Page:Works of Edmund Spenser - 1857.djvu/34

18 Ireland. The Munster insurgents were headed by James Fitzthomas Geraldine, titular Earl of Desmond, to whose family the castle and estates of Kilcolman had be longed. Spenser and his family fled. One of his children was left behind, and perished in the ruins of his dwelling, which had been fired by the rebels.

Unnerved by these calamities, turning from the scene of former happiness, he made his way to London, where, after a fruitless struggle against poverty and sickness, in a lodging house in King-street, Westminster, died the poet of the Faerie Queene! He was buried in the abbey, near the tomb of Chaucer, with a splendid funeral, at the expense of the Earl of Essex. The pall was borne by poets; and with a true poetic feeling, tributary verses by the most illustrious of his contemporaries, with the pens that wrote them, were thrown into his grave. About thirty years after his death Anne Countess of Dorset erected a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey. It was executed by Stone, at a cost of forty pounds.

In Camden’s little tract entitled, “Reges, Reginæ, Nobiles, et alii in Ecclesia Collegiata B. Petri Westmonasterii sepulti,” 1606, 4 to., we find the following notice of this monument, which was defaced by the Puritans during the civil wars, and the present one erected or restored in 1778:—

“Edmundus Spencer Londinensis, Anglicorum Poetarum nostri seculi facile princeps quod ejus poemata faventi bus Musis et victuro genio conscripta comprobant. Obiit immatura morte anno salutis 1598, et prope Galfredum Chauccrum conditur qui fœlicissmè poesin Anglicis literis primus illustravit. In quem hæc scripta sunt Epitaphia:—

The inscription on the restored monument is thus: “Heare lyes (expecting the second comminge of our Saviour Jesus) the body of Edmond Spenser, the Prince of Poets in his tyme, whose divine spirit needs noe othir witnesse then the works which he left behinde him. He was borne in London, in the yeare 1553, and died in the yeare 1598.”

His contemporaries, by whom he had never been addressed without the epithet ‘great,’ or ‘learned,’ vied with each other in Elegiac tributes to his memory; and the most eminent of our later poets have successively confessed their obligations to him. Milton acknowledged to Dryden that Spenser was his master, and Dryden has said of him, “no man was ever born with a greater genius, or had more knowledge to support it.” But the enumeration of all the eulogies which gratitude or admiration has showered upon him, would too much amplify our sketch, which has already extended beyond the prescribed limit. In concluding these “Observations,” the writer has only to remark, that the quotations introduced have been selected rather to illustrate the particular subject under discussion, than as specimens of Spenser’s “Beauties,” a just appreciation of which can only be acquired by an attentive study of his writings.