Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/55

Rh To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares; To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs, To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."

"The Ruins of Rome" by Bellay, are thirty-three sonnets translated from the French, of no particular merit. "Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly," is an allegory, the drift of which at present is not very apparent. "Visions of the World's Vanity," and a few sonnets completed the list of this collection. Ponsonby, in the address to the reader prefixed to his volume, observes that finding the "Faëry Queen" had found a favourable passage among them, for the better increase and accomplishment of their delight, he had collected such small poems of the same author, as he had heard were dispersed abroad in sundry hands, and refers to other poems in addition to those enumerated as lost. Those, however, which were published, and the titles of others already recapitulated, to which frequent allusions were made in the poet's correspondence, exhibit in their amount alone a rare industry, and an unparalleled facility of composition.

We may assume—and most of the incidents in the biography of Spenser are but assumptions, gleaned from incidental notices of himself in his works—that he now remained in England for a year or two. In February, 1591, Elizabeth conferred on him a grant of £50 a-year. The discovery of this instrument in the Chapel of the Rolls has induced his biographers to class Spenser with the Poets-Laureate. He held, however, a sort of intermediate position between the old University Graduates, and the subsequent tenants of a legally constituted office. In January of the following year he published his "Daphnaida," an elegy on the death of Mrs. Arthur Gorges, and soon afterwards he returned to Ireland. Though we fail now to trace his proceedings from his writings, we have some