1558 Death of Mary;
Elizabeth
crowned.
Spenser - Faerie Queene - 1
"I think that if he had not been a great poet," says Leigh Hunt, "he would
have been a great painter. "
"After reading," says Pope, "a canto of Spenser two or three days ago to an
old lady, between seventy and eighty years of age, she said that I had been
showing her a gallery of pictures. I do not know how it is, but she said
very right. There is something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in
old age as it did in youth. I read the _Faerie Queene_ when I was about
twelve, with infinite delight; and I think it gave me as much, when I read
it over about a year or two ago. "
The imperishable charm of the poem lies in its appeal to the pure sense of
beauty. "A beautiful pagan dream," says Taine, "carries on a beautiful
dream of chivalry. " The reader hears in its lines a stately and undulating
rhythm that intoxicates the ear and carries him on with an irresistible
fascination, he sees the unsubstantial forms of fairyland go sweeping by in
a gorgeous and dreamlike pageantry, and he feels pulsing in its luxuriant
and enchanted atmosphere the warm and beauty-loving temper of the Italian
Renaissance. "Spenser is superior to his subject," says Taine, "comprehends
it fully, frames it with a view to the end, in order to impress upon it the
proper mark of his soul and his genius. Each story is modified with respect
to another, and all with respect to a certain effect which is being worked
out. Thus a beauty issues from this harmony,--the beauty in the poet's
heart,--which his whole work strives to express; a noble and yet a laughing
beauty, made up of moral elevation and sensuous seductions, English in
sentiment, Italian in externals, chivalric in subject, modern in its
perfection, representing a unique and admirable epoch, the appearance of
paganism in a Christian race, and the worship of form by an imagination of
the North. "
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
EVENTS IN SPENSER'S LIFE A. D. CONTEMPORARY EVENTS
Birth of Edmund Spenser (about) 1552 Birth of Sir Walter Raleigh
1553 Death of Edward VI; Mary crowned.
1554 Mary marries Philip of Spain.
1558 Death of Mary; Elizabeth crowned.
1560 Charles IX, king of France.
1568 Council of Trent.
_Visions of Bellay_, published, 1569
_Sonnets of Petrarch_, published, 1569
Enters Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 1569
1572 Gregory XIII, Pope of Rome.
1572 Massacre of St. Batholomew.
1574 Henry III, king of France.
Received M. A. , leaves Cambridge, 1576 Rudolph II, emperor.
Leaves Lancashire, 1578 Elizabeth aids the Netherlands.
Visits Lord Leicester, 1579
_The Shepheards Calender_, 1579
Goes to Ireland, 1580 Massacre of Smerwick.
1581 Tasso's _Jersalem Delivered_.
Lord Grey's return to England, 1582
1584 Assassination of William the
Silent.
1585 Sixtus V, Pope. Drake's voyage.
