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interested him very much ; it was a book of the assets and dis- 

 bursements of the trustees of Eobert Nowell, Esquire, of the 

 Eead Nowells, and here he ahghted upon the name of Edmund 

 Spenser, the Prince of Poets of his age. The document shows 

 that while at the Merchant Taylors' School, in London, Spenser 

 received money for the purchase of black cloth that he might 

 attend the funeral of Eobert Nowell, and in April, 1569, he had 

 a gift of money from the Nowell trust on proceeding from school 

 to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. Again in 1570 and 1571 he had 

 other pecuniary gifts from the same source whilst at the univer- 

 sity, and the MS. records gifts out of the trust to no fewer than 

 fourteen members of the clan of Spensers in the Burnley district, 

 one of whom was named Edmund and another Lawrence. It 

 was not surprising, after Mr. F. C. Spenser's researches, the 

 confirmatory illustrations of Mr. T. T. Wilkinson as to the poet's 

 use of the Northern English dialect, and the occurrence of 

 Edmund Spenser's name as the protege of Dean Nowell, that 

 the supposition that the poet was of a Lancashire family at 

 length became an assumption by writers of biographical notices 

 on Spenser, and of magazine articles on his personal history. 

 Dean Chiu-ch, writing in 1879, said it seemed likely that the 

 scenery round the home of the Spensers in North-East Lanca- 

 shire gave form and character to the poet's first considerable 

 work. 



Dr. Grosart, of Blackburn, had recently pubhshed a life of 

 Spenser which it was not too much to say far surpassed all jjre- 

 vious memoirs. He had elaborated all the information that 

 could be procured on the subject ; had thrown light on many 

 points in dispute, as, for example, the poet's parentage ; and had 

 given new facts concerning Spenser's last days. He supplies the 

 genealogy of the Spensers of Hurstwood from the middle of the 

 16th to the end of the 17th century, when Hurstwood passed 

 from the possession of the family. He adopts Mr. Wilkinson's 

 theory as to the poet's acquaintance with the Lancashu-e dialect, 

 and gives instances of several hundred words from " The Faerie 

 Queene," and other works of the poet which echo the peculiar 

 sounds of our dialect. Dryden spoke of Spenser as a master of 

 the Northern dialect. Dr. Grosart maintains that the scenery 

 and natural features of this district are in perfect keeping with 

 passages in the Shepherd's Calendar; it was a land of mountain 

 and moor, the inhabitants were imaginative and superstitious, 

 entirely cut off from the people of the South, and these defiles 

 were supposed to be peopled with witches. There were two fresh 

 bits of evidence which Dr. Grosart had been able to produce. 

 The first was that the printer of Edmund Spenser's first book 

 was either a Lancashire man born or a member of a Lancashire 

 family — Hugh Singleton, a name derived from the names of two 



