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The author of these paltry verfes has not only borrowed the thought which he has fo ill expreffed in the last distich, but that which is in the lines before it; for I remember to have feen fomewhere this Epitaph on Sannazarius, made by Bembus :

Da facro cineri flores: hic ille Maroni
Sincerus Mufa proximus, ut tumulo.

Communicated

Communicated by a FRIEND of the EDITOR.

SIR,

IF the few following Strictures on Spenfer meet with approbation, they are at your service, and may form no unwelcome Appendix to your Father's REMARKS upon this his favourite and much-favoured author. I find them, in manufcript, on the blank leaves of a printed copy of those Remarks. They were many years fince drawn up by a late writer; they appear to be equally elegant and judicious; and have never yet been published.

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I am, Sir, your's

B.

SPENSER'S

SPENSER'S FAIRY QUEEN.

INTRODUCTION.

STANZ. I.

'Tis plain Spenfer here imitates thofe four lines, which are sometimes prefixt. to the Eneid, though I can by no means believe them Virgil's.

Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avend
Carmen; et egreffus fylvis, vicina coëgi
Ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono ;
Gratum opus Agricolis: at nunc horrentia Martis
Arma, virumque cano, &c.

In the second stanza, and the fourth, there is a thought, which Milton has borrowed in the beginning of his poem:

What in me is dark,

Illumine: what is low, raise and support.

STANZ.

III.

Horace's requeft to Venus is of the fame fort

with this of Spenfer :

Fervidus tecum Puer, et folutis

Gratia zonis, properentque Nymphe,
Et parum comis fine te Juventas,

Mercuriufque.

8

L. I. Od.

30.

STANZ.

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STANZ. IV.

Afflicted style." Quære, whether it should not be affected? Spenfer, in his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, calls his poem "a continued allegory, or

dark conceit."

BOOK I.

CANTO I. 14.

The light thrown into the dark cave by the armour of the knight, is not unlike what we read in Milton:

A dungeon, horrible on all fides round,

As one great furnace flam'd; yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness vifible

Serv'd only to discover fights of woe.

STANZ.

Par. Loft, I. 61.

XXI.

'Tis well known all rivers are reprefented by old See Grævius on Callim. H. to Delos, v. 71.

men.

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The poet has a fimile, B. 11. C. 1x. 16. from gnats, with an expreffion or two fimilar to this.

High on a hill is a circumstance beautifully imagined. Homer, Il. A. 275. fays,

Ως δ' ότ' απο σκοπιῆς εἶδεν νέφος αιπόλος ανήρ.

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See the beginning of Theocritus' first Idyll.
Αδυ τι τὸ ψιθύρισμα και ο πίτυς, αἰπίλε, τήνα,
“Α πολὶ ταῖς παγᾶισι, μελίσδεξαι.

The humming of bees is very frequently mentioned in Theocritus, whose word is the most beautiful for it that can be conceived:-v. 107.

Ωδε καλὸν βομβεύντι ποὶ σμάνεσσι μέλισσαι.

See Homer II. B. 87. and Æneid. I. 433. VI

709.

Strepit omnis murmure campus.

STANZ. XLIII. &c.

All this business of the dream is plainly borrowed from Homer. Spenfer fays the dream,

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The immediate place whence Spenfer took his description of the trees, in Stanza 8. I fuppofe is Stanza 75. and 76. of Taffo's Jerufalem, Book III. See Fairfax's tranflation.

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