446 



linde also is a feigned name, which, being well-ordered, will 

 bewray the very name of his (Spenser's) love and mistress." 

 .The editors and biographers (Malone amongst the rest) have 

 accordingly conjectured this to be the anagrammatic name 

 either of "Rose Linde" or " Eliza Horden," families of people 

 with those surnames having been found resident in Kent in 

 the reign of Henry VI. But besides the remoteness of the 

 period assigned, — some five or six reigns before the birth of 

 our rustic beauty, — the conjectures are of no value, because 

 the authors of them are unable to show between the principal 

 parties any connexion or acquaintance, any courtship, or con- 

 tiguity of residence, which might have brought them within 

 the ordinary sphere of attraction. The notion, then, so far 

 from being probable, contains nothing beyond the crude ele- 

 ments of a barren possibility. 



But Spenser, at this time, had an intimate and beloved 

 friend and brother poet, Samuel Daniel (see enumeration of 

 English poets in Colin Clout's Come Home Again), and this 

 Samuel Daniel had a sister named Rose, — Rose Daniel ; and 

 Rose Daniel reads anagrammatically, and in perfect accordance 

 with Camden's rules, into Rosalinde. She was, probably 

 about the date of the Shepherd's Calender, married to a friend 

 of her brother's; not, indeed, to Spenser, but to a scholar of 

 much celebrity in his time, but, withal, so eccentric as to 

 have left behind him, in his scanty biography, traces so dura- 

 ble as to enable us to interpret with reference to him passages 

 in the works of Spenser, which were otherwise unintelligible 

 at this distance of time. 



The reading of Rosalinde into Rose Daniel gives an 

 easy and probable solution to the whole tale of Spenser's dis- 

 appointed passion, as recorded by himself. It exactly rounds 

 the anagram. The intimacy between her brother and Spenser 

 accounts for her first acquaintance with the poet ; her marriage 

 with a rival defines the species of infidelity of which her lover 

 complains; and her subsequent fortunes, arising from her mar- 

 riage^ with a very wayward man, correspond, with surprising 



