A Biography of Edmund Spenser | Page 7

of his youth, though at a later
period of his life he cancelled and superseded them. They are therefore
reprinted in this volume. (See pp. 699-701.) Vander Noodt, it must be
said, makes no mention of Spenser in his volume. It would seem that he
did not know English, and that he wrote his _Declaration_--a sort of
commentary in prose on the _Visions_--in French. At least we are told
that this Declaration is translated out of French into English by
Theodore Roest. All that is stated of the origin of his Visions is: 'The
learned poete M. Francisce Petrarche, gentleman of Florence, did
invent and write in Tuscan the six firste . . . . which because they serve

wel to our purpose, I have out of the Brabants speache turned them into
the English tongue;' and 'The other ten visions next ensuing ar
described of one Ioachim du Bellay, gentleman of France, the whiche
also, because they serve to our purpose I have translated them out of
Dutch into English.' The fact of the Visions being subsequently
ascribed to Spenser would not by itself carry much weight. But, as Prof.
Craik pertinently asks, 'if this English version was not the work of
Spenser, where did Ponsonby [the printer who issued that subsequent
publication which has been mentioned] procure the corrections which
are not mere typographical errata, and the additions and other
variations{3} that are found in his edition?' In a work called Tragical
Tales, published in 1587, there is a letter in verse, dated 1569,
addressed to 'Spencer' by George Turberville, then resident in Russia as
secretary to the English ambassador, Sir Thomas Randolph. Anthony
{a\} Wood says this Spencer was the poet; but it can scarcely have
been so. 'Turberville himself,' remarks Prof. Craik, 'is supposed to have
been at this time in his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year, which is not the
age at which men choose boys of sixteen for their friends. Besides, the
verses seem to imply a friendship of some standing, and also in the
person addressed the habits and social position of manhood. . . . It has
not been commonly noticed that this epistle from Russia is not
Turberville's only poetical address to his friend Spencer. Among his
"Epitaphs and Sonnets" are two other pieces of verse addressed to the
same person.' To the year 1569 belongs that mention referred to above
of payment made one 'Edmund Spenser' for bearing letters from France.
As has been already remarked, it is scarcely probable that this can have
been the poet, then a youth of some seventeen years on the verge of his
undergraduateship. The one certain event of Spenser's life in the year
1569 is that he was then entered as a sizar at Pembroke Hall,
Cambridge. He 'proceeded B.A.' in 1573, and 'commenced M.A.' in
1576. There is some reason for believing that his college life was
troubled in much the same way as was that of Milton some sixty years
later--that there prevailed some misunderstanding between him and the
scholastic authorities. He mentions his university with respect in the
Faerie Queene, in book iv. canto xi. where, setting forth what various
rivers gathered happily together to celebrate the marriage of the
Thames and the Medway, he tells how

... the plenteous Ouse came far from land By many a city and by many
a towne, And many rivers taking under hand Into his waters, as he
passeth downe, The Cle, the Were, the Grant, the Sture, the Rowne.
Thence doth by Huntingdon and Cambridge flit, My mother Cambridge,
whom as with a Crowne He doth adorne, and is adorn'd of it With
many a gentle Muse, and many a learned wit.
But he makes no mention of his college. The notorious Gabriel Harvey,
an intimate friend of Spenser, who was elected a Fellow of Pembroke
Hall the year after the future poet was admitted as a sizar, in a letter
written in 1580, asks: 'And wil you needes have my testimoniall of
youre old Controllers new behaviour?' and then proceeds to heap
abusive words on some person not mentioned by name but evidently
only too well known to both the sender and the receiver of the epistle.
Having compiled a list of scurrilities worthy of Falstaff, and attacked
another matter which was an abomination to him, Harvey vents his
wrath in sundry Latin charges, one of which runs: 'C{ae}tera fer{e\}, ut
olim: Bellum inter capita et membra continuatum.' 'Other matters are
much as they were: war kept up between the heads [the dons] and the
members [the men].' Spenser was not elected to a fellowship; he quitted
his college, with all its miserable bickerings, after he had taken his
master's degree. There can be little doubt, however, that he was most
diligent and earnest