Spenser's English Rivers. 107 



g'ods, three (20-2) the famous rivers of the world, twenty 

 (23-39; 45-47) the English rivers, and six (48-53) the sea- 

 nymphs. In his letter to Harvey, Spenser has nothing to say 

 about sea-gods, nymphs, or famous rivers other than English ; 

 presumably the Epithalamion Thamesls did not employ them. 

 Neither could it have contained the review of the Irish rivers, 

 since the matter for that passage, being partly from Camden,''^ 

 but in far the greatest part from Spenser's personal acquaintance 

 with Ireland, was not available till later years. Hence the Epi- 

 thalamion Thamesis could be represented in canto xi only in the 

 part dealing with the English rivers. 



But at least half of this matter, as already shown, p. 70, was 

 drawn from Camden's Britannia, which did not appear till 1586, 

 not less than six years after the composition of the lost poem. 

 And in his use of Holinshed, Spenser consulted the fuller second 

 edition of 1587 rather than the first of 1577.'^^ Then, too, in the 

 letter to Harvey, Spenser had said that he would show in his 

 Epithalamion Thamesis not only the Thames' 'first beginning, 

 and offspring,' which he has actually done in canto xi, but 'all 

 the Countrey, that he passeth thorough,' which he has not done, 

 though he may have done this in the lost poem.'° Lastly, the 

 bride at the earlier wedding may not have been the Medway, 

 which is Thames' younger brother at 6". C. Jul. 83. 



Obviously, then, canto xi owes but a small portion of its mate- 

 rial to the Epithalamion Thamesis, and whatever has been 

 retained from the earlier poem has been so unraveled and 

 rewoven in the new fabric that it could be recognized only in 

 shreds here and there, and, so far as any surviving semblance of 

 the old poem may be sought in the Faery Queen, it is lost indeed. 



Spenser admits that even by 1580 he had already found that 

 his treatment of this subject involved much labor. It was an 



" Harper, p. 17. 



'* Harper, pp. 12-15. I cannot find in Spenser's language of 1580 any- 

 thing to support Dr. Harper's inference, on page 22 of her book, that 

 Spenser was planning to supplement what he got from the first edition 

 of Holinshed with material from other sources. 



'^ Such promises, however, Spenser did not keep literally, as in the case 

 of the prefatory letter to Raleigh about the Faery Queen, in comparison 

 with the poem itself. 



