Spenser's English Rivers. 91 



to the Theise and the Crane may have been suggested to the 

 poet while looking at a map. There the Medway seems to the 

 fanciful eye to be curiously trailing that part of her course from 

 her source to Yalding, where she stands more erect towards the 

 north. These two handmaids attend her just at this point, and 

 seem to help uphold her train. 



The 'pages twaine,' the Doune and the Frith, give some diffi- 

 culty. Harrison says of the Medway : Tt hasteth to Pensherst, 

 and there carrieth withall the Eden, that commeth from Lingfield 

 parke. After this it goeth to the southeast part of Kent, and 

 taketh with it the Frith or Firth, on the northwest side, and an 

 other little streame that commeth from the hilles betweene 

 Pevenburie and Horsemon on the southeast' (i. 90). Spenser's 

 words seem to imply, that the streams are small, well paired, and 

 that they reach the Medway above the Theise and the Crane. 

 The Frith, by Harrison's brief account, might be one of several 

 little streams coming in from the northwest in the neighborhood 

 of Tonbridge. One of these rises in Frith Wood, at Dene Park, 

 a mile or more west of the hamlet of North Frith. Spenser's 

 Frith may, however, be the river Shode, a brook flowing south 

 from Wrotham, with its mouth near East Peckham, just above 

 Yalding. The stream from the hills between Pembury and 

 Horsmonden to the southwest (there is no stream in this region 

 from the south^'o.yf before we reach the Teise and the Beult) 

 has no name on the modern maps, and I have been unable to dis- 

 cover whether it now has one ; but in Harrison's description it 

 corresponds most closely with what Spenser calls the Doune. 



Penshurst, the home of the Sidneys, is on the Medway above 

 Tonbridge, not more than five or six miles from its upper waters. 

 Is it not likely that Spenser knew these tiny streamlets and 'dales 

 of Kent' at first hand, either from his association with Pens- 

 hurst. whatever that association was, or other occasion of 

 acquaintance with the Kentish country?^" 



°" On Philip Symonson's map of Kent, probably first published in 1576, 

 this stream is marked as coming from the southeast, as Harrison says. 

 Symonson's map is highly praised by Lambarde and later writers, and 

 well deserves praise for its comparative accuracy and fineness of detail. 

 See All Account of a Map of Kent, dated 1596, by the Hon. Henry 

 Hannen, in Archceologia Cantiana 30. 85-92, with a reproduction of 

 Symonson's map on a reduced scale. On neither Symonson's map nor 



