[Footnote 260: The tyrant of Syracuse, who, after being dethroned, taught a school at Corinth.]
[Footnote 261: _Quisque suæ fortunæ faber._ SALLUST.]
_And mother Hubbard, in her homely dress, Has sharply blamed a British Lioness; That queen, whose feast the factious rabble keep, Exposed obscenely naked, and asleep._--P. 197.
The poet, in the beginning of this canto, anticipates the censure of those who might blame him for introducing into his fables animals not natives of Britain, where the scene was laid. He vindicates himself by the example of Æsop and Spenser. The latter, in "Mother Hubbard's Tale," exhibits at length the various arts by which, in his time, obscure and infamous characters rose to eminence in church and state. This is illustrated by the parable of an Ape and a Fox, who insinuate themselves into various situations, and play the knaves in all. At length,
Lo, where they spied, how, in a gloomy glade, The Lion, sleeping, lay in secret shade; His crown and sceptre lying him beside, And having doft for heat his dreadful hide.
The adventurers possess themselves of the royal spoils, with which the Ape is arrayed; who forthwith takes upon himself the dignity of the monarch of the beasts, and, by the counsels of the Fox, commits every species of oppression, until Jove, incensed at the disorders which his tyranny had introduced, sends Mercury to awaken the Lion from his slumber:
Arise! said Mercury, thou sluggish beast, That here liest senseless, like the corpse deceast; The whilst thy kingdom from thy head is rent, And thy throne royal with dishonour blent.
The Lion rouses himself, hastens to court, and avenges himself of the usurpers.--There is no doubt, that, under this allegory, Spenser meant to represent the exorbitant power of Lord Burleigh; and he afterwards complains, that his verse occasioned his falling into a "mighty peer's displeasure." The Lion, therefore, whose negligence is upbraided by Mercury, was Queen Elizabeth. Dryden calls her,
The queen, whose feast the factious rabble keep;
because the tumultuous pope-burnings of 1680 and 1681 were solemnized on Queen Elizabeth's night. The poet had probably, since his change of religion, laid aside much of the hereditary respect with which most Englishmen regard Queen Bess; for, in the pamphlets of the Romanists, she is branded as "a known bastard, who raised this prelatic protestancy, called the church of England, as a prop to supply the weakness of her title."[264]