Respecting Spenser’s private character, conversation and manners, his contemporaries leave us nearly in the dark. We know that Burleigh was his enemy, that Sidney and Raleigh were his friends: and from the dignity of sentiment and moral tendency prevailing throughout his works, we may reasonably infer that his virtue was not unworthy of his genius. Milton speaks of him as “our sage and serious poet, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.” ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar,’ the first of Spenser’s works in print, is generally said to have come out in 1579. It is a series of pastorals, formed on no uniform plan, but lowered to the standard supposed to be appropriate to that style of composition. But the rustic language of these pieces renders them so utterly untunable to a modern ear, that what obtained the applause of Sidney would not have saved the author’s name from oblivion, had it not been borne up to imperishable fame by the splendour of the ‘Faery Queene,’ the three first books of which were published in 1590. Six years afterwards three other books came out; and after his death two other cantos, and the beginning of a third. The poem, therefore, exists as a fragment: there is a traditionary story that he had completed his design in twelve books, as was his avowed intention; but that the last six books were lost by a servant who had the charge of bringing them over to England. Yet, unfinished as the poem is, any one canto has merit and beauties enough to have secured its author’s fame. In 1591 a quarto volume was published, containing the following nine pieces:—‘The Ruines of Time;’ ‘The Tears of the Muses;’ ‘Virgil’s Gnat;’ ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale;’ ‘Ruines of Rome;’ ‘Muiopotmos;’ ‘Visions of the World’s Vanitie;’ ‘Bellay’s Visions;’ ‘Petrarche’s Visions.’ ‘Daphnaida,’ published in 1592, was dedicated to the Marchioness of Northampton, on the death of her niece, Douglas Howard. The pastoral elegy of ‘Astrophel’ was devoted wholly to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney, and inscribed to Lady Essex. To enter on the subject of his Sonnets, &c. &c. would carry us far beyond our prescribed limits.