He had resigned his clerkship on the 22nd June, 1588, and was appointed Clerk to the Council of Munster.
Although we have mentioned no previous publication, yet it must not be concluded that this was the first poem with which Spenser delighted his contemporaries. Our author was one of those extraordinary men who appear occasionally to prove the marvellous fecundity of the human mind. With him incessant production seemed a law of nature; composition was but the spontaneous and unlaboured flow of his ever teeming fancy; an exercise necessary to his healthy existence, and an ever originating source of solace. His earliest work was his "Shepherd's Calender," published ten years before, a series of twelve eclogues, appropriated to each month of the year, detailing the course of his hapless passion. Within the intermediate decade of years, he had written nine comedies, a composition called "The Dreams," "The Dying Pelican," "Slumber," "The Court of Cupid;" "Legends," probably afterwards worked into the "Faëry Queen," "Pageants," concerning which a like conjecture has been expressed, "Sonnets," "The Marriage Song of the Thames," Translation of Moschus's "Idyllium of Wandering Love," "The English Poet," probably a prose essay, and "Stemmata Dudleiana."
In 1591, William Ponsonby, publisher of the "Faëry Queen," brought out a volume of his minor poems. Among these were "The Ruins of Time," a poem in ninety-seven stanzas, bewailing the death of the Earl of Leicester. In this piece there are a few bitter lines, which have generally been applied to Burleigh. The occasion of the attack is contained in a story related by Fuller, which it has been the fashion of late to discredit. The recent discovery of a MS. diary of a barrister from 1601 to 1603 tends, however, to confirm the tale, which bears no internal improbability. On the presentation of some poems to the Queen, we are told that she ordered him a gift of ₤100.
