The honour of the noble familie Of which I meanest boast myself to be. For the particular branch of the Spencer or Spenser family--one branch wrote the name with _s_, another with _c_--to which the poet belonged, it has been well suggested that it was that settled in East Lancashire in the neighbourhood of Pendle Forest. It is known on the authority of his friend Kirke, whom we shall mention again presently, that Spenser retired to the North after leaving Cambridge; traces of a Northern dialect appear in the _Shepheardes Calendar_; the Christian name Edmund is shown by the parish registers to have been a favourite with one part of the Lancashire branch--with that located near Filley Close, three miles north of Hurstwood, near Burnley. Spenser then was born in London, probably in East Smithfield, about a year before those hideous Marian fires began to blaze in West Smithfield. He had at least one sister, and probably at least one brother. His memory would begin to be retentive about the time of Queen Elizabeth's accession. Of his great contemporaries, with most of whom he was to be brought eventually into contact, Raleigh was born at Hayes in Devonshire in the same year with him, Camden in Old Bailey in 1551, Hooker near Exeter in or about 1553, Sidney at Penshurst in 1554, Bacon at York House in the West Strand, 1561, Shakspere at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, Robert Devereux, afterwards second earl of Essex, in 1567. The next assured fact concerning Spenser is that he was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School, then just founded. This we learn from an entry in 'The Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell, Esq.,' of Reade Hall, Lancashire, brother of Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul's. In an accompt of sums 'geven to poor schollers of dyvers gramare scholles' we find Xs. given, April 28, 1569, to 'Edmond Spensore Scholler of the Merchante Tayler Scholl;' and the identification is established by the occasion being described as 'his gowinge to Penbrocke Hall in Chambridge,' for we know that the future poet was admitted a Sizar of Pembroke College, then styled Hall, Cambridge, in 1569. Thus we may fairly conclude that Spenser was not only London born but London bred, though he may have from time to time sojourned with relatives and connections in Lancashire{2} before his undergraduateship, as well as after. Thus a conjecture of Mr. Collier's may confidently be discarded, who in the muster-book of a hundred in Warwickshire has noted the record of one Edmund Spenser as living in 1569 at Kingsbury, and conjectures that this was the poet's father, and that perhaps the poet spent his youth in the same county with Shakspere. It may be much doubted whether it is a just assumption that every Edmund Spenser that is in any way or anywhere mentioned in the Elizabethan era was either the poet or his father. Nor, should it be allowed that the Spenser of Kingsbury was indeed the poet's father, could we reasonably indulge in any