earlier writers have been collected with admirable learning and industry
by scholars such as Kluge and Reissert[92], but the investigation of his
originality presents at once a more interesting and more important field
of inquiry. So, indeed, Spenser himself appears to have thought, for the
only direct acknowledgement he makes in the work is to Chaucer, although,
as a writer to whom the humours of criticism are ever present has
remarked, 'it might almost seem that Spenser borrowed from Chaucer nothing
but his sly way of acknowledging indebtedness chiefly where it was not
due.'

The chief point of originality in the _Calender_ is the attempt at linking
the separate eclogues into a connected series. We have already seen how
with Googe the same characters recur in a sort of shadowy story; but what
was in his case vague and almost unintentional becomes with Spenser a
central artistic motive of the piece. The eclogues are arranged with no
small skill and care on somewhat of an architectural design, or perhaps we
should rather say with somewhat of the symmetry of a geometrical pattern.
This will best be seen in a brief analysis of the several eclogues,
'proportionable,' as the title is careful to inform us, 'to the twelve
monethes.'

In the 'January,' a monologue, Spenser, under the disguise of Colin
Clout, laments the ill-success of his love for Rosalind, who meets his
advances with scorn. He also alludes to his friendship with Harvey, who is
introduced throughout under the name of Hobbinol. The 'February' is a
disputation between youth and age in the persons of Cuddie and Thenot. It
introduces the fable of the oak and the briar, in which, since he ascribes
it to Tityrus, a name he transferred from Vergil to Chaucer, Spenser
presumably imagined he was imitating that poet, though it is really no
more in the style of Chaucer than is the roughly accentual measure in