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In 1590, towards the end of those ten years, a month or two after Tamburlaine had been first presented “on stages in the Citie” and a year or two before Shakespeare had certainly reached the way to the stages in the City, Edmund Spenser published, with the encouragement of Sir Walter Raleigh, the first three cantos of the Faerie Queene. He accompanied them with seventeen sonnets, addressed among others to Raleigh, Essex, Burleigh, Howard, and Walsingham. He described Raleigh as the summer’s nightingale, with a compliment on the nightingale’s verse. He invoked Essex as “magnific Lord,” assuring him that this base poem was not worthy of his heroic parts, which it would later on more nobly celebrate. He assured Burleigh that at bottom it was a very serious poem and not as vain as it might superficially appear. Howard was an example to the present age of the heroes of antiquity, and Walsingham was Mæcenas.

The last unlikely comparison was used by another poet, William Harrison, who preluded with it verses commenting on “that anti-Christ at Rome”—a phrase which would have surprised the original Mæcenas. In fact Walsingham seems to have confined his patronal attentions to very minor poets, to Puritan scholars and divines, and to himself; he made nearly twenty thousand pounds in five years, at the lowest reckoning, by farming the Customs from the Queen. But the fact that Spenser could address him with that rhyming and hopeful untruth explains by accentuation the verbal music of the age. Verse is not so different from prose, nor public dedications from private devotions, that Spenser can be held guiltless of flattery if Bacon is to be blamed. A few years afterwards Shakespeare was to assure Southampton that “what I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours.” Such was the habit of writers to courtiers, ministers, and great lords.

Beyond lords, ministers, and courtiers was the Queen herself. Every one is aware how poets and less intelligent people than poets “flattered” the Queen. Fashion, which denigrates so many reputations after death, has had to wait three hundred years and more to have its turn at Elizabeth; it appears that it will soon console itself for the delay. But to her poets and servants she was, what she was to Spenser, Glory. She was all the Goddesses, all the Muses, all the Nymphs and Graces, the “imperial votaress,” the “dearest dread,” “the bright Occidental star.” To attribute deliberate insincerity to those voices is to misunderstand both their imagination and their style. They beheld, while they shaped, the external world. Their attitude towards the Queen was voluntary and compulsory at once; they also, in that lesser thing, chose necessity. They created her, but they created what existed potentially. They formed her and believed in her precisely as we all form images and believe in them. They defined Royalty.

It is easy to believe they flattered, not so easy to see that they flattered where they believed. Yet the whole similar tradition of romantic love illumines their devotion. The young lover believes that “authority and reason” wait on his mistress; that