by Botticelli or Lippi beside the altar-pieces of Giotto or Angelico. But the singularly infelicitous selection of names which throughout the Calender seems to strike a dissonant note and mar the beauty of the verse, detracts much from the elegance of an idyl such as that before us. APRIL. Majora canamus! Spenser now, in accordance with a fashion which, however prevalent in the literature of that day, was nevertheless tainted with fulsomeness, if not with hypocrisy, has to offer his tribute of flattery to Elizabeth, the key-note of which is struck by Hobbinol's embleme, “O dea certe!" Spenser naturally decorates that true child of the Renaissance with all the classical images which his scholarship, miscellaneous rather than exact, can supply. Elizabeth's praises (which, we may note, are ascribed by Hobbinol to Colin-that is, to Spenser himself) fill an Ode of nine stanzas, inserted among the quatrains in which the interlocutors, Thenot and Hobbinol, discourse. This Ode is now mainly interesting as the poet's first recorded experiment in a lyrical form, which he afterwards developed into singular excellence: he preludes here to the Epithalamion of 1596. Compared with that and other specimens of Spenser's later work, this piece is somewhat slight and halting in metre, the substance of it somewhat poor and commonplace. Even if the excess in flattery were condoned, good taste cannot be recognized in the genealogy which speaks of Henry VIII as Pan, of Anne Boleyn as Syrinx; whilst the flowers assembled in Elizabeth's honour are grouped (as we find in Januarie) with some disregard of natural truth. But, when published, the Ode was probably far beyond any at that time written for the glorification of the Queen, in fluency and completeness of art. Looking at the metrical structure of this Eclogue, it would be pedantic to criticize Spenser simply for deviating from classical usage, which does not admit of change in the metre when a song is placed in the mouth of one of the characters in the dialogue. Yet something of unity in effect, I venture to think, is always sacrificed by the method here adopted ;for which Spenser may have found a precedent in Sanazzaro. Metrically considered, the intention of the Elisa Ode is Iambic but vague anapæsts occur, and give a rather uneven effect to the rhythm. A similar fluctuation marks the opening stanzas of August. These peculiarities I take to be experimental: they are not exhibited in Spenser's later work. MAYE. This curious dialogue between Piers and Palinode, two shepherds representing "Protestant and Catholique pastoures," is the first of the three in which Spenser has been led by the example of Mantuanus and other writers of the time into a field wholly alien from the pastoral. Piers must, in a general sense, be taken as representing Spenser's own opinions ;—yet the dialogue, when closely examined, is much less distinctly theological, less Puritan, than the commentators, beginning with E. K. (whose gloss is in his most extravagant and pedantic style), have held it; and the opponents, with a liberality not common in any disputation, debate and part without any sign of personal animosity. In fact, we find Spenser here, as he probably remained through life, balanced between the great rival religious systems. To the older religion he is attracted by his temperament as a poet; to Protestantism partly by its severe tone of professed practical morality, partly by the influence, doubtless, of early friends, in especial of Leicester and Sidney. The bias towards the Puritan side, given by these powerful patrons, had a perturbing effect on Spenser's course as a poet; his natural impulse would not have been to a system which, even in Elizabeth's reign, although its excesses were repressed, had already (as in the reaction against liberal culture which marked the reign of her brother), showed its antagonism to what was large and elevating, not less than to what was debasing, in the Renaissance movement. Spenser's internal sentiment, if it be here correctly interpreted, has deprived his satire of force and reality, even while, as could hardly fail in the work of so masterly a poet, he has some lines of much vigour and vivacity. Although I cannot agree with those who have found a model for this Eclogue in the Plowman's Tale, ascribed formerly to Chaucer, which is a long and tedious Lollard effusion carried on by way of dialogue between a ploughman and a pelican, yet Spenser here had probably in view Chaucer's anti-monastic and anti-clerical satires. He has been hence betrayed into a species of anachronism; the exposure and condemnation of faithless and cheating priests and monks, however justified by the corrupt England of the later Plantagenets, having much less object and verisimilitude in the reformed England of Elizabeth. This unreality detracts much from the effect of the poem; the ascetic view of clerical life which Piers brings forward (even if it had the historical foundation claimed for it in line 103 and onward), being obviously opposed to Spenser's own instinct for the reasonable enjoyment, for the poetry, of life. Palinode, in fact, replying Thou findest faulte, * has the best of the argument, if argument it can be called; as in the opening lines of the poem his tone is much nearer Spenser's own than that which Piers is compelled to adopt. The parable of the Foxe and the Kidde (for the style of which E. K., as in Eclogue II, refers us to Æsop), is hence naturally without much point or power. It is misplaced in Spenser's age, and Palinode puts it by at the end with ease. JUNE. We have here an Eclogue of what the Scholiast terms the "plaintive" or amorous class; being a dialogue between Hobbinol (Harvey), and Colin Clout (Spenser), on the latter's ill-success in his love for Rosalind, who has the bad taste to prefer a certain Menalcas to Colin. The lovely music of the very difficult stanza probably invented by Spenser, and here employed with the greatest apparent ease,—the full, even flow of imagery * Spenser might have given his satire on clerical love of wealth another turn, had he foreseen that his grandson would be robbed of the Irish estate which cost the poet so dearly, for the alleged crime of Catholicism at seven years of age, under the strict Puritan administration of Cromwell. See the Appendix to Craik's Spenser and his Poetry, and Lecky's History of England, vol. ii, ch. 7. and reflection, must have made this poem a kind of revelation to the readers of 1580; whilst it was not injured as a model of poetical style by that want of genuine passion, or touches of natural description (beyond those of the most obvious character), which marks it. The graceful lament for Chaucer, as if lately dead, accords well with the conventional atmosphere of the eclogue. If Spenser were not heart-whole in regard to Rosalind, this lament, at least, bears no evidence to the contrary. Nor can its coldness be ascribed to its pastoral disguise by those who recall that exquisite cry of passion with which Gallus the shepherd, nineteen centuries since, invokes the lost Love : Hic gelidi fontes, hic mollia prata, Lycori; This piece shows a signal advance in art; it might have been a credit to Sanazzaro or Tasso to have written it. Yet justice to Spenser's earlier models requires us to confess that his imitative lay never really reaches that exquisiteness of phrase, that ever-rememberable choice and union of words, by which Theocritus or Vergil double the effect of the human passion and the natural landscape from which they have framed their most characteristic Idyls. I wote my rymes bene rough, and rudely drest, Colin's own criticism, when we think of these ancient master-works, is more true than Spenser himself may have deemed it. JULYE. Another essay, which it is impossible to consider felicitous, in Spenser's peculiar vein of theological satire. |