THE COMPLETE WORKS IN VERSE AND PROSE OF EDMUND SPENSER. EDITED, WITH A NEW LIFE, BASED ON ORIGINAL RESEARCHES BY THE KEV ALEXANDER B. GROSART, LL.D. (EDIN.), F.S.A. ESSAYS ON THE MINOR POEMS OF SPENSER. By F. T. PALGRAVE, ESQ., LL.D, DAPHNAIDA: AN ELEGIE UPON THE DEATH OF THE NOBLE AND COLIN CLOUTS COME HOME AGAIN. AMORETTI AND EPITHALAMION. FOWRE HYMNES. 1596. 1595. 1595. PROTHALAMION, OR A SPOUSAL VERSE, ETC. 1596. IKIN TD FOK PRIVATE CIRCULATION ONLY 100 copies only.] LETA ESSAYS ON THE MINOR POEMS of Spenser. BY F. T. PALGRAVE, ix The (steel) portrait of Raleigh. to face title-page in 4° (large paper only) ESSAYS ON THE MINOR POEMS OF SPENSER. BY FRANCIS T. PALGRAVE. I. SPENSER IN RELATION TO HIS IMMEDIATE PREDECESSORS. SPENSER'S greatness, and his permanent place in Poetry, are to be sought mainly in the Faerie Queene, which is criticized elsewhere in this edition. But for the development and the varied resources of his genius, and for many of the new poetical forms by which he has influenced English literature from his age to our own, we must look to those other poems, which the editor has committed to my diffident and reluctant hands. In the separate Prefaces it is intended to note the growth of Spenser's genius, and the quality of each production, with such attention to chronology as their often-conjectural dates of writing may allow. What I here wish to bring out, with all the clearness (imperfect as it must be in matter of this nature) that I can command, is the novelty of the models, whether in subject or in style, which he presented from 1580 onwards ;to show how far he was a Maker, (to use the fine Elizabethan phrase,) in the literature of the day, by comparison with those who wrote during the preceding half-century. |