A Biography of Edmund Spenser | Page 4

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 in the Books of the Treasurer of the Queen's Chamber in 1569, as paid for bearing letters from Sir Henry Norris, her Majesty's ambassador in France, to the Queen,{1} and who with but slight probability has been surmised to be the poet