Part 4

Looking round over this stripped and lonely landscape, over the "looming flats," over the dark moorland hills that slumber to the north and east, and then far away to more distant but equally sterile mountain ranges, a strange feeling crept over me of the force of events which could compel, nay, make it desirable for the most imaginative spirit of the age, next to Shakspeare, to quit the British capital, the wit and intelligence of Elizabeth's court, to sit down in this wilderness, and in the face of savage and exasperated foes, the poetical eremite, the exile of necessity. But, perhaps, the place then was not so shorn of all embellishment as now. The writer I have quoted seems to imagine that Spenser, by the sheer force of fancy, not only peopled this waste with fauns and nymphs, but clothed it with trees, and other charms of nature. But we must remember that since then, ages of devastation, of desertion, and of an exhausting system, have gone over this country. Then this castle stood fair and complete, and no doubt had its due embellishment and garniture of woodland trees. The green alder not only overhung the Mulla, but this lake very likely, and a pleasure bark might then add its grace and its life to the view from the castle windows. Todd calls it "the _woody_ Kilcolman," on what authority I know not, and supposes that Spenser calls his first-born son Sylvanus on that account, as its heir. Here he spent twelve years, and, from every thing that we can learn from his poetry, to his own great satisfaction. We can not suppose, therefore, that he found the place without some native charms, far less that he left it without those which planting and cultivation could give it. As Sir Walter Raleigh planted and embellished his estate at Youghal with laurels and other evergreens, there is little doubt that Spenser would do the same here. He would naturally feel a lively and active interest in raising that place and estate, which was to be the family seat of his children, to as high a degree of beauty and amenity as possible. Though busily engaged on his great poem, the Faërie Queene, there is evidence that he was also an active and clever man of business; so much so, that Queen Elizabeth, in preference to all those more aristocratic and more largely land-endowed gentlemen, who were settled with him on the plantations of Munster, had, the very year of his expulsion hence by the Irish rebels, named him to fill the office of sheriff of the county of Cork. That he asserted his rights, appears from a document published by Mr. Hardiman, in his Irish Minstrelsy, showing that he had a dispute with his neighbor, Lord Roche, about some lands, in which, by petitions to the Lord-chancellor of Ireland, it appeared that Edmund Spenser had made forcible claim on these plow-lands at Ballingerath, dispossessed the said Lord Roche, had made great waste of the wood, and appropriated the corn growing on the estate. And the decision was given against Spenser. Spenser was, therefore, evidently quite alive to the value of property.

If we look at what Doneraile is, a perfect paradise of glorious woods, we may imagine what Kilcolman would have been if, instead of being laid waste with fire and sword by the Irish kerns, and left to become a mere expanse of Irish rack-rent farms and potato grounds, it had been carefully planted, cultivated, and embellished, as the estate of the descendants of one of the proudest names of England.

As it is, it stands one more lonely and scathed testimony to the evil fortunes of poets:

"The poets who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight, by heavenly lays!"

yet who, themselves, of all men, are still shown by a wise Providence to be "pilgrims and sojourners on the earth, having no abiding city" in it. Their souls have a heaven-aspiring tendency. They can not grasp the earth; it escapes from their hold, and they leave behind them, not castles and domains, but golden foot-prints, which, whoever follows, finds them ever and ever leading him upward to the immortal regions.

"For a rich guerdon waits on minds that dare, If aught be in them of immortal seed, And reason governs that audacious flight Which heavenward they direct."--_Wordsworth._

In no situations do we so much as in such as these recall the truth uttered by the meditative poet just quoted:

"High is our calling, friend! Creative art-- Whether the instrument of words she use. Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues, Demands the service of a mind and heart, Though sensitive, yet, in their weakest part, Heroically fashioned--to infuse Faith in the whispers of the lonely muse, While the whole world seems adverse to desert. And oh! when nature sinks, as oft she may, Through long-lived pressure of obscure distress, Still to be strenuous for the bright reward, And in the soul admit of no decay, Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness-- Great is the glory, for the strife is hard."

Let us, then, at this moment, rather endeavor to look at the happiness which Spenser enjoyed here for ten bright years, than at the melancholy _finale_. Here he worked busily and blissfully at his great poem. Forms of glory, of high valor and virtue, of female beauty and goodness, floated richly through his mind. The imperial Gloriana, the heavenly Una,

"Whose angel face, As the great eye of Heaven, shinéd bright, And made a sunshine in the shady place;"

the sweet Belphoebe, the gallant Britomart, and the brave troop of knights, Arthur the magnanimous, the Red-Cross Knight, the holy and hardly-tried, the just Artegall, and all their triumphs over Archimagos, false Duessas, and the might of dragon natures. This was a life, a labor which clothed the ground with golden flowers, made heaven look forth from between the clouds and the mountain tops, and songs of glory wake on the winds that swept past his towers. Here he accomplished and saw given to the world half his great work--a whole, and an immortal whole as it regarded his fame and great mission in the world--to breathe lofty and unselfish thoughts into the souls of men; to make truth, purity, and high principle the objects of desire.

Here, too, he married the woman of his heart, chosen on the principle of his poetry, not for her lands, but for her beauty and her goodness. Nothing is known of her, not even her name, except that it was Elizabeth, that she was eminently beautiful, and of low degree. Some conjecture her to be of Cork, and a merchant's daughter, but Spenser himself says she was a country lass. Thus, in the Faërie Queene:

"Such were these goddesses which you did see: But that _fourth maid_, which there amid them traced Who can aread what creature may she bee; Whether a creature, or a goddess graced With heavenly gifts from heaven first enraced! But whatso sure she was, she worthy was To be the fourth with these three other placed: Yet was she certes but a country lasse; Yet she all other country lasses far did passe.

So far, as doth the daughter of the day All other lesser lights in light excell: So far doth she in beautiful array Above all other lasses bear the bell: Ne less in virtue that beseemes her well Doth she exceede the rest of all her race; For which the Graces that there wont to dwell Have for more honor brought her to this place, And gracéd her so much to be another Grace.

Another Grace she well deserves to be, In whom so many graces gathered are, Excelling much the mean of her degree; Divine resemblance, beauty sovereign rare, Firm chastity, that spight no blemish dare; All which she with such courtesie doth grace That all her peres can not with her compare, But quite are dimméd when she is in place; She made me often pipe, and now to pipe apace.

Sunne of the world, great glory of the sky, That all the earth doth lighten with thy rayes, Great Gloriana, greatest majesty, Pardon thy shepherd, 'mongst so many lays As he hath sung of thee in all his days, To make one mencine of thy poor handmaid, And underneath thy feet to place her praise, That when thy glory shall be far displayed In future age, of her this mention may be made."

_Faërie Queene_, b. xii., c. x.

These were known in Spenser's days to be an affectionate monument of immortal verse to his wife, still more nobly erected in his Epithalamion; and to identify it more, in his Amoretti he tells us that his queen, his mother, and his wife were all of the same name.

"The which three times thrice happy hath me made With gifts of body, fortune, and of minde, Ye _three Elizabeths_ forever live, That thus such graces unto me did give."

Here, too, he enjoyed the memorable visit of Sir Walter Raleigh, which he commemorates in Colin Clout. He had now ready for the press the first three books of his Faërie Queene; and these he read to Raleigh during his visit, probably as he has described it in pastoral style, as they sat together under the green alders on the banks of the Mulla.

"I sate, as was my trade, Under the foot of Mole, that mountain hore, Keeping my sheep among the coolly shade Of the green alders by the Mulla's shore. There a strange shepherd chanced to find me out; Whether allured with my pipe's delight, Whose pleasing sound yshrilled far about, Or thither led by chance, I know not right, Whom when I askéd from what place he came, And how he hight, himself he did ycleep The Shepherd of the Ocean by name, And said he came far from the main sea deep. He, sitting me beside in the same shade, Provoked me to play some pleasant fit," &c.

Raleigh was enchanted with the poem. He was just returned from a voyage to Portugal, and was now bound for England. He was, it appears, himself weary of his own location, for he soon after sold it to the Earl of Cork. He pressed Spenser to accompany him, put his poem to press, and by means of its fame to win the more earnest patronage of Queen Elizabeth.

"When thus our pipes we both had wearied well, Quoth he, and each an end of singing made, He 'gan to cast great liking to my lore, And great disliking to my luckless lot, That banished had myself, like wight forlore, Into that waste, where I was quite forgot. The which to leave, thenceforth he counseled me, Unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful, And wend with him, his Cynthia to see; Where grace was great, and bounty most rewardful. So what with hope of good, and hate of ill, He me persuaded forth with him to fare. So to the sea we came."

Here it comes out that, however much more clothed with trees, and however much better this spot was in Spenser's days, it was still "a waste where he was forgot," a place into which Raleigh considered his friend as banished, and as unfit for any "man in whom was aught regardful." He left it, published his poem, tried court expectation and attendance once more, but found them still more bitter and sterile than his Irish wilderness, and came back.

When we hear Kilcolman described by Spenser's biographers as "romantic and delightful," it is evident that they judged of it from mere fancy; and when all writers about him talk of the Mulla "flowing through his grounds," and "past his castle," they give the reader a most erroneous idea. The castle, it must be remembered, is on a wide plain; the hills are at a couple of miles or more distant; and the Mulla is two miles off. We see nothing at the castle but the wide boggy plain, the distant naked hills, and the weedy pond under the castle walls. Such is Kilcolman.

Here the poet was startled at midnight from his dreams by the sound of horse's hoofs beating in full gallop the stony tracks of the dale, and by a succeeding burst of wild yells from crowding thousands of infuriated Irish. Fire was put to the castle, and it was soon in flames. Spenser, concealed by the gloom of one side of the building, contrived to escape with his wife, and most probably his three boys and girl, as they were saved, and lived after him, but the youngest child in the cradle perished in the flames, with all his property and unpublished poems. On a second visit to England he had published three more books of his Faërie Queene; and there is a story of six more being lost by his servant, by whom they were sent to England. This could not be the fact, as he had himself but recently returned from the publication of the second three. Probably the rumor arose from some other MSS. lost in that manner. Fleeing to England, distracted at the fate of his child and his property, he died there, heart-broken and in poverty, at an inn or lodging-house in King-street, Westminster, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, at the expense of the Earl of Essex, "his hearse attended," says Camben, "by poets, and mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, thrown into his tomb."

There is much that we naturally are anxious to know connected with the final fate and family of Spenser. How his children actually escaped. What became of them and their claim on the property? When was the property of Kilcolman lost to the poet's descendants? Of all this next to nothing is known. The literati of that age do not seem to have given themselves any trouble to preserve the facts of the history of their illustrious cotemporaries. Shakspeare and Spenser were left to the cold keeping of careless tradition. The particulars, beyond what we have already given, are very few.

Spenser's widow returned to Ireland, and there brought up her children. Of these, Sylvanus, as eldest son, inherited Rennie and Kilcolman. It appears that he found some difficulty with his mother, Spenser's widow, who married again, to a Roger Seckerstone, and was obliged to petition the Lord-chancellor of Ireland, to obtain from his mother and her new husband documents belonging to his estate, which they withheld. He married, as already stated, Ellen Nagle, of Monanimy, south of Kilcolman, of a Catholic family, a circumstance which had a great effect on the fortunes of their descendants, as connecting them with the unsuccessful party in the troubles of Ireland. His eldest son died without issue, and his second son, William, succeeded to Kilcolman. The property of William, being seized on by the Commonwealth party, was ordered to be restored to him by Cromwell, but is supposed to have only been regained at the Restoration. He had three other grants of land in the counties of Galway and Roscommon, in the latter, the estate of Ballinasloe. At the Revolution he joined King William, who for his services granted him the estate of his cousin Hugoline, of Rennie. This Hugoline was the son of Peregrine, the poet's youngest son, who had Rennie made over to him by his eldest brother, Sylvanus. Hugoline took part with his Catholic relatives, and, siding with King James at the Revolution, was outlawed, and his property at Rennie made over to his cousin William. Thus the descendants of Sylvanus, or the eldest son of the poet, became the only known posterity of the poet. The descendants of William, and therefore of Sylvanus Spenser, the elder male line, possessed Rennie till 1734, soon after which this line became extinct. There are still in Ireland persons claiming to be descendants, by the mother's side, from Spenser; and the Travers, of Clifton, near Cork, are lineal descendants of Spenser's sister Sarah and John Travers, a friend of the poet's, who accompanied him to Ireland, and had the town lands of Ardenbone and Knocknacaple given to him by Spenser as his sister's marriage dowry. The descendants of this sister number among many distinguished families of Ireland, those of the Earls of Cork and Ossary, Earl Shannon, Lord Doneraile, Earl of Clanwilliam, &c.

The fame of Spenser is not quite rooted out of the minds of the neighboring peasantry. I inquired of an old man and his family, who live close by the castle, whom that castle formerly belonged to, and they replied, "To one Spenser."

"Who was he?"

"They could not tell: they only knew that many officers from Fermoy, and others, came to see the place."

"Ay, I have heard of him," I added. "He was an Englishman, and the Irish burned him out of the castle, and he fled to England."

"Oh no! nothing of the kind. He lived and died there, and was buried just below the castle, which used to be a church-yard. Bones are often dug up, and on the western side of the mound there had been a nunnery."

In fact, they knew nothing accurately, but, like the people at Lissoy, by Goldsmith, would insist on his death and burial on the spot.

But the desolated spot possesses an interest stronger than the possession of the poet's dust. It was the scene of his happiest hours--hours of love and of inspiration. Here the Faërie Queene grew in heavenly zeal, and here it was suddenly arrested by the howl of savage vengeance, and the flames which wrapped the poet's heart in ruin.

"Ah! what a warning for a thoughtless man, Could field or grove, or any spot of earth, Show to his eye an image of the pangs Which it hath witnessed; render back the echo Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod."

_Wordsworth._

SHAKSPEARE.

There are two reasons why I proposed to omit the homes and haunts of Shakspeare from the present volumes; the first, because I have found it impossible to include the dramatic poets in the compass of these two, and must reserve them for a third; and the second, because I have already, in my Visits to Remarkable Places (vol. i.), devoted a considerable article to almost the only place where his homes and haunts still remain, Stratford-upon-Avon. A very little reflection, however, convinced me that an entire omission of the haunts of this great national poet from these first two volumes would be received as a disappointment by a numerous class of readers. Shakspeare is not merely a dramatic poet. Great and peerless as is his dramatic fame, the very elements, not of dramatic art and fame alone, but of universal poetry, and that of the highest order, are so diffused throughout all his works, that the character of poet soars above the character of dramatist in him, like some heaven-climbing tower above a glorious church. Every line, almost every word, is a living mass of poetry; these are scattered through the works of all authors as such exponents of their deepest sentiments as they can not command themselves. They are like the branches, the buds, the flowers and leaves of a great tree of poetry, making a magnificent whole, and rich and beautiful as nature itself, down to its minutest portions. To leave out Shakspeare were, indeed, to play Hamlet with the part of Hamlet himself omitted; it were to invite guests, and get the host to absent himself. In the Walhalla of British poetry, the statue of Shakspeare must be first admitted and placed in the center, before gradations and classifications are thought of. He is the universal genius, whose presence and spirit must and will pervade the whole place.

And yet, where are the homes and haunts of Shakspeare in London? Like those of a thousand other remarkable men, in the accidents and the growth of this great city they are swept away. Fires and renovation have carried every thing before them. If the fame of men depended on bricks and mortar, what reputations would have been extinguished within the last two centuries in London! In no place in the world have the violent necessities of a rapid and immense development paid so little respect to the "local habitations" of great names. The very resting-places and tombs of many are destroyed, and their bones, like those of Chatterton, have been scattered by the spades of the unlettered laborer.

We may suppose that Shakspeare, on his coming up to London, would reside near the theaters where he sought his livelihood. The first appears to have been that of Blackfriars. It has long been clean gone, and its locality is now occupied by Play-house-yard, near Apothecaries' Hall, and the dense buildings around. Play-house-yard derives its name from the old play-house. In Knight's London, it is suggested that this theater might be pulled down soon after the permanent close of the theaters during the Commonwealth, by the Puritans; but the real old theater of Shakspeare must, had that not been the case, have perished entirely in the fire of London, which cleared all this ground, from Tower-street to the Temple. If Shakspeare ever held horses at the theater door on his first coming to town, it would be here, for here he seems to have been first engaged. The idea of his holding horses at a theater door, bold and active fellow as he had shown himself in his deer-stealing exploits, and with friends and acquaintances in town, has been scouted, especially as he was then a full-grown man of twenty-three. The thing, however, is by no means improbable. Shakspeare was most likely as independent as he was clever and active. On arriving in town, and seeing an old acquaintance, Thomas Green, at this theater, he might, like other remarkable men who have made their way to eminence in London, be ready to turn his hand to any thing till something better turned up. Green, who was a player, might be quite willing to introduce Shakspeare into that character and the theater; but it had yet to be proved that Shakspeare could make an actor of himself, and, till opportunity offered, what so likely to seize the attention of a hanger about the theater as the want of a careful horse-holder for those who came there in such style, which appears was then common enough. We have the statement from Sir William Davenant, and therefore from a cotemporary, admirer, and assumed relative. We are told that the speculation was not a bad one. Shakspeare, by his superior age and carefulness, soon engrossed all this business, and had to employ those boys, who had before been acting on their own account, as his subordinates; whence they acquired and retained, long after he had mounted into an actor himself, within the theater, the name of Shakspeare's boys. That he became "an actor at one of the play-houses, and did act exceedingly well," Aubrey tells us. He is supposed to have acted Old Knowell in Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humor;" and Oldys tells us that a relative of Shakspeare, then in advanced age, but who in his youth had been in the habit of visiting London for the purpose of seeing him act in some of his own plays, told Mr. Jones, of Tarbeck, that "he had a faint recollection of having once seen him act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein, being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping, and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported, and carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some company who were eating, and one of them sang a song." This is supposed to have been in the character of Adam, in "As You Like It," and hence it has been inferred, in connection with his acting the Ghost in Hamlet, and Old Knowell, that he took chiefly old or elderly characters.

Every glimpse of this extraordinary man, who, however much he might have been acknowledged and estimated in his own day, certainly lived long before his time, is deeply interesting. That he was estimated highly we know from Jonson himself:

"Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appear, And make those flights upon the banks of Thames That did so take Eliza and our James."