EDMUND SPENSER. EDITED, WITH A NEW LIFE, BASED ON ORIGINAL RESEARCHES, ESSAYS ON THE MINOR POEMS OF SPENSER. DAPHNAIDA: AN ELEGIE UPON THE DEATH OF THE NOBLE AND VERTUOUS DOUGLAS HOWARD, ETC. 1591. PROTHALAMION, OR A SPOUSAL VERSE, ETC. 1596. PRINTED FOR THE SPENSER SOCIETY. ESSAYS ON THE MINOR POEMS OF SPENSER. BY FRANCIS T. PALGRAVE. I. SPENSER IN RELATION TO HIS IMMEDIATE SPENSER'S greatness, and his permanent place in 9295 1882 All great poets must be in advance of their own age; but though all must, at some period, influence those who succeed, yet this influence may neither be definite nor immediate. Spenser, however, unites both features in a very marked degree. He was, in point of style and form, singularly new; his influence was instantaneous as well as enduring. In fact, no candid reader of his lesser poems will, I think, be able to deny that whilst much, indeed, is consecrated for all time by exquisiteness and by power, yet much, also, remains of which the value is mainly relative, the interest historical. That we may judge him fairly, we have constantly to bear in mind the very peculiar position in which the development of European culture placed an Englishman during the latter half of the sixteenth century. For the Renaissance movement in literature, which we may trace back to the lyrical impulse of Provence and of Dante's age, if not even earlier, had nearly spent its creative power in its first seats when it reached Spain, Northern France, and England. The last wave of Italian poetry, we might almost say, wafted the Renaissance to our shores. And it was hence here mingled with elements absent from the original outburst in Italy ;-with the genius of Greece and Rome, reawakening after the long sleep which followed the Barbarian conquests,-the spirit of theological reformation,—the spirit of physical science. These powers, penetrating our writers in very varying degrees, give a wider scope than was covered by the early poets of Italy and Provence to the Elizabethan lyrists. They had also a richer and longer national history behind them; they had even, in Chaucer and his followers, a noble literature wherein Mediævalism was already tinged by the early Renaissance, but which, in regard to poetical form and diction, could not be taken as a guide to meet sixteenth-century requirements; whilst, at the same time, the English national temperament, substantially the same, then and now, as it was in Chaucer's day, but radically different from that of the southern races, demanded representation under the new colours of Italianized classicalism. Hence so much had necessarily to be learned and attempted and incorporated, that there is often something artificial-something which threatened to be almost "Alexandrian," (a phase which, perhaps, was more distinctly and injuriously felt in France)—about our first fresh Elizabethan creations. There was more material, above all, than the poets could thoroughly fuse: our great early national outburst of poetry wants the perfect spontaneity by which the parallel lyrical movement in Hellas is distinguished. To give proper form to this vast movement, to provide a language equal to the occasion, to blend in one English national sentiment, mediæval feeling and tradition, and that Italianized classicalism under which the Renaissance impulse first reached us, was the peculiar task of Spenser. To trace all his proximate antecedents would hence be to write European history for some. centuries preceding his youth. Waiving this immense. task, let us now turn briefly to the writers whose language was practically identical with his own, and who were the earliest pupils in the "new learning" of Italy. The names of Surrey and Wyatt, friends and fellowworkers, like the names of Petrarch and Boccaccio, Beaumont and Fletcher, Goethe and Schiller, are inseparable Dioscuri in the history of our literature. They, |