reflection and a serious course of action. But neither of these dangers arises from any calamity in our position. These dangers suggest, as all our circumstances suggest, that we especially need the lessons of our past history, and that as we need them, we may better than others profit by them. The life of a recluse student may be favourable to the mere work of poring over books, or of deciphering manuscripts. It is not the most favourable to the work of learning the toils and struggles of human beings, the Divine drama which is ever unfolding itself before our eyes. We must be alive that we may know that which has lived and does live. But we cannot live merely in the passing instant. That which holds us tied and bound to that instant is death. Our English history, like the history of our own selves, is a message to us concerning that which is, and was, and will be evermore.

VIII.

SPENSER'S "FAERY QUEENE.”1

I AM to speak to you to-night of a very long poem, the longest perhaps in the English language. Few persons probably have read it from beginning to end. There are some who are frightened from reading it at all. I believe it is not only the length which frightens them. They do not know exactly what to make of the title, and they have heard strange rumours about certain hidden meanings in it which they must guess at, and which, after taking great pains, they may perhaps never discover. It may be worth while, they say, for people who have leisure and great sagacity to spend their time in spelling out the conceits of an old author. There may be a certain pleasure in hitting the mark, and some, perhaps, even in sending the arrows which fall most wide of it. But people who are busy, and can only take up a poem now and then for an evening's entertainment, can hardly be expected to give themselves this trouble. They would rather find an author who

1 Delivered at the Working Men's College, about 1864.

will tell them out plainly what he wishes them to understand.

I am sorry that an opinion of this kind should prevail. For I am sure Spenser's "Faery Queene" is good reading for all kinds of people, especially for all people born on this English soil. Whatever its title may seem to say, it is not a poem about some imaginary unknown world, but about the world in which you and I are dwelling. It was written by an Englishman who lived in the most English reign in our history, and whose heart was as full as any man's ever was of English feelings and sympathies. And it is a book about those things in which all Englishmen, and all men, are interested equally. Edmund Spenser had some friends among courtiers and among learned men. But he did not, on the whole, succeed well at Court, and it is not among learned people that he has been the greatest favourite. In fact, till courtiers and scholars find out that the greatest treasure, the highest glory, they have is that which they have in common with every clown, they never will understand rightly any great poet; they will never learn what he has done to teach them.

Edmund Spenser belongs to us who live now in London. He was born in East Smithfield in 1553; he died in King Street, Westminster, in 1598. He may have been connected with high families; but he seems to have been poor; for when he was sixteen he went to Pembroke Hall, at Cambridge, as a sizar-that is, as a poor student.

He was not happy, apparently, at

Cambridge; though he owed to it at least one good friend, and he must have brought away from it some good knowledge. When he left it he went as a private tutor into the North; then he came to London, and became acquainted with one of the noblest men of the time, Sir Philip Sidney. There are some stories told to explain how they found each other out. I do not think they are worth record; we may be sure that men who are meant to help each other, and love each other, will find each other out in some way. Sidney's life would have been altogether different without Spenser, and Spenser's without Sidney; so we need not fancy that the poet had to wait at the great man's door, while he was looking over part of the "Faery Queene," before he learnt that he was worth more than all the gold that Sidney or anyone else had to give him. Sir Walter Raleigh, who had not perhaps as thoroughly pure a spirit as Sidney, but who had wider thoughts, a more daring love of enterprise, and, I should think, a more real understanding of poetry than he had, was also one of Spenser's dearest friends. Sidney and Raleigh believed, like wise men as they were, that one who could sing beautiful songs was not at all less fitted for civil employment on that account-would probably have more sympathy and fellowship with human beings, than those who had been brought up amidst red tape; and that, if he had a call for it, he would have just as much aptitude for business as any mere drudge. Perhaps through the influence of the Earl of Leicester, Sidney's uncle, Spenser was sent to Ireland

He

as Secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton. He proved that his friends were sound in their judgment of him by writing the best "View of the State of Ireland,” and of the condition of the people which, so far as I know, any Irish Secretary ever wrote. He married in Ireland, and worked away in his retirement at many of his minor poems, and at his great book, "The Faery Queene." Long as that poem is, it is incomplete, and the story goes that six books out of it were lost by Spenser's servant as he was crossing from Ireland. That, perhaps, was not the case; and if it was, we may not have so much cause for regret. Spenser's fame may not have suffered so much as we might at first fancy. may have spoken all he was meant to speak in the earlier books. The lost books may have been but the leavings of his mind; they might not have helped us to understand him or ourselves better. I do not know, but I think we sometimes mourn rather overmuch about the works that great men intended to write and did not write, as well as about those that they did and that have perished. Even when they are histories, the gaps in our information, which we think so deplorable, may be partly filled up by an earnest study of the hints and memorials which remain to us. If more was told us about what has happened, we might be less diligent in comparing one scrap with another, and so discovering what really did happen. And when it is not history, but the thoughts and creations of men's minds we have been deprived of, we may reflect that every man can but give us fragments of his mind, and cannot by any