Our external sources of information are, then, extremely scanty. Fortunately our internal sources are somewhat less meagre. No poet ever more emphatically lived in his poetry than did Spenser. The Muses were, so to speak, his own bosom friends, to whom he opened all his heart. With them he conversed perpetually on the various events of his life; into their ears he poured forth constantly the tale of his joys and his sorrows, of his hopes, his fears, his distresses. He was not one of those poets who can put off themselves in their works, who can forego their own interests and passions, and live for the time an extraneous life. There is an intense personality about all his writings, as in those of Milton and of Wordsworth. In reading them you can never forget the poet in the poem. They directly and fully reflect the poet's own nature and his circumstances. They are, as it were, fine spiritual diaries, refined self- portraitures. Horace's description of his own famous fore-runner, quoted at the head of this memoir, applies excellently to Spenser. On this account the scantiness of our external means of knowing Spenser is perhaps the less to be regretted. Of him it is eminently true that we may know him from his works. His poems are his best biography. In the sketch of his life to be given here his poems shall be our one great authority. Footnotes --------- {1} Compare 'Underneath this sable _hearse_, &c.' {2} Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden. Edinburgh, 1711, p. 225. {3} _Annales_, ed. _Hearne_, iii. 783. {4} _History of Elizabeth, Queen of England._ Ed. 1688, pp. 564, 565. {5} Father {6} _Theatrum Poet. Anglic._, ed. Brydges, 1800, pp. 148, 149. CHAPTER I. 1552-1579. FROM SPENSER'S BIRTH TO THE PUBLICATION OF THE SHEPHEARD'S CALENDAR. Edmund Spenser was born in London in the year 1552, or possibly 1551. For both these statements we have directly or indirectly his own authority. In his _Prothalamion_ he sings of certain swans whom in a vision he saw floating down the river 'Themmes,' that At length they all to mery London came, To mery London, my most kyndly nurse, That to me gave this lifes first native sourse, Though from another place I take my name, An house of auncient fame.