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Friendship with Edmund Spenser. 197

Bishop of Bath and Wells, writer of the old comedy, "Gammer Gurton's Needle," and Thomas Preston, who wrote the old tragedy, "Cambyses, King of Persia." In 1576 Spenser left Cambridge to reside in the north of England, perhaps at Hurstwood in Lancashire, and, if his "Shepherd's Calendar" is to be regarded as history, to fall in love with "the widow's daughter of the glen" whom there and elsewhere he calls Rosalind, styling himself Colin Clout and Harvey Hobbinol. By Harvey's advice and on his introduction, Spenser left the north and became an inmate of Leicester House in the autumn of 1578 or not long afterwards.

This was a memorable incident. If Spenser had a useful patron in the Earl of Leicester, he had a far more useful friend in Sidney; and to Sidney the friendship that sprang up between them was, in literary ways, far more serviceable than to Spenser. To it we must mainly attribute all the seriousness that there was in Sidney's work as an author. He had already, however, begun to find amusement in authorship; and at first-to some extent always-the difference in rank between the two caused Spenser to regard himself, doubtless without being so regarded by them, as inferior to Sidney and the other courtiers who welcomed his company. "The two worthy gentlemen, Mr. Sidney and Mr. Dyer," Spenser said in a letter written to Gabriel Harvey on the 16th of October, 1579, “have me, I thank them, in some use of familiarity; of whom and to whom what speech passeth for your credit and estimation I leave yourself to conceive, having always so well

1580]

conceived of my unfeigned affection and good will towards you."

The "some use of familiarity" must have been considerable for at least several months before October, 1579. All through this year, while he was finding both pleasure and annoyance in his attendance on the Queen, trying to act with dignity as a courtier and to show himself a statesman as well, taking a prominent part in the opposition to the Queen's talked-of marriage with the Duke of Anjou long before the date of his famous letter to her on the subject in January, 1580, and having to resent or submit to much rudeness from rivals like the Earl of Oxford, it is certain that Sidney, with Dyer, Greville, and other friends, often sought refreshment in the society of Spenser at Leicester House and elsewhere with perhaps an occasional holiday at Penshurst.

Scarcely any record exists of visits paid by Sidney to Penshurst, and we know of none in which Spenser was his companion there. But there can be no doubt that in the year 1579, while the old house was being enlarged and beautified, he ran down oftener than usual to his father's proper home, though it was rarely tenanted by his father, and that Spenser was frequently there with him before the poet went to Ireland in the autumn of 1580. We see more suggestion of Lancashire than of Kent -from Rosalind's frequent appearance in it down to the dialect it favours-in "The Shepherd's Calendar"; but its many reminiscences of the scenery of Penshurst and the neighbourhood warrant the con

[graphic]

THE MINSTRELS' GALLERY IN THE BARONIAL HALL OF PENSHURST PLACE.

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