SPENSER, EDMUND, one of the chief literary ornaments of the great Elizabethan period, was born in London in the year 1553. There is some ground for supposing him to have been of good family connection; but inasmuch as of neither of his parents is anything whatever known, the evidence of this is precarious. In 1569 he went to Pem broke Hall, Cambridge, in the humble capacity of sizar, in itself a sufficient proof that whatever his family, the gifts of fortune were deficient. At Cambridge he remained several years, becoming bachelor of arts in 1572, and master in 1576. After leaving college, he went to live with friends in the n. of England. Of the detail of his life at this period, nothing is known further than that he busied himself with poetry, his first volume of which, The Shepheardes Calendar, was published in 1579. Its dedication to sir Philip Sidney was the means of introducing him to that noble and kindly gentle man, who not only extended to him a generous patronage, but honored him with his warm friendship. He seems for some time to have been domesticated with sir Philip at Leicester house, from which he dates his moiety of the Foure Epistles, exchanged be tween him and Gabriel Harvey, and printed in 1580. Toward the end of this year, through the influence of Sidney's uncle, the earl of Leicester, an appointment was pro cured for him as secretary to lord Grey of Wilton, the queen's deputy in Ireland,whither he at once proceeded. About this time it was that he commenced his great, work, The Faery Queen. His official duties must have been punctually and ably performed, as in 1588 we find his services rewarded by a grant from the crown of Kilcolman in the county of Cork. an estate of upward of 3,000 acres, on which he now went to reside. Along with this piece of good fortune came the evil news to him of the death of his friend Sidney at Zutphen, an event which he musically bewails in the elegy entitled Astropliel. Subsequently the place of Sidney, as at once his patron and friend, was a measure supplied by sir Walter Raleigh, who visited him in Ireland in 1590, took him along with hint to England, and introduced him to the notice of queen Elizabeth. Ilis expe riences as a suitor for court-favor seem not to have been specially of a pleasant kind, if we may judge from a passage in one of his works, in which a keen personal feeling of wrong and weary humiliation speaks out unmistakably. Documentary evidence exists, however, that a pension of £50 per annum was granted him by queen Elizabeth; that it was ever paid, or paid with due punctuality, there seems considerable reason to doubt. That Elizabeth, along with her greater qualities, could exhibit on occasion an extreme meanness and stinginess, there is no reason to doubt whatever. What portion of Spen ser's after-life was passed in England, what in Ireland, we do not distinctly know.
Nearly all we distinctly know of him henceforth is the date of his several publications. The first three hooks of The Faery Queen, issued on his arrival in England in 1590, were followed the year after by three more, and a collection of lesser pieces entitled Complaints, including Mother Hubbard's Tale, the Tears of the Moses, etc.; and in 1590 by four Hyutn,s, so called, in which the Platonic doctrine of beauty is elaborated in noble music. In 1596 be wrote his YieW of Ireland, a treatise full of sagacious observation and re mark, which was only published long after in Dublin in 1633. Further than this, all record which survives to us of Spenser is stunmed in the facts that in 1594 he was mar ried to a woman whose very name has perished; that in 1598 lie was made sheriff of Cork by the queen; and that in the course of the same year the deplorable calamity befell him which shortly preceded and in part may have caused his death. Tyrone's rebellion having broken out, his house at K,ilcolman was sacked and burned by the rebels, lie and his wife with difficulty escaping, while their youngest child perished in the flames. On Jan. 15, 1599, his death took place in London. According: to the account given by Ben Jonson to Drummond, he "died for lake of bread." This is not likely to have been in the literal sense true, but it is scarce possible to evade the inference from it, as coming from one so likely to be well informed as Jonson, of a state of great wretchedness and destitution. He was buried by his own request near Chaucer in Westminster abbey, at the expense of the earl of Essex, who is said, in the account by Jonson, to have ten dered him succor on his death-bed, though too late to be of any avail.
Spenser takes admitted rank, as one of the very greatest of our poets; and his chief work, the Fairy Queen, written in that stateliest of tmglish measures, since known by the name of its inventor, tedious as it is in its allegory, and in much of its diction obsolete even when written, is a masterpiece of opulent genius. In the poetry of Spenser, an ever present seeking for and sense of beauty finds its fit expression and reflex in a fluent succession of sweet and various cadences; in breadth and splendor of pictorial effect, it has never, perhaps, been surpassed; such a lavish exuberance in detail as we find in it, has seldom been so combined with a total impression of chastened and majestic sobriety; and throughout it is pervaded by that atmosphere of moral wisdom and serenity which Milton reverently recognizes in " the sage and serious Spense•."—See Spenser and his Poetry, by prof. G. L. Craik (3 vols. 1815). The most complete edition of the poet's works is that by Todd (Loud. 8 vols. 1806); but a new edition, with glossary, notes, and life, by J. P. Collier, was published in 1802.