the sixteenth century, and one very frequently adopted at that time. This text is treated in a manner characteristic of the age. It is exemplified by a series of visions. The poet represents himself as seeing at Verulam an apparition of a woman weeping over the decay of that ancient town. This woman stands for the town itself. Of its whilome glories, she says,· after a vain recounting of them, They all are gone and with them is gone, Ne ought to me remaines, but to lament My long decay. No one, she continues, weeps with her, no one remembers her, Save one that maugre fortunes injurie And times decay, and enuies cruell tort Hath writ my record in true seeming sort. Cambden the nourice of antiquitie, And lanterne unto late succeeding age, To see the light of simple veritie Buried in ruines, through the great outrage Of her owne people, led with warlike rage, Cambden, though time all moniments obscure, Yet thy just labours ever shall endure. Then she rebukes herself for these selfish moanings by calling to mind how far from solitary she is in her desolation. She recalls to mind the great ones of the land who have lately fallen--Leicester, and Warwick, and Sidney--and wonders no longer at her own ruin. Is not _Transit Gloria_ the lesson taught everywhere? Then other visions and emblems of instability are seen, some of them not darkly suggesting that what passes away from earth and apparently ends may perhaps be glorified elsewhere. The second of these collected poems--_The Teares of the Muses_--dedicated, as we have seen, to one of the poet's fair cousins, the Lady Strange, deplores the general intellectual condition of the time. It is doubtful whether Spenser fully conceived what a brilliant literary age was beginning about the year 1590. Perhaps his long absence in Ireland, the death of Sidney who was the great hope of England Spenser knew, the ecclesiastical controversies raging when he revisited England, may partly account for his despondent tone with reference to literature. He introduces each Muse weeping for the neglect and contempt suffered by her respective province. He who describes these tears was himself destined to dry them; and Shakspere, who, if anyone, was to make the faces of the Muses blithe and bright, was now rapidly approaching his prime. There can be little doubt that at a later time Spenser was acquainted with Shakspere; for Spenser was an intimate friend of the Earl of Essex; Shakspere was an intimate friend of the Earl of Southampton, who was one of the most attached friends of that Earl of Essex. And a personal acquaintance with Shakspere may have been one of the most memorable events of Spenser's visit to London in 1589. We would gladly think that Thalia in the _Teares of the Muses_ refers in the following passage to Shakspere: the comic stage, she says, is degraded,