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DEATH (1599), AND CONTEMPORARY FAME xxxix
considered of in the recovery of the Realme of Ireland' ' The policy
that he urges and the tone in which he voices it is the same in this, his last
work, as in his longer tract He must have felt that the present outbreak
was only another vindication of the policy of Grey against the weaker
efforts at conciliation which had merely courted disaster, and he was
doubtless chosen as the messenger to the government at home that he
might advise them upon immediate and resolute action But soon after
his arrival at Westminster, Spenser was taken ill He died on January 16,
1599
This sudden and dramatic close to the career of a poet who was associated
in the public mind with the visionary and the ideal offered an irresistible
temptation to the popular imagination, and the legend grew up that
Spenser lost a child in the flames at Kilcolman and died in a garret in
Westminster, starving and broken-hearted Ben Jonson, who loved to
dilate upon the hard lot that the world meted out to the artist, and warned
Drummond from cultivating ' Poetne, for that she had beggared him,
when he might have been a rich lawer, physitian, or marchant', gave
his support to the story But it is probably apocryphal Spenser's calm
and reasoned statement to the queen, penned when the first shock of
disaster was upon him, shows little sign of a broken spirit His friend
Camden, indeed, speaks of him as ' mops . He had never been a rich
man, and after his hurried departure from Kilcolman and the burning
of his real property he may well have been in temporary want of money.
But that the bearer of an important state missive, one who, moreover,
had a pension to fall back upon, should have died for lack of bread is
inconceivable , and the statement, if it be true, that he ' refused twenty
pieces from my lord of Essex, saying that he was some he had no time to
spend them ', is capable of a very different interpretation The offer
shows clearly that he still had powerful friends able and ready to help
him, its refusal that gallant lightness of heart with which an Elizabethan
gentleman paid his last debt to nature
His body was laid in Westminster Abbey, near to Chaucer His
funeral, of which Essex defrayed the cost, was attended by many noblemen
and poets, who threw into the open grave elegies written to his memory
and the pens with which they wrote them The queen, in a burst of
unwonted generosity, ordered him a monument, but either her own
financial prudence, or the peculation of a subordinate, stepped in between
her intention and its fulfilment In 1620 Anne, Countess of Dorset,
corrected the oversight But the true memorial to Spenser is to be read
in the work of his successors He is among the very greatest of our poets,
but the significance of his poetry m the history of our literature is even
greater than its intrinsic value He recreated English prosody, giving
back to our verse the fluidity and the grace that it had lost since the
days of Chaucer, and extending the range of its achievement, he created
1 Quoted in full, Grosart, Life, pp 537-55
b3