in blank verse or in lyrical stanzas is introduced. Spenser borrows nothing from the names of Sanazzaro's personages, which appear to be original inventions. The ninth Eclogue has the air of greater aim at country diction than the others, and the Ofelia who here strikes an English reader is probably only framed from the rustic Ofellus of Horace. Sanazzaro writes in literary Italian, making no attempt at dialect, and what there is of natural description is only introduced in immediate connection with the persons of the Eclogue.-To Marot, on the other hand, as my comment on December will show, Spenser is indebted for more than his Scholiast notices.

Yet, granting that the pastoral form was adapted by Spenser from recent Renaissance models, as in them from Vergil and Theocritus ;-and by him, also, first employed in our literature,—the final impression left by the Calender ought, I think, to be that it is in the main a thoroughly original work, imbued much more with an English than with a Renaissance spirit, and in its tone and its details derived in due course from our own poetry, not from those foreign sources, ancient and modern, to which E. K., in the fashion of the day, thought it seemly to trace his friend's inspiration. To Chaucer, of course, as incomparably the richest and the most vigorous genius who, to this date, had ennobled our poetry, Spenser looked up as his master; and Chaucer's general influence, doubtless, was the most powerful element (so far as such influences are really traceable) in forming the disciple. Here he found, not only "numbers," verse in its technical form, but "the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of Poesy" her

self. Yet-at any rate in the Minor Poems-Chaucer's inspiration is influential rather over the general manner of Spenser than his style, choice of subject, or quality of thought. This was best; and it was also inevitable. For the two men are obviously of very different gifts and natures: it is in the romantic plays of Shakespeare, not in the Faerie Queene, that the Pilgrimage makes its authentic reappearance. Chaucer's genius also shines far more in his longer works than in brief lyrics. Thus it is probable that Spenser formed himself most upon the writers of whom I have given a short sketch in the preceding pages; one finds among them, at least, his didactic tone, the quality which led Milton to call him "the sage and serious Spenser," whom he "dared to be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." Even in this field, however, my study has not lighted upon any distinct detailed debt from Spenser to his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. What we find is, that these take suggestions from each other, as others afterwards copied him, with a freedom from which Spenser was perhaps exempted by his own almost too fluent copiousness. The sonnet form, of course, he may have partially learned from Surrey or Wyatt. Sackville's admirably sustained loftiness of melody, as I have noticed, has a strong claim to be regarded as a model for Spenser's, as it is difficult not to believe that the Induction preluded to the allegories of the Faerie Queene. The literary influence, however, of that poet to whom one would have naturally looked as marked out for the strongest hold over Spenser is strangely absent, not only from the Calender, but from the whole body of his

poetry. It is part of that deep and irritating ignorance, already noticed, under which we lie as to the details of the English Renaissance, that no evidence appears to remain upon Spenser's introduction to Sir Philip Sidney,-no notice of him, personally, in any of Sidney's preserved writings. Even the dedication of the Calender to the president

Of Noblesse and of chevalree, (with the reference to it in E. K.'s Epistle,) claims no personal knowledge, and might have been addressed to Sidney simply in his recognized position as beyond compare the most highly placed and conspicuous man of literary culture in England. But Spenser's letter to Harvey, dated from the house of Leicester, Sidney's too-predominant uncle, in October 1579, discussing the curious and instructive attempt initiated, as he boasted, by Harvey, to reform English metres after the Greco-Roman model, speaks of "Master Sidney and Master Dyer" as "twoo worthy Gentlemen," who "have me, I thanke them, in some use of familiarity." Beyond this, all is conjecture; though we may accept as possible that in 1578-9 Spenser was at Penshurst, and that the phrase of the fourth Eclogue describing him as "the Southerne shepheerdes boye" refers to his association with Sidney. Whether, however, Sidney at that time communicated any of his own poetry to Spenser, the songs of the Arcadia, or the more intimate and passionate Astrophel series,-nay, whether any portion of these was completed by 1578-9, is wholly uncertain.* To add to our perplexity, Sidney's

* The possibly probable dates for Astrophel and Stella, after careful consideration of the circumstances of Sidney's life, I would

unhappy love, his love songs, his beautiful romance, all seem entirely unnoticed in his own correspondence; nor was any account of the date or circumstances of their composition given when the Arcadia, Astrophel, and other lyrics were published some years after his death. In short, although the most brilliant figure of that brilliant epoch, Sidney as an author is even less known to us than Shakespeare. Precisely the two poets with whose thoughts and aims in literature we should most eagerly desire intimacy, are hidden from us (and, it is to be feared, must always be) in a darkness which we may perhaps be allowed to compare to that cloud wherein Homer hides the Deities when they descend to mix with mortals.

Looking, however, to the leading dates in Sidney's life, it is likely that part of the Arcadia was in existence before 1580, and that this at least for the Astrophel poems, I suspect, remained throughout life the secret of their heart-wrung writer-would be shown to Spenser. Yet the diction and sentiment of the comparatively few pastoral lyrics embodied in Arcadia seem to me to bear no relation whatever to Spenser's; who, it should be remembered, was himself by two years Sidney's senior, and had formed his own style in its main elements, as the translations published by Van der Noodt in 1569 indicate, at a very early age. This style is widely different from Sidney's; it is far more fluent and musical, more ornamented, more uniformly and distinctively poetical. It is as a fine art that poetry always appears in Spenser ;

place between 1577 and 1583; those for Arcadia between 1579 and 1583. To the long visit at Wilton from March to September in 1580 we may reasonably assign a large portion of the Romance, if not of the other work.

his work may at times be too overtly ornamented: merely ornamental and decorative his art never is. That "mass of words, with a tinkling sound of rhyme, barely accompanied with reason," which Sidney found in the majority of English poets, cannot be charged to Spenser, even in his most fluent and most conventional moods. In this respect he ranks with Dante in his lyrics, with Petrarch, perhaps we may add with Sanazzaro, and is on a higher level than we can assign to the great majority of his Italian contemporaries. Even in a poet so exquisite as Tasso, Form, in his facile canzoniere, is too often inadequately sustained by Material. Sidney, on the other hand, is unequal in point of style, lapsing not unfrequently into over-terseness and obscurity, and, though less often in the sonnets than in the Arcadia lyrics, into prosaicism. Nor has he any constant share in Spenser's singular gift of fluent melody, a quality rarely reconcilable with brevity of diction. Yet this terseness, this directness of speech, in their turn give Sidney's verse a simple power of appeal to human feeling which is, perhaps, the one quality notably lacking in his great contemporary. Spenser sees life, in his poetry at least, through more than one veil, always, though varyingly, conventional in character. The note of personal passion, as I shall have afterwards to point out, is very seldom clearly and irrefragably heard in his music. He does not speak, it seems to me that, except at rare moments, he could not speak,-heart to heart. He has been described as adopting the allegorical style, using the word in its widest sense. But the truth is that he could do no otherwise. It was Allegory, rather, that