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One who had caught a glimpse of the shining yet solemn eyes of the youth, as he walked home, would wonder no longer that he should talk as he did so sedately, yet so poetically so long windedly, if you like, yet so sensibly even wisely. Lady Florimel lay on the sand, and sought again to read the "Faerie Queene."
He returned to Ireland to commemorate his marriage in Sonnets and the most beautiful of bridal songs, and to complete the "Faerie Queen" amongst love and poverty and troubles from his Irish neighbours. But these troubles soon took a graver form. In 1599 Ireland broke into revolt, and the poet escaped from his burning house to fly to England, and to die broken-hearted in an inn at Westminster.
It has been said that to read a contemporary's account of "Raleigh's adventures with the Irish chieftains, his challenges and single combats, his escapes at fords and woods, is like reading bits of the Faerie Queene in prose." In 1598 the Irish, infuriated by the invasion of their country and the seizure of their lands, set fire to Spenser's castle.
Nobody particular, I should think. Wasn't it a pity they didn't have Lady Langham for the Faerie Queen? I do call it absurd the way Sir Cyril Meres has put that pert, insignificant cousin of his forward in quite half the pictures and when he might have had Maud Langham." Goring threw himself back in his chair and laughed his quite loud laugh. "'A mad world, my masters," he quoted.
There were excellent books in the house, Shakespeare and Milton, of course, but also Pope's "Iliad," Thomson's "Seasons," the "Spectator," "Pilgrim's Progress," and the "Faerie Queene," and the time had now come when these would be serviceable to him.
It is recollected that, by the time he was fourteen, he had read Clarendon, Froissart, and Rousseau, besides "The Newgate Calendar," a week-day favorite; and he may be said to have begun youth already well versed in good English books, and with the habit and taste of literary pleasure established as a natural part of life. "The Faerie Queene" was the first book he bought with his own money.
The English language never changed so much after the time of Chaucer and Wyclif as it had done before. The next really great English poet, Edmund Spenser, who wrote his wonderful poem, "The Faerie Queene," in the days of Queen Elizabeth, invented a great many new words. Some of these were seldom or never used afterwards, but some became ordinary English words.
Edmund Spenser, the poet of The Faerie Queene, writing in 1596, bears this striking testimony to the Irish horse-soldier and inferentially to the Irish horse: "I have hearde some greate warriours say, that, in all the services which they had seene abroade in forrayne countreys, they never sawe a more comely horseman than the Irish man, nor that cometh on more bravely in his charge."
Our own Spenser has imbibed the spirit of some of its most beautiful passages; and several striking coincidences between his Faerie Queen and the Rinaldo can be traced, particularly in the account of the lion tamed by Clarillo, and the well-known incident of Una and the lion in Spenser.
Spenser was at work on his Faerie Queene, alongside his preoccupation with state business, for nearly twenty years. Pope was twelve years translating Homer, and I think there is little doubt that Gray's Elegy owes much of its staying power to the Horatian deliberation with which Gray polished and repolished it through eight years.
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