These verses, which are from Barnabe Googe’s _Epitaph_ on Thomas Phayre, are not bad examples of a kind of metre which seems to come naturally to Englishmen, but their capacity for turning to doggerel is patent. They, with here and there a note which shows that if the writer had had the good fortune to be young after, and not before, _The Shepherd’s Calendar_, he might have contributed to the great body of exquisite Elizabethan songs, make the staple of the verse of the first half of the reign. These men are entitled to their own honour. They rough-harrowed the ground. George Turberville, who was born about 1530 and died about 1594; George Gascoigne, whose dates are 1535 or thereabouts to 1577; and Barnabe Googe, born in 1540, who died in 1594, tried many things; and if they did nothing else, they helped to extend the knowledge of the average Englishman, and to give practice to the language by their translations. The strongest of the three was Gascoigne, who, in addition to his attempt to write a verse satire--_The Steel Glass_--was the author of some pretty occasional poetry, of a translation of Ariosto’s _Gli Suppositi_, stories from Bandello, and a tragedy of Euripides, and who may be said to have begun the writing of critical essays in English by his brief note of Instruction for the construction of English verse, published as a preface to _The Steel Glass_.[61] [SN: _Spenser._] The sincerity with which the best intellects in England were studying poetry, and looking for a poet, helps to explain the instant recognition of Spenser. At this moment the times called for the man, and he came. Edmund Spenser was born in London, probably in 1552, of a Lancashire branch of a very ancient and famous house. His family was poor, and he received his education at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar. He remained at Cambridge from 1569 to 1573, and it is believed that he then spent some time in the north of England with his family before coming to London to seek his fortune. It could be obtained in one way only--by the favour of friends who could secure him a place. That Spenser was resolved to make poetry the chief aim of his life is certain; but he could not live by it at a time when no form of literature, with the exception of the drama, brought certain payment, and even the drama gave but starvation wages. He had to rely on the willingness of powerful patrons to see him provided for because he was a poet. Spenser was not without friends who might have been useful. At Cambridge he had become known to Gabriel Harvey, who, as the older man, a good scholar, and perhaps also as a person of pragmatical self-confidence and indomitable pertinacity, exercised a certain limited influence over him. Harvey introduced Spenser to Leicester and Leicester’s kinsman, Sir Philip Sidney. His undoubted Puritanism was, it may be, in part learnt from the equally undoubted though very different Puritanism of the queen’s favourite. But Leicester did, and