identity, together with that of Rosalind and Menalcas, being matters of
but indirect literary interest, may be left to Spenser's editors and
biographers to fight over. It will be sufficient to add in this place that
however 'literary' may have been Spenser's attachment to Rosalind there is
no reason to suppose that she was not a real person, while however little
response his advances may have met with there _is_ reason to suppose that
his sorrow at their rejection was not wholly conventional.

Spenser's design in turning his attention to the pastoral form would not
seem hard to apprehend. Less readily may we suppose that any deep
philosophical impulse directed his mind towards certain modes of
expression, than that in an age of catholic experiment he turned from the
penning of impossible iambic trimeters, 'minding,' as E. K. directly
informs us, 'to furnish our tongue with this kind, wherein it faulteth.'
He was qualified for the task by a wide knowledge of previous pastoral
writers from Theocritus and Bion down to Marot, and deliberately ranged
himself in line with the previous poets of the regular pastoral
tradition. Yet we find side by side in his work two distinct and
apparently antagonistic though equally conscious tendencies; the one
towards authority, leading him to borrow motives freely and even to resort
to direct paraphrase; the other towards individuality, nationality,
freedom, informing his general scheme and regulating the language of his
imaginary swains. It is this double nature of his pastoral work that
justifies us as regarding him, in spite of his alleged orthodoxy, as in
reality the first of a series of English writers who combined the
traditions of regular pastoral with the wayward graces of native
inspiration. It is true that in Spenser the natural pastoral impulse has
lost the spontaneity of the earlier examples, and has passed into the
realm of conscious and deliberate art; but it is none the less there,
modifying the conventional form. The individual debts owed by Spenser to