though the error is less flagrant than that perpetrated
by the inscription that preceded the present one, which
set down as his natal year 1510.
Of his parents the only fact secured is that his
mother's name was Elizabeth. This appears from sonnet
74, where he apostrophizes those

Most happy letters! fram'd by skilfull trade
With which that happy name was first desynd,
The which three times thrise happy hath me made,
With guifts of body, fortune and of mind.
The first my being to me gave by kind
From mothers womb deriv'd by dew descent.

The second is the Queen, the third 'my love, my lives
last ornament.' A careful examination by Mr. Collier
and others of what parish registers there are extant in
such old churches as stand near East Smithfield--the
Great Fire, it will be remembered, broke out some
distance west of the Tower, and raged mainly westward--
has failed to discover any trace of the infant Spenser
or his parents. An 'Edmund Spenser' who is mentioned
in the Books of the Treasurer of the Queen's Chamber in
1569, as paid for bearing letters from Sir Henry
Norris, her Majesty's ambassador in France, to the
Queen,{1} and who with but slight probability has been
surmised to be the poet himself, is scarcely more
plausibly conjectured by Mr. Collier to be the poet's
father. The utter silence about his parents, with the
single exception quoted, in the works of one who, as