445 



Rev. N. J. Halpin read a paper on certain passages in the 

 life of Edmund Spenser. 



In bringing this subject before the Academy, Mr. Halpin 

 lamented the slovenly biography which had hitherto left un- 

 examined and undetected, — though given with sufficient cer- 

 tainty in his own works, — the name and family of the lady to 

 whom Edmund Spenser was married ; and not only her, but, 

 perhaps, the most celebrated name in English amatory poetry, 

 that of the fair and false Rosalinde, for whom, in his youth, 

 he entertained a deep but ill-requited passion. The names of 

 both were recorded in his own works, after a method at that 

 time much practised by the poets, and of which the learned 

 Camden, in his Remaines, has laid down the laws, viz., by 

 the Anagram ; and though both the names thus lay close be- 

 neath the surface of his poems, they have both remained there 

 to the present day undiscovered, but prepared to reward the 

 pains of the more caretaking inquirer. 



In the series of sonnets called the Amoretti, the name and 

 circumstances of his wife are expressly celebrated ; those of 

 his earlier flame, the fickle Rosalinde, in his Shepherd's Ca- 

 lender, each expressly written for its peculiar purpose. But of 

 both his passions we have occasional notices throughout his 

 Faerie Queen, his Colin Clout's Come Home Again, and his 

 Epithalamion, in all of which the allusions to those ladies re- 

 spectively are unmistakeably transparent. But inasmuch as 

 the clue to the real secret is given by the ostensible editor 

 (whoever he may have been, whether Spenser himself j or 

 his friend, Gabriel Harvey, the Hobinal of the poem ; or a 

 genuine, though anonymous E. K.) of the Shepherd's Ca- 

 lender, it will be most convenient to take '\t first in order, and 

 to ascertain, by its methods, who the lady was that figures 

 under the title of 



ROSALINDE.* 



We are told expressly by the editorial E. K. that " Rosa- 



* So spelled in the original editions. 



