Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1870 edition. Excerpt: ...for is not every part of a matchless statue instinct with the loveliness and majesty of the whole 1 Such was the fame which the publication of his magnum opus won for Spenser, that his printer made haste to collect what works of the poet were accessible in the hands of his friends, or otherwise " loosely scattered abroad;" and in 1591, when Spenser, having been endowed with his pension, was back at Kileolinan, Ponsonby put forth a volume of " Complaints; containing sundry small Poems of the World's Vanity." These were, in their order, "The Ruins of Time," "The Tears of the Muses," " Virgil's Gnat," "Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberd's Tale," "The Ruins of Rome, by Bellay," "Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly" (which seems to have appeared under some shape in 1590); "Visions of the World's Vanity f "Bellay's Visions;" and "Petrarch's Visions." In his notice "to the gentle reader," the printer gives the titles of a number of other poems, on which he could not lay his hands, and which are now lost to us for ever--for Spenser either was content with the renown gained by "The Faerie Queen," or was prevented by his premature death from rendering justice to the labours of his youth. "The Ruins of Time," an elegy on the recent deaths of Sidney (1586), Leicester (1588), and Leicester's brother, the Earl of Warwick (1589), was written during the poet's stay in England; and so was his "Daphnaida," an elegy on the death of the daughter of Henry Lord Howard Viscount Byndon, and wife of Arthur Gorges, Esq. Immediately after his return to Kileolman, Spenser recounted tho visit of Raleigh, and his voyage to...