Few great poets were ever so little beholden to predecessors as Spenser. He had before him Chaucer, and near his own time Sackville, who had written with original force in Chaucer’s stanza. There were also the Italians, whom he knew well, their few English followers, and the French poets of the Pléiade. In his _Shepherd’s Calendar_ Spenser imitated the Italian copies of the classic Eclogues, and he translated from the French. Neither he nor any man could live uninfluenced by his time. The notes of the Renaissance are abundantly audible in his work--its love of beauty, its desire for joy, and the melancholy which was natural in men whose ideals were unattainable in a very harsh world, which was never harder than amid the disruption of faith, the violent clash of contending forces, and the unchaining of violent passions, of the sixteenth century. But there might have been all this, and no Spenser. [SN: _His metre._] He is great by what was wholly his own, both in form and spirit. _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ may be called the work of his prentice hand, done when he had not attained complete control of his own vast powers. Yet it is not so far below the impeccable verse of his later years as it is above the level of his immediate predecessors in Elizabeth’s reign. The part of imitation which there is in it is the weakest. What he inherited from nobody was the new melody he imparted to English poetry. It is out of his own genius that he perfected the form in which that melody found its full expression. The Spenserian stanza does not appear in _The Shepherd’s Calendar_; but it had been constructed, and was being used in the earlier cantos of _The Faërie Queen_ at least immediately after the earlier work was finished. It is surely no longer necessary to argue that this form was not imitated from the Italians. The _ottava rima_ and the sonnet may have--indeed must have--helped Spenser with indications, but they did no more. Had he been an imitator he would have done as the Spaniards did,--he would have taken an already finished form, and would have adhered to it slavishly. But he did a very different thing. He constructed a stanza which is to English what the _ottava rima_ is to the Italian. It is just the difference between a successor and a mere follower, that whereas the second toils to reproduce the letter, the first gives a new form to the spirit. The relation in which Spenser stands to the Italians is that he carried on the torch of great poetry, but he lit it of English wood, and bore it to a measure of his own. His sonnet is hardly less independent than his stanza, and all talk of obligation to any model becomes idle indeed when we think of the melody of the Hymns, the _Epithalamium_, and the _Prothalamium_. [SN: _The character of his poetry._]