The plan of the poem, neglecting the unities of an epic, is like that of a general history, rambling and desultory, or like the transformations of a fairy tale, as it is: his descriptions are gorgeous, his verse exceedingly melodious, and his management of it very graceful. The Gerusalemme Liberata of Tasso appeared while he was writing the Faery Queene, and he imitated portions of that great epic in his own, but his imitations are finer than the original. HIS OTHER WORKS.--His other works need not detain us: Hymns in honor of Love and Beauty, Prothalamion, and Epithalamion, Mother Hubbard's Tale, Amoretti or Sonnets, The Tears of the Muses or Brittain's Ida, are little read at the present day. His Astrophel is a tender "pastoral elegie" upon the death of the most noble and valorous knight, Sir Philip Sidney; and is better known for its subject than for itself. This was a favorite theme of the friendly and sensitive poet; he has also written several elegies and æglogues in honor of Sidney. SPENSER'S FATE.--The fate of Spenser is a commentary upon courtiership, even in the reign of Elizabeth, the Faery Queene. Her requital of his adoration was an annual pension of fifty pounds, and the ruined castle and unprofitable estate of Kilcolman in Ireland, among a half-savage population, in a period of insurrections and massacres, with the requirement that he should reside upon his grant. An occasional visit from Raleigh, then a captain in the army, a rambler along the banks of the picturesque Mulla, and the composition and arrangement of the great poem with the suggestions of his friend, were at once his labors and his only recreations. He sighed after the court, and considered himself as hardly used by the queen. At length an insurrection broke out, and his home was set on fire: he fled from his flaming castle, and in the confusion his infant child was left behind and burned to death. A few months after, he died in London, on January 16, 1598-9, broken-hearted and poor, at an humble tavern, in King Street. Buried at the expense of the Earl of Essex, Ann Countess of Dorset bore the expense of his monument in Westminster Abbey, in gratitude for his noble championship of woman. Upon that are inscribed these words: _Anglorum poetarum nostri seculi facile princeps_--truer words, great as is the praise, than are usually found in monumental inscriptions. Whatever our estimate of Spenser, he must be regarded as the truest literary exponent and representative of the age of Elizabeth, almost as much her biographer as Miss Strickland, and her historian as Hume: indeed, neither biographer nor historian could venture to draw the lineaments of her character without having recourse to Spenser and his literary contemporaries. OTHER WRITERS OF THE AGE OF SPENSER.