I don’t know if any of our parish will care to read the _Ecclesiastical Polity_; but if you have courage thereto, you will find in this old master of sound and cumbrous English prose, passages of rare eloquence, and many turns of expression, which for their winning grace, their aptitude, their quality of fastening themselves upon the mind, are not overmatched by those of any Elizabethan writer. His theology is old and rankly conservative; but he shows throughout a beautiful reverence for that all-embracing Law, “whose seat (as he says) is the Bosom of God, and whose voice is the Harmony of the World.”[91] _Edmund Spenser._ As for Edmund Spenser, he was a year older at this date--twenty-five: he had taken his master’s degree at Cambridge and had just returned to London from a visit to the North of England, where he had encountered some fair damsel to whom he had been paying weary and vain suit, and whom he had embalmed in his _Shepherd’s Calendar_ (just then being made ready for the press) under the name of Rosalind. “Ah, faithless Rosalind, and voyd of grace, That art the root of all this ruthful woe [My] teares would make the hardest flint to flow;” and his tears keep a-drip through a great many of those charming eclogues--called the _Shepherd’s Calendar_. Some of the commentators on Spenser have queried--gravely--whether he ever forgot this Rosalind; and whether the occurrence of the name and certain woe-worn words in some madrigal of later years did not show a wound unhealed and bleeding. We are all at liberty to guess, and I am inclined to doubt here. I think he was equal to forgetting this Rosalind before the ink of the _Shepherd’s Calendar_ was fairly dry. He loved dreams and fed on dreams; and I suspect enjoyed the dream of his woe more than he ever suffered from a sting of rebuff.