The Canterbury tales and Faerie queene &c., &c., &c., ed. for popular perusal with current illustrations and explanatory notes, by D. Laing Purves.

LIFE OF EDMUND SPENSER.
THOSE familiar with London and London life in the second half of the nineteenth
century, will more or less consciously take a Carlylean view of its intellectually productive capability, and affirm that no poet could be born there. Yet it mnay be
questioned whether, in times past, London did not hold to the rest of these Islands,
not numerically alone, but in activity and intensity of material life, a much more
important relation than it does at present. In many senses, London was far more
conspicuously the centre of the kingdom at a time when everything circulated
to it, and little or nothing from it, than in these days, when the inward and
the outward currents fairly compete with each other, and the facilities of intercommunication, the growth of independent political life, have destroyed the commercial and intellectual monopoly which in the older days the metropolis enjoyed.
Certain it is, nevertheless, that London produced three of England's greatest Poets;
and if the fourth, Shakespeare, did not draw his first or his last breath in the
capital, at least he spent there the most important part of his life, and made the
little fortune on which he quietly waited for death at Stratford-on-Avon. Chaucer,
Spenser, and Milton, however, indubitably were born in London; the first and
the last of that splendid trio were Londoners most of their days-men of the Court,
men of the council, men at head-quarters. Spenser's future fate led him afield
into lonely and rough places; but London claims the honour of giving him birth.
We have his own word for the fact; for in a poem entitled " Prothalamion," written
to celebrate "the double marriage of the two honourable and virtuous Ladies, the
Lady Elizabeth and the Lady Katherine Somerset, daughters to the right honourable
the Earl of Worcester," Spenser says-describing the progress of the two Swans
who represent the brides, with their attendant train of nymphs" At length they all to merry London came,
To merry London, my most kindly nurse,
That to me gave this life's first native source,
Though from another place I take my name,
A house of ancient fame:"
Some now wholly unrecognisable or demolished house " in East Smithfield, by the
Tower," saw the poet ushered into this world, towards the close of the year 1552.
(See note 1, page 618.) The general belief is, that his parents were in indifferent
circumstances; but little doubt is entertained regarding the "respectability," if
not even the nobility, of their original condition. Repeatedly, in dedications prefixed to his minor poems, Spenser claims kindred with the Spencers of Althorpe,
in Northamptonshire-from whom the noble houses of Spencer and Marlborough
took their rise. In 1590, he dedicates "Muiopotmos" to Lady Carey, the second
daughter of Sir John Spencer; next year, he dedicates " The Tears of the Muses"