But he makes no mention of his college. The notorious
Gabriel Harvey, an intimate friend of Spenser, who was
elected a Fellow of Pembroke Hall the year after the
future poet was admitted as a sizar, in a letter
written in 1580, asks: 'And wil you needes have my
testimoniall of youre old Controllers new behaviour?'
and then proceeds to heap abusive words on some person
not mentioned by name but evidently only too well known
to both the sender and the receiver of the epistle.
Having compiled a list of scurrilities worthy of
Falstaff, and attacked another matter which was an
abomination to him, Harvey vents his wrath in sundry
Latin charges, one of which runs: 'C{ae}tera fer{e\}, ut
olim: Bellum inter capita et membra continuatum.'
'Other matters are much as they were: war kept up
between the heads [the dons] and the members [the
men].' Spenser was not elected to a fellowship; he
quitted his college, with all its miserable bickerings,
after he had taken his master's degree. There can be
little doubt, however, that he was most diligent and
earnest student during his residence at Cambridge;
during that period, for example, he must have gained
that knowledge of Plato's works which so distinctly
marks his poems, and found in that immortal writer a
spirit most truly congenial. But it is conceivable
that he pursued his studies after his own manner, and
probably enough excited by his independence the strong
disapprobation of the master and tutor of the college
of his day.
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