We call the whole group of authors who sprang up at this time the Elizabethans, after the name of the Queen in whose reign they lived and wrote.  And to those of us who know even a very little of the time, the word calls up a brilliant vision.  Great names come crowding to our minds, names of poets, dramatists, historians, philosophers, divines.  It would be impossible to tell of all in this book, so we must choose the greatest from the noble array.  And foremost among them comes Edmund Spenser, for “the glory of the new literature broke in England with Edmund Spenser."*

J.  R. Green, History of English People.

If we could stand aside, as it were, and take a wide view of all our early literature, it would seem as if the names of Chaucer and Spenser stood out above all others like great mountains.  The others are valleys between.  They are pleasant fields in which to wander, in which to gather flowers, not landmarks for all the world like Chaucer and Spenser.  And although it is easier and safer for children to wander in the meadows and gather meadow flowers, they still may look up to the mountains and hope to climb them some day.

Edmund Spenser was born in London in 1552, and was the son of a poor clothworker or tailor.  He went to school at the Merchant Taylors’ School, which had then been newly founded.  That his father was very poor we know, for Edmund Spenser’s name appears among “certain poor scholars of the schools about London” who received money and clothes from a fund left by a rich man to help poor children at school.

When he was about seventeen Edmund went to Cambridge, receiving for his journey a sum of ten shillings from the fund from which he had already received help at school.  He entered college as a sizar, that is, in return for doing the work of a servant he received free board and lodging in his college.  A sizar’s life was not always a happy one, for many of the other scholars or gentlemen commoners looked down upon them because of their poverty.  And this poverty they could not hide, for the sizars were obliged to wear a different cap and gown from that of the gentlemen commoners.

But of how Spenser fared at college we know nothing, except that he was often ill and that he made two lifelong friends.  That he loved his university, however, we learn from his poems, when he tenderly speaks of “my mother Cambridge."* When he left college Spenser was twenty-three.  He was poor and, it would seem, ill, so he did not return to London, but went to live with relatives in the country in Lancashire.  And there about “the wasteful woods and forest wide"** he wandered, gathering new life and strength, taking all a poet’s joy in the beauty and the freedom of a country life, “for ylike to me was liberty and life,"** he says.  And here among the pleasant woods he met a fair lady named Rosalind, “the widow’s daughter of the glen."***

Faery Queen, book IV canto xi. *Shepherd’s Calendar, December ***The same, April.