Shall chance, through power of some divining spright, May by this Gnat's complaint be easily known.” The Gnat of Virgil, observing a serpent in the act of darting on a sleeping swain, stings the eye of the sleeper; starting at the pain, the disturbed man crushes the gnat, but, thus awakened, he saves himself from the crested serpent. The poem turns on the remonstrance of the ghost of the gnat, which had no other means than by inflicting its friendly sting, to warn him of his peril who had thus hastily deprived it of its own innocent existence. What was "the serpent,' and why the poet was hardly used as "the gnat," and why he was "Wronged, yet not daring to express his pain," and yet "grieved to feel his fault," is "a riddle rare," supposed to require some Edipus of secret history to solve. The moral is obvious. The character of the royal favorite may give rise to many suggestions; but if I may venture a conjecture on what the parties themselves "were only privy to," Spenser had touched on some high matter, where his affectionate zeal, however sagacious, on this occasion hurt the pride of Leicester--too haughty or too mortified to be lessened by his familiar dependant, who, like the gnat, found that his timely warning was "his fault." A sage of the antiquarian school imagined that he could solve the enigma of Spenser's sorrows, by arranging, with dates and accounts of salaries, the official situations which the poet held. To remove the odium attached to Burleigh's prepossessions against the poet, he assumes that without the lord-treasurer's consent Spenser could not have received his lands or his pensions. But the royal grant of the forfeited lands were obviously the reward for his conduct, suggested by those under whose eye he had served: the patronage of Sidney and the Lords Leicester and Grey may be imagined to have greatly outweighed any cavils of Burleigh. George Chalmers infers that all the complaints of the poet are "too highly colored, if they really were complaints respecting himself!" and concludes that all the poet's querulousness must be ascribed, not to Burleigh, but to the Irish rebellion. But the calamity of the Irish rebellion occasioned no complaints from the poet-only his death! for we have not a line by Spenser during the short interval which elapsed between his flight from Ireland to his decease in London. It was not by an estimate of salaries and an arrangement of dates, which yield no result, but by a statement of feelings, in which the "secret sorrows" of Spenser lie concealed, that we can decide on the real source of his continued complaints. The poet must be judged by the habits of his mind, and by those interior conflicts which are often unconnected with those external circumstances open to common observers. Of all the tuneful train Spenser was the most poetical in the gentlest attributes of the poet. That robust force which the enterprise of active life demands was not lodged in that soul of tenderness; and worldly cares like that cancer in the breast which the sufferer hides from others, dejected the fancy which at all times was working ceaselessly among its bright creations. His vein was inexhaustible, and we have lost perhaps more than we possess of his writings. The author of "The Faery Queen" required above all things leisure and the muse. His first steppings into life were auspicious. To Sir Philip Sidney he had opened the first cantoes of his romantic epic; the catastrophe of that poet-hero made our poet a mourner all his days. There was no substitute for a congenial patron: all other patrons could be but the very statues of patronage, cold representatives of the departed, but no longer the bosom companion of the poet's thoughts, and the generous arbiter of his fortunes. In his last days Spenser has not dropped even one "melodious tear;" but he was wept by his brothers the poets, who held his pall, and bestrewed his hearse with their elegies, and beheld in the fate of their great master their own. And thus truly, though ambigu ously, Phineas Fletcher described his destiny "Poorly, poor man! he lived; poorly, poor man! he died.” So many living details of that golden bondage into which our poet was thrown, from his earliest to his latter days, discover the real source of his 66 secret sorrows" his unceasing and vain solicitation at court, the suiter of so many patrons; the res angusta domi perpetually pressed on the morbid imagination of the fortuneless man. I know of no satire aimed at Spenser; a singular fate for a great poet : even satyric Nash" revered the character of the author of "The Faery Queen." I have often thought that among the numerous critics of Spenser, the truest was that of his keen and witty contemporary; for this town-wit has stamped all our poet's excellences by one felicitous word "HEAVENLY SPENSER." 130 THE FAERY QUEEN. SPENSER, the courtly spectator of the tilt, the pageant, and the masque --musing over the tome of old Gothic romances, and striking into the vein of fabling of Italian poesy, whose novelty had nearly supplanted the ancient classics. was at once Ariosto and Tasso and Ovid. Spenser composed with great facility; incessant production seems to have been his true existence. His was one of those minds whose labor diffuses their delight, and whose delight provokes to labor. He seems always to be in earnest, and sometimes in haste, for he had much to work. While composing the Faery Queen," he had that concurrent poem of the regal Arthur, of no inferior calibre, ever in his mind. The "Faery Queen" would have contained, had it been completed, not much under a hundred thousand verses. The "Iliad" does not exceed fifteen. He seems to have been satisfied with his first unblotted thoughts. He has defects which might have proved fatal to an ordinary versifier; but his voluminous vein lies protected by his genius. The artificial complexity of his nine-lined stanza put him to many shifts; he exercised arbitrary power in shortening words or lengthening syllables, and hardily invented novel terminations to common words, to provide his multiplicity of rhymes; he falsified accentuation, to adapt it to his metre, and violated the orthography, to adjust the rhyme. He dilated his thoughts to fill up the measure of his stanza; and we are too often reminded of the hammering of the chain. The first book of the "Faery Queen," when the difficulties of this novel stanza must have been most arduous is necessarily composed with most care, and, both for subject and execution, is of itself a complete poem. As Spenser acquired facility and dexterity, his pen winged its flight through the prescribed labyrinth of sweet sounds. His exquisite ear had felt the melody of the vowelly and voluble stanza of Italy, and to which he even added a grace of his own by a new measure, in the Alexandrine close. This verse had been introduced by Sir Thomas Wyatt with no great effect; it was adroitly adopted by Spenser to give a full cadence to his stanza. Dryden, in its occasional use, professedly derived it from Spenser, and seems to have carried away the honor, when Pope in exemplifying its solemn effect ascribes it to the latter poet, who he tells us had taught "The full-resounding line, The long majestic march and energy divine." The inanity of that race "Of gentlemen who wrote with ease," and made such free use of "the full-resounding line," void of all thought, only betrayed their barrenness by this additional extension of their weakness. Hence it incurred the partial censure of our great poetical critic, as "a heedless Alexandrine," "That like a wounded snake drags its slow length along." But the soul of melody lies hidden in the musician's instrument; and the Spenserian stanza, to be felt, must find its echo in the ear of the reader. A master in the art of versification was struck by our poet's modulation, so musical was his ear in the rhythm of his verse. remarked this in those two delicious pieces, "The Prothalamion," a spousal hymn on the double marriage He |