Page:Works of Edmund Spenser - 1857.djvu/24

8 matters, certainly incongruous in the mouths of the rustic heroes, who have been not inaptly styled by Campbell, “parsons in disguise.” The consequence of this obtrusion of Church Polemics into the simplicity of rural affairs has been, that the Eclogues for May, July, and September, are anything but Pastorals. Independent, however of these blemishes, the poem is enriched with many passages of exquisite beauty; and in the Eclogues for January, June, October, and December, the descriptions of nature are minute and luxuriant, and may be cited as among the sweetest specimens of their class, extant in our language. Dryden and Pope have bestowed upon it their most emphatic applause; and the former has not hesitated to place it in the same rank with the writings of Theocritus or Virgil. The novelty of its subject and its style; it being the first poem of the kind published in England, with the exception, perhaps, of Lord Buckhurst’s “Induction and Legend of Henry Duke of Buckingham” (the allegorical pictures of which, in the opinion of Warton, “are so beautifully drawn, that in all probability they contributed to direct, or at least to stimulate, Spenser’s imagination”), excited universal attention; and such was its popularity that, during the author’s life time, it passed through no less than five editions. It is supposed that some political passages in these poems, especially the allusions to Abp. Grindall, in the Eclogue for April, excited the wrath of the great Burghley, the effects of which had no inconsiderable influence on the Poet’s after-life. In vain he distinguished the minister with the most flattering adulation in one of the sonnets prefixed to the Faerie Queene: the mighty Peere remained implacable; and it is doubtless to the loss of this noble’s “grace” that he alludes in the following terse and pregnant lines from Mother Hubberds Tale:

But if the Shepheards Calendar procured for its author a powerful enemy, on the other hand it secured him some no less powerful friends. The poem, partly written at Penshurst, was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, who, from this period to the close of his