Several causes have been suggested to account for this disfavour. The popular tradition was pleased to explain it by making Burghley the ideal dullard who has no soul for poetry--to whom one copy of verses is very much as good as another, and no copy good for anything. It delighted to bring this commonplace gross-minded person into opposition with one of the most spiritual of geniuses. In this myth Spenser represents mind, Burghley matter. But there is no justification in facts for this tradition. It may be that the Lord Treasurer was not endowed with a high intellectual nature; but he was far too wise in his generation not to pretend a virtue if he had it not, when circumstances called for anything of the sort. When the Queen patronized literature, we may be sure Lord Burghley was too discreet to disparage and oppress it. Another solution refers to Burghley's Puritanism as the cause of the misunderstanding; but, as Spenser too inclined that way, this is inadequate. Probably, as Todd and others have thought, what alienated his Lordship at first was Spenser's connection with Leicester; what subsequently aggravated the estrangement was his friendship with Essex. Footnotes --------- {1} See Peter Cunningham's _Introduction to Extracts from Accounts of the Revels at Court_. (Shakspeare Society.) {2} It may be suggested that what are called the archaisms of Spenser's style may be _in part_ due to the author's long residence in the country with one of the older forms of the language spoken all round him and spoken by him, in fact his vernacular. I say _in part_, because of course his much study of Chaucer must be taken into account. But, as Mr. Richard Morris has remarked to me, he could not have drawn from Chaucer those forms and words of a _northern_ dialect which appear in the _Calendar_. {3} These are given in the Appendix to the present work. {4} This supposed description of his first love was written probably during the courtship, which ended, as we shall see, in his marriage. The First Love is said to be portrayed in cant. vii., the Last in cant. x. of book vi. of the _Faerie Queene_. But this identification of Rosalind and Mirabilla is, after all, but a conjecture, and is not be accepted as gospel. {5} See this work amongst Mr. Arber's excellent _English Reprints_. {6} _Ancient Critical Essays_, ed. Hazlewood, 1815, pp. 259, 260. CHAPTER II. 1580-1589.