Poets, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography; Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599
First, therefore, when ye have in handsome wise
Your selfe attyred, as you can devise,
Then to some Noble-man your selfe applye,
Or other great one in the worldës eye,
That hath a zealous disposition
To God, and so to his religion.
There must thou fashion eke a godly zeale,
Such as no carpers may contrayre reveale;
For each thing fained ought more warie bee.
There thou must walke in sober gravitee,
And seeme as Saintlike as Sainte Radegund:
Fast much, pray oft, looke lowly on the ground,
And unto everie one doo curtesie meeke:
These lookes (nought saying) doo a benefice seeke,
And be thou sure one not to lack or long.
But he is impartial, and points out that there are other ways of
rising--by adopting the fashions of the Court, "facing, and forging, and
scoffing, and crouching to please," and so to "mock out a benefice;" or
else, by compounding with a patron to give him half the profits, and in
the case of a bishopric, to submit to the alienation of its manors to
some powerful favourite, as the Bishop of Salisbury had to surrender
Sherborn to Sir Walter Ralegh. Spenser, in his dedication of _Mother
Hubberd's Tale_ to one of the daughters of Sir John Spencer, Lady
Compton and Monteagle, speaks of it as "long sithence composed in the
raw conceit of youth." But, whatever this may mean, and it was his way
thus to deprecate severe judgments, his allowing the publication of it
at this time, shows, if the work itself did not show it, that he was in
very serious earnest in his bitter sarcasms on the base and evil arts
which brought success at the Court.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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