A Biography of Edmund Spenser | Page 4

Winstanley's time, it may be
added, Hughes in 1715, Dr. Birch in 1731, Church in 1758, Upton in
that same year, Todd in 1805, Aikin in 1806, Robinson in 1825,
Mitford in 1839, Prof. Craik in 1845, Prof. Child in 1855, Mr. Collier
in 1862, Dr. Grosart in 1884, have re-told what little there is to tell,
with various additions and subtractions. Our external sources of
information are, then, extremely scanty. Fortunately our internal
sources are somewhat less meagre. No poet ever more emphatically
lived in his poetry than did Spenser. The Muses were, so to speak, his
own bosom friends, to whom he opened all his heart. With them he
conversed perpetually on the various events of his life; into their ears
he poured forth constantly the tale of his joys and his sorrows, of his
hopes, his fears, his distresses. He was not one of those poets who can

put off themselves in their works, who can forego their own interests
and passions, and live for the time an extraneous life. There is an
intense personality about all his writings, as in those of Milton and of
Wordsworth. In reading them you can never forget the poet in the poem.
They directly and fully reflect the poet's own nature and his
circumstances. They are, as it were, fine spiritual diaries, refined self-
portraitures. Horace's description of his own famous fore-runner,
quoted at the head of this memoir, applies excellently to Spenser. On
this account the scantiness of our external means of knowing Spenser is
perhaps the less to be regretted. Of him it is eminently true that we may
know him from his works. His poems are his best biography. In the
sketch of his life to be given here his poems shall be our one great
authority.

Footnotes ---------
{1} Compare 'Underneath this sable hearse, &c.' {2} Works of William
Drummond of Hawthornden. Edinburgh, 1711, p. 225. {3} Annales, ed.
Hearne, iii. 783. {4} _History of Elizabeth, Queen of England._ Ed.
1688, pp. 564, 565. {5} Father {6} _Theatrum Poet. Anglic._, ed.
Brydges, 1800, pp. 148, 149.

CHAPTER I.
1552-1579.
FROM SPENSER'S BIRTH TO THE PUBLICATION OF THE
SHEPHEARD'S CALENDAR.
Edmund Spenser was born in London in the year 1552, or possibly
1551. For both these statements we have directly or indirectly his own
authority. In his Prothalamion he sings of certain swans whom in a
vision he saw floating down the river 'Themmes,' that
At length they all to mery London came, To mery London, my most
kyndly nurse, That to me gave this lifes first native sourse, Though
from another place I take my name, An house of auncient fame.

A MS. note by Oldys the antiquary in Winstanley's Lives of the most
famous English Poets, states that the precise locality of his birth was
East Smithfield. East Smithfield lies just to the east of the Tower, and
in the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Tower was still one of
the chief centres of London life and importance, was of course a
neighbourhood of far different rank and degree from its present social
status. The date of his birth is concluded with sufficient certainty from
one of his sonnets, viz. sonnet 60; which it is pretty well ascertained
was composed in the year 1593. These sonnets are, as well shall see, of
the amorous wooing sort; in the one of them just mentioned, the
sighing poet declares that it is but a year since he fell in love, but that
the year has seemed to him longer
Then al those fourty which my life out-went.
Hence it is gathered that he was most probably born in 1552. The
inscription, then, over his tomb in Westminster Abbey errs in assigning
his birth to 1553; though the error is less flagrant than that perpetrated
by the inscription that preceded the present one, which set down as his
natal year 1510. Of his parents the only fact secured is that his mother's
name was Elizabeth. This appears from sonnet 74, where he
apostrophizes those
Most happy letters! fram'd by skilfull trade With which that happy
name was first desynd, The which three times thrise happy hath me
made, With guifts of body, fortune and of mind. The first my being to
me gave by kind From mothers womb deriv'd by dew descent.
The second is the Queen, the third 'my love, my lives last ornament.' A
careful examination by Mr. Collier and others of what parish registers
there are extant in such old churches as stand near East Smithfield--the
Great Fire, it will be remembered, broke out some distance west of the
Tower, and raged mainly westward-- has failed to discover any trace of
the infant Spenser or his parents. An 'Edmund Spenser' who is
mentioned