battle of Zutphen. The pastoral elegy of "Astrophel," sacred to the memory of the departed hero, although not published until 1595, was probably written when the grief of the poet was at its height. It was provided by the royal patent, that those who profited by the forfeiture should reside upon the lands that were allotted to them. According to this arrangement, Spenser proceeded to a place named Kilcolman, in the county of Cork. This exile, to what was then little better than a region of barbarians, was cheered by a visit from the renowned Sir Walter Raleigh in 1589. At the suggestion, it may be presumed, of his distinguished guest, whom perhaps he accompanied to England, the poet soon exchanged his Hibernian solitude for the splendours of a court. In 1590 were published the first three books of the Fairy Queen; and the poet was afterwards presented by Raleigh to Queen Elizabeth, who conferred upon him a pension of fifty pounds a-year, then no despicable sum. The grant of this pension was discovered in the chapel of the Rolls by Malone, who has thus been enabled to clear the reputation of Lord Burleigh from the stigma of having intercepted the bounty of his sovereign to the author of the Fairy Queen. Malone has also made it appear that Queen Elizabeth had no poet-laureate, an appointment which was supposed to have been held by Spenser. In the sonnets annexed to the poem is one to his new patron, "the right noble and valorous knight, Sir Walter Raleigh;" but Spenser does not forget to shed a grateful tear to the memory of Sidney. There is a sonnet addressed to the Countess of Pembroke, the darling sister of that accomplished person, for whose amusement he wrote his Arcadia. With mournful dignity, the poet acknowledges to the countess his many obligations to

During his absence in Ireland, to which kingdom he returned after the publication of the Fairy Queen, was printed a collection of Spenser's minor pieces, entitled Complaints: containing sundrie small Poems of the World's Vanitie. Whereof the next page maketh mention, by Ed. Sp., Lond., 1591, 4to. This production was followed by Daphnoida, an elegy on the death of Douglas Howard, daughter of Henry Lord Howard. It is dated January 1, 1591-2. About this period he is supposed to have paid a visit to his native country; after which a considerable space intervenes unmarked by incidents.

Being no longer a pennyless rhymer, Spenser now wooed a kinder mistress than "Rosalind." This lady, whose name is unknown (Keightley conjectures it was Elizabeth), became his wife in 1593 or 1594. This progress of this successful courtship is traced in his Amoretti, or Sonnets. In 1595 appeared the pastoral of Colin Clout's come home again. It is dedicated to Sir Walter Raleigh, who is introduced as the Shepherd of the Ocean. In 1596, he published four Hymns. He informs the Countess of Cumberland and the Countess of Warwick, to whom they are inscribed, that the two latter, composed in his riper years, and treating of heavenly love and beauty, were designed to atone for the two former, which were written in the heyday of his blood, and of which the subjects are sensual desire and earthly grace. In the same year, or more probably three years earlier (Sonnet 18), were produced the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of the Fairy Queen. Of that magnificent poem, two additional imperfect cantos are all that can be found. Our limits prohibit the discussion of the question, whether the remaining six books, which would have completed the design, were destroyed by fire during the Irish rebellion, or left unfinished. Nor is there much utility in transcribing a long list of poems no longer extant, which are supposed to have shared their fate. In the course of this year, Spenser presented his View of the State of Ireland to the queen; but, for reasons not very clearly explained, that performance was not printed until thirty-five years after the author's death. It was published by Sir James Ware in Dublin in 1633.

In a letter from Queen Elizabeth to the Irish government, dated September 30, 1598, which was discovered by Malone, Spenser is recommended to be sheriff of Cork. A royal recommendation is generally equivalent to a command, but the rebellion of Tyrone put a period to all the poet's hopes of dignity and emolument. To escape the fury of the insurgents, he abandoned his house in Kilcolman, leaving behind him one of his children, who had been forgotten in the terror of the moment. Having removed everything else that it contained, the miscreants set fire to the building, and left the infant to perish in the flames. The burning of his house and the spoiling of his goods are attributed to his own cupidity by some writers, but the fact of his having been nominated sheriff of Cork is sufficient to account for it. Spenser did not long survive these multiplied calamities. On the 16th of January 1598-9, soon after his arrival in England, he died at an inn in King Street, Westminster, London. The authority for this assertion, it must be confessed, is somewhat slender. It rests on the implied truthfulness of a statement in a manuscript notice in a copy of the Faerie Queen that had originally belonged to Henry Capell, "Qui obit," says this notice, "apud diversorium in platea Regia apud Westmonasterium iuxta London, 16° die Januarii 1598." The expenses of his funeral were defrayed by the unfortunate Earl of Essex, who buried him in Westminster Abbey, near the remains of Chaucer; a spot on which he had always desired to take his last repose. Ben Jonson, in his Conversations with Drummond, stated, with what truth it is difficult to say, "that the Irish having rob'd Spenser's goods and burnt his house and a little child new born, he and his wyf escaped; and after, he died for lack of bread in King Street, and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of Essex, and said, 'He was sorrie he had no time to spend them.'"

Spenser left two sons, Sylvanus and Peregrine. Hugolin, the son of the latter, was restored to his grandfather's estate by Charles II.; but, adhering to the intemperate successor of that monarch, he was outlawed, after the Revolution, for high treason. The lands of the outlaw, however, were bestowed upon his cousin William, the son of Sylvanus, through the interest of Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax. William Spenser was presented to the notice of Montague by Congreve. "The family of the Spencers," says Gibbon, "has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough, but I exhort them to consider the Fairy Queen as the most precious jewel in their coronet."

Of Spenser's personal character we are in a great measure left to form our opinion from his works. Both the tendency and details of these are highly favourable to virtue; and the many chaplets he threw upon the hearse of Sidney prove that he cherished the memory of his benefactor with pious care. It is easy to imagine gratitude allied to every other noble quality, and it is more misanthropy to question the sincerity of tears that fall to those who can give no more.

Dr G. L. Craik, in his admirable volumes on Spenser and his Poetry, has the following remarks:—The Fairy Queen "is not a poem like the Iliad, fiery, passionate, dramatic as life itself; it is all more likely to a dream than to waking life. Its descriptions and pictures, it must be confessed, more resemble visions in the clouds than anything to be seen on earth. And this, we apprehend, is what Coleridge must be understood to mean when he says that Spenser's descriptions are not, in the true sense of the word, picturesque; but then no more are Claude's landscapes picturesque. Both want a peculiar piquancy which is one of the characteristics and constituents of the picturesque as commonly limited. It is essentially a thing of earth rather than of heaven, tending always towards the human, almost towards the domestic, offering nestling places for the affections; delighting, therefore, more in houses and fields than in mountains and forests, and more in mountains and forests than in sea and sky. Spenser's descriptions are not picturesque in this sense, because his poetry has so little flesh and blood throughout. Yet he is surely one of the very greatest of painters in words, diffuse and florid, no doubt, rather than energetic and expressive; but of what affluence and prodigality of power and resources in his own style, of what inexhaustible ingenuity and invention, of what flowing freedom of movement, of how deep and exquisite a sense of beauty! He is, indeed, distinctly and pre-eminently the poet of the beautiful. Of the purely beautiful, as consisting simply in form and colour, his poetry is the richest storehouse in the literature of the world; and what it contains of this pure essential beauty is not more matchless for its quantity than for the quality of much of it. Nor let it be supposed that this is a narrow realm in which he reigns supreme. The region of form is of boundless extent, comprehending whatever gratifies the sense of sight and sound, or the imagination and fancy as excited through them. But Spenser's poetry is full also of the spirit of moral beauty. It is not a passionate song, but yet it is both earnest and high-toned, and it is pervaded by a quiet tenderness that is always soothing, often touching: a heart of gentleness and nobleness ever lives and beats in it. With all its unworleliness, too, it breathes throughout a thoughtful wisdom, which looks deep even into human things; and oftentimes sad and pitying, is yet also sometimes stern. Thus, although the music is in the air, and invisible spirits seem to make it, it wants not many a note betraying its mortal origin.

"Spenser's verse is the most abundantly musical in English poetry. Even Milton's, more scientific and elaborate, and also rising at times to more volume and grandeur of tone, has not so rich a natural sweetness and variety, or so deep a pathos. His poetry swims in music; he winds his way through stanza after stanza of his spacious song, more like one actually singing than writing, borne along, it might seem, almost without effort or thought.

"His treatment of words upon such occasions is like nothing that ever was seen, unless it might be Hercules breaking the back of the Nemean lion. He gives them any sense and any shape that the case may demand. Sometimes he merely alters a letter or two, sometimes he twists off the head or the tail of the unfortunate vocable altogether. In short, it is evident that he considers his prerogative in such matters to be unlimited. But this fearless, lordly, truly royal style in which he proceeds makes one only fear the more how easily, if he chose, he could avoid the necessity of having recourse to such outrages. After all, they do not occur so frequently as much to mar the beauty of his verse: the more brilliant passages of the poem are for the most part free from them.

"Distinct and dissimilar in many respects, opposed in some, as are the genius of Spenser and that of Homer, we have yet always felt that there is something in the poetry of the one that recalls that of the other. The fire, the passion, the dramatic life, the narrative rapidity of Homer, Spenser wants; the Homeric is of all poetry that in which there is most flesh and blood, the Spenserian that in which there is the least. Homer is both soul and body, Spenser is only soul, or soul with the body laid asleep as it is in dreams; the Homeric poetry is essentially and intensely of this world, that of Spenser as essentially and intensely not of this world; the one is full of the spirit of sunshine and the open air, the other of that of moonlight and torchlight. Yet, spite of these great differences, is there any other English poetry that is so like the Homeric as that of Spenser? any other through which an English reader, properly warned in regard to the wide disagreement between them in many respects, could get so near to a just and lively conception of that of Homer? We should say there certainly is not.

"One of Spenser's inventions in the Fairy Queen is his magnificent stanza, which may be said to be the last new form of verse that has fairly established itself in the language."

There are in all some forty editions of Spenser's works. The most prominent of these are, an edition with a glossary and a life of the author, and an essay on allegorical poetry, by John Hughes, London, 1715, 6 vols. 12mo. The Fairy Queen, with an exact collation of the two original editions, a life of the author by Dr Birch, and a glossary, together with 32 plates from designs by Kent. Lond., 1751, 3 vols. 4to. Another edition of this poem, with notes critical and explanatory, was soon afterwards published by Ralph Church, A.M., Lond., 1758, 4 vols. 8vo. And about the same time appeared a new edition, with a glossary and notes explanatory and critical, by John Upton, A.M., Lond., 1758, 2 vols. 4to. An elaborate and complete edition of Spenser's works was at length published by Todd, Lond., 1805, 8 vols. 8vo; also, Dr Craik's Spenser and his Poetry, 3 vols., 1845, already referred to.