poor children at school.

When he was about seventeen Edmund went to Cambridge, receiving
for his journey a sum of ten shillings from the fund from which
he had already received help at school. He entered college as a
sizar, that is, in return for doing the work of a servant he
received free board and lodging in his college. A sizar's life
was not always a happy one, for many of the other scholars or
gentlemen commoners looked down upon them because of their
poverty. And this poverty they could not hide, for the sizars
were obliged to wear a different cap and gown from that of the
gentlemen commoners.

But of how Spenser fared at college we know nothing, except that
he was often ill and that he made two lifelong friends. That he
loved his university, however, we learn from his poems, when he
tenderly speaks of "my mother Cambridge."* When he left college
Spenser was twenty-three. He was poor and, it would seem, ill,
so he did not return to London, but went to live with relatives
in the country in Lancashire. And there about "the wasteful
woods and forest wide"** he wandered, gathering new life and
strength, taking all a poet's joy in the beauty and the freedom
of a country life, "for ylike to me was liberty and life,"** he
says. And here among the pleasant woods he met a fair lady named
Rosalind, "the widow's daughter of the glen."***

*Faery Queen, book IV canto xi.
**Shepherd's Calendar, December
***The same, April.