Passing to the ‘September’ we find an eclogue of the ‘wise shepherd’ type.  It is composed in the rough accentual metre, and opens with a couplet which roused the ire of Dr. Johnson: 

    Diggon Davie!  I bidde her god day;
    Or Diggon her is, or I missaye.

Diggon is a shepherd, who, in hope of gain, drove his flock into a far country, and coming home the poorer, relates to Hobbinol the evil ways of foreign shepherds among whom,

       playnely to speake of shepheards most what,
    Badde is the best.

The ‘October’ eclogue belongs to the stanzaic group, and consists of a dialogue on the subject of poetry between the shepherds Piers and Cuddie.  It is one of the most imaginative of the series, and in it Spenser has refashioned time-honoured themes with more conspicuous taste than elsewhere.  The old complaint for the neglect of poetry acquires new life through the dramatic contrast of the two characters in which opposite sides of the poetic temperament are revealed.  In Cuddie we have a poet for whom the prize is more than the praise[93], whose inspiration is cramped because of the indifference of a worldly court and society.  Things were not always so—­

    But ah!  Mecaenas is yclad in claye,
    And great Augustus long ygoe is dead,
    And all the worthies liggen wrapt in leade,
    That matter made for Poets on to play.

And in the same strain he laments over what might have been his song: 

    Thou kenst not, Percie, howe the ryme should rage,
    O! if my temples were distaind with wine,
    And girt with girlonds of wild Yvie twine,
    How I could reare the Muse on stately stage,
    And teache her tread aloft in buskin fine,
    With queint Bellona in her equipage!

Reading these words to-day they may well seem to us the charter of the new age of England’s song; and the effect is rendered all the more striking by the rhythm of the last line with its prophecy of Marlowe and mighty music to come.  Piers, on the other hand, though with less poetic rage, is a truer idealist, and approaches the high things of poetry more reverentially than his Bacchic comrade.  When Cuddie, acknowledging his own unworthiness, adds: 

    For Colin fittes such famous flight to scanne;
    He, were he not with love so ill bedight,
    Would mount as high, and sing as soote as Swanne;

Piers breaks out in words fitting the poet of the Hymnes: 

    Ah, fon! for love doth teach him climbe so hie,
    And lyftes him up out of the loathsome myre.

And throughout this high discourse the homely names of Piers and Cuddie seem somehow more appropriate, or at least touch us more nearly, than Mantuan’s Sylvanus and Candidus, as if, in spite of all Spenser owes to foreign models, he were yet conscious of a latent power of simple native inspiration, capable, when once fully awakened, of standing up naked and unshamed in the presence of Italy and Greece.  One might well question whether there is not more of the true spirit of prophecy in this poem of Spenser’s than ever went to the composition of Vergil’s Pollio.