the daughters of Sir John Spencer- the head of the family in his time-Spenser dedicated poems, and in those dedications, and elsewhere in his verse, he asserts his kinship with those ladies and their house. To the Lady Strange he speaks of "some private bands of affinitie, which

it hath pleased your Ladiship to acknowledge;" to the Lady Carey of "name or kindred's sake by you vouchsafed;" and in that poem which is the most autobiographic document he has left us-"Colin Clouts Come Home Againe"-he sums the trio together as,

"The sisters three,

The honor of the noble familie

Of which I meanest boast my selfe to be,
And most that unto them I am so nie."

In one of his sonnets, Spenser gives us another group of three ladies who entered largely into his life, comprising his mother, his Queen, and his wife. The link which bound them together was that of a common name:

"Ye three Elizabeths! for ever live,

That three such graces did unto me give."

This meagre fact, then, that her name was Elizabeth, is all that Spenser has recorded of his mother. But of both father and mother some little additional information has been offered in

recent years. While investigating the manuscripts of an old Lancashire family, Mr. R. B. Knowles happened upon documents which led him to conclude that the poet's parents, by the time their son entered Cambridge, were living at Burnley in Lancashire. If this theory should ever be removed into the category of fact it would clear up much of the mystery which enshrouds that period of Spenser's life between his farewell to Cambridge and his appearance in London. It is indisputable that he spent much

of that interval in the north of England, but where and with whom he lived are not known.

East Smithfield is pointed out as the locality of Spenser's birth; the year 1552 as the date. Few districts in London have altered so utterly out of recognition as the reputed scene of the poet's birth. Its vicinity to Tower Hill, then a focus of Court life, is suggestive enough of its importance as a residential district in Elizabethan times. Although careful search has been made among the registers of all the churches in the neighbourhood, no entry of Spenser's birth or baptism has been discovered; for the place and for the date tradition is our only authority. It is true that one of Spenser's sonnets is cited as evidence that he was born in 1552, but in offering such a witness two facts have to be taken for granted, namely, that the sonnet was written in 1593, and that its "fourty" years were forty years, rather than a lesser or greater period expressed in even numbers for poetic purposes.

Prior to the discovery by Mr. Knowles, referred to above, all biographers of Spenser were forced to pass at once from his birth to his student days at Cambridge, but now it is possible to fill in the blank with some interesting facts as to the poet's school-days. One writer minimised

that blank by dismissing the question of his school-days as of no moment; but that, surely, is a new theory of biography. Among the manuscripts unearthed by Mr. Knowles was one which gave a detailed account of the spending of the bequests of a London citizen named Robert Nowell, and from this it was learned that Spenser was a pupil of the Merchant Taylors' School. Such a discovery directs the enquirer at once to the archives of the school itself; and happily these are of such a nature as to throw a flood of light on the early educational environment of the poet.

It was in 1561 that the Merchant Taylors bethought themselves of founding a school, intended principally for the children of the citizens of London, and the estate purchased for the purpose included several buildings and a chapel. The statutes framed for the administration of the school are suggestive of its character. Children were not to be admitted unless they could read and write and say the catechism in English or Latin; the school hours, both summer and winter, were from 7 A.M. to 5 P.M., with an interval between 11 and 1 o'clock; three times each day the pupils, "kneeling on their knees," were to say the prayers appointed "with due tract and paus

ing." Nor are these particulars the only facts from which the imagination can weave its picture of the boy Spenser in school. The head-master in Spenser's time, and for many years after, was Dr. Richard Mulcaster, of whom Andrew Fuller has drawn this picture: "In a morning he would exactly and plainly construe and parse the lesson to his scholars; which done, he slept his hour (custom made him critical to proportion it) in his desk in the school, but woe be to the scholar that slept the while. Awaking, he heard them accurately; and Atropos might be persuaded to pity as soon as he to pardon, where he found just fault. The prayers of cockering mothers prevailed with him as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children; but his sharpness was the better endured because impartial; and many excellent scholars were bred under him." In that last remark, Fuller wrote wiser than he knew. How it would have rounded his sentence had his knowledge enabled him to write the name of Spenser among those scholars! For Spenser was a deeply learned poet, and it is not idle to suppose that his passion for knowledge owed much to this severe mentor of his youthful days.