Anglica te vivo vixit, plausitque l'oesis;
Nunc moritura timet, te moriente mori."

I have also a folio copy of Spenser, printed by Henry Hills for Jonathan
Edwin, London, 1679. In a short life therein printed, it says that he
was buried near Chaucer, 1596; and the frontispiece is an engraving of
his tomb, by E. White, which bears this epitaph:--

"Heare lyes (expecting the second comminge of our Saviour,
Christ Jesus) the body of Edmond Spenser, the Prince of Poets in
his tyme, whose Divine spirit needs noe othir witness than the
works which he left behind {482} him. He was borne in London in
the yeare 1510, and died in the yeare 1596."

Beneath are these lines:--

"Such is the tombs the Noble Essex gave
Great Spenser's learned reliques, such his grave:
Howe'er ill-treated in his life he were,
His sacred bones rest honourably here."

How are these two epitaphs, with their differing dates, to be
reconciled? Can he have been born in 1510, as the first one says "obiit
_immaturâ_ morte?" Now eighty-five is not very immature; and I believe
he entered at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1569, at which time he
would be fifty-nine, and that at a period when college education
commenced at an earlier age than now. Vertue's portrait, engraved 1727,
takes as a motto the last two lines of the first epitaph--"Anglica te
vivo," &c.