A volume of minor poems,
entitled _Complaints_, followed in 1591, and the three remaining books
of the _Faerie Queene_ in 1596. In 1595-1596 he published also his
_Daphnaida, Prothalamion,_ and the four hymns on _Love_ and _Beauty_,
and on _Heavenly Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_. In 1598, in Tyrone's
rebellion, Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his
family, fled to London, where he died in January, 1599.
The _Faerie Queene_ reflects, perhaps, more fully than any other English
work, the many-sided literary influences of the Renascence. It was the
blossom of a richly composite culture. Its immediate models were
Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_, the first forty cantos of which were
published in 1515, and Tasso's _Gerusalemme Liberata_, printed in 1581.
Both of these were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the first based
upon the old Charlemagne epos--Orlando being identical with the hero of
the French _Chanson de Roland_: the second upon the history of the first
crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. But in both
of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of coloring quite
unknown to the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and Tasso wrote with the
great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in mind, and all about them
was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness and
power.
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