In 1569 he was entered as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and in due
course took his bachelor's degree in 1573, and his master's in 1576. He
is supposed, on insufficient grounds, as it appears to me, to have met
with some disgust or disappointment during his residence at the
University.[269] Between 1576 and 1578 Spenser seems to have been with
some of his kinsfolk "in the North" It was during this interval that he
conceived his fruitless passion for the Rosalinde, whose jilting him for
another shepherd, whom he calls Menalcas, is somewhat perfunctorily
bemoaned in his pastorals[270] Before the publication of his "Shepherd's
Calendar" in 1579, he had made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, and
was domiciled with him for a time at Penshurst, whether as guest or
literary dependant is uncertain. In October, 1579, he is in the household
of the Earl of Leicester. In July, 1580 he accompanied Lord Grey de
Wilton to Ireland as Secretary, and in that country he spent the rest of
his life, with occasional flying visits to England to publish poems or in
search of preferment. His residence in that country has been compared to
that of Ovid in Pontus. And, no doubt, there were certain outward points
of likeness. The Irishry by whom he was surrounded were to the full as
savage, as hostile, and as tenacious of their ancestral habitudes as the
Scythians[271] who made Tomi a prison, and the descendants of the earlier
English settlers had degenerated as much as the Mix-Hellenes who
disgusted the Latin poet.
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