which is carrying cruelty very far. February is occupied with a rustic dispute between youth and age: the metre is one of the measures of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel":-- Who will not suffer the stormy time, Where will he live tyll the lustry prime? (_Shepherd's Calendar_, Feb., 11. 15, 16.) They burn'd the chapel for very rage And cursed Lord Cranstoun's Goblin-page. (_Lay of the Last Minstrel_, C. II., Stanza, 33). March, with the dialogue of Willie and Thomalin about the strange bird, Love, is adapted from the Greek of Bion in a most pleasant manner, and April contains a melodious song of fair Eliza, a Maiden Queen; which probably procured Spenser's presentation to Elizabeth. The great variety of melodious verse of which Spenser was already a perfect master is, for us, perhaps the chief merit of his pastorals. Through life Spenser keeps up the shepherd's mask, and Raleigh, in his verse, is "The Shepherd of Ocean". The rival Protestant and Catholic clergy also appear as shepherds, good or bad, while in another eclogue the perfect poet, Cuddie, complains, like Theocritus, of public indifference, and is advised to sing of redoubted knights: and, indeed, Spenser had already conceived the idea of his knightly romantic poem "The Faery Queen," and was ambitious to excel his model, Ariosto. In this Harvey discouraged him; "Hobgoblin" must not "run away with the garland from Apollo". Fortunately Spenser followed his own genius, and, though he dallied with the fashion for wedding Greek measures to English words, as in the English hexameters of Watson and Harvey, he dropped many projects at which he had glanced, and was constant to his "Faery Queen". The manuscript of that great poem must have been the companion of Spenser in many strange wanderings, In savage soil far from Parnassus Mount, as he says. He was attached, as we have seen, in 1578, to the household of Leicester, and may have gone on a mission of his to France. To be patronized by Leicester was to risk incurring the enmity of Burleigh. The long rivalry between Elizabeth's brilliant and wavering favourite--who once so nearly brought her into a plight almost as bad as that of Mary Stuart--and her sagacious counsellor, Sir William Cecil (Lord Burleigh)--who now and again saved his Queen "as by fire"--might have furnished Spenser with a high theme for a poetic allegory. But chance had made him Leicester's man, not Burleigh's man, so that he never won the fortune for which he sought. Who, indeed, would seek fortune in Ireland? Spenser did, accompanying Lord Grey of Wilton to an isle more than commonly distressful.