The publication of the first parts of _The Faery Queen_ (1590) raised Spenser to the foremost place in English letters. He was made poet-laureate, and used every influence of patrons and of literary success to the end that he be allowed to remain in London, but the queen was flint-hearted, insisting that he must give up his estate or occupy it. So he returned sorrowfully to "exile," and wrote three more books of _The Faery Queen_. To his other offices was added that of sheriff of County Cork, an adventurous office for any man even in times of peace, and for a poet, in a time of turmoil, an invitation to disaster. Presently another rebellion broke out, Kilcolman castle was burned, and the poet's family barely escaped with their lives. It was said by Ben Jonson that one of Spenser's children and some parts of _The Faery Queen_ perished in the fire, but the truth of the saying has not been established. Soon after this experience, which crushed the poet's spirit, he was ordered on official business to London, and died on the journey in 1599. As he was buried beside Chaucer, in Westminster Abbey, poets were seen casting memorial verses and the pens that had written them into his tomb. [Sidenote: CHARACTER] In character Spenser was unfitted either for the intrigues among Elizabeth's favorites or for the more desperate scenes amid which his Lot was cast. Unlike his friend Raleigh, who was a man of action, Spenser was essentially a dreamer, and except in Cambridge he seems never to have felt at home. His criticism of the age as barren and hopeless, and the melancholy of the greater part of his work, indicate that for him, at least, the great Elizabethan times were "out of joint." The world, which thinks of Spenser as a great poet, has forgotten that he thought of himself as a disappointed man. WORKS OF SPENSER. The poems of Spenser may be conveniently grouped in three classes. In the first are the pastorals of _The Shepherd's Calendar_, in which he reflects some of the poetical fashions of his age. In the second are the allegories of _The Faery Queen_, in which he pictures the state of England as a struggle between good and evil. In the third class are his occasional poems of friendship and love, such as the _Amoretti_. All his works are alike musical, and all remote from ordinary life, like the eerie music of a wind harp. [Sidenote: SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR] _The Shepherd's Calendar_ (1579) is famous as the poem which announced that a successor to Chaucer had at last appeared in England. It is an amateurish work in which Spenser tried various meters; and to analyze it is to discover two discordant elements, which we may call fashionable poetry and puritanic preaching. Let us understand these elements clearly, for apart from them the _Calendar_ is a meaningless work.