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deringly translated as it apparently is. This, I admit, is the worst failure of Spenser in this kind ; though, even here, when he gets on to the organs of the mind, the enchantments of his fancy and style come to the rescue and put us in good-humor again, hard as it is to conceive of armed knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking with such visionary damsels as Ambition and Shamefastness. Nay, even in the most prosy parts, unless my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopœia which half beguiles us, as of children who play that everything is something else, and are quite satisfied with the transformation.

The problem for Spenser was a double one: how to commend poetry at all to a generation which thought it effeminate trifling, and how he, Master Edmund Spenser, of imagination all compact, could commend his poetry to Master John Bull, the most practical of mankind in his habitual mood, but at that moment in a passion of religious anxiety about his soul. Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci was not only an irrefragable axiom because a Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met the case in point. He would convince the scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master Bull his new way of making fine words butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then practised, was imagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and illustrated with cuts,

1 See Sidney's Defence, and Puttenham's Art of English Poesy, Book I. c. 8.

and would thus serve both his ethical and pictorial purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he proceeded to put forth; but he so bordered it with bright-colored fancies, he so often filled whole pages and crowded the text hard in others with the gay frolics of his pencil, that, as in the Grimani missal, the holy function of the book is forgotten in the ecstasy of its adornment. Worse than all, does not his brush linger more lovingly along the rosy contours of his sirens than on the modest wimples of the Wise Virgins? "The general end of the book," he tells us in his Dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh, "is to fashion a gentleman of noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." But a little further on he evidently has a qualm, as he thinks how generously he had interpreted his promise of cuts: "To some I know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at large,1 as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devices." Lord Burleigh was of this way of thinking, undoubtedly, but how could poor Clarion help it? Has he not said,

"And whatso else of virtue good or ill,

Grew in this garden, fetcht from far away,
Of every one he takes and tastes at will,

And on their pleasures greedily doth prey"?

One sometimes feels in reading him as if he were the pure sense of the beautiful incarnated to the one end that he might interpret it to our duller per

1 We can fancy how he would have done this by Jeremy Taylor, who was a kind of Spenser in a cassock.

ceptions. So exquisite was his sensibility, that with him sensation and intellection seem identical, and we “can almost say his body thought." This subtle interfusion of sense with spirit it is that gives his poetry a crystalline purity without lack of warmth. He is full of feeling, and yet of such a kind that we can neither say it is mere intellectual perception of what is fair and good, nor yet associate it with that throbbing fervor which leads us to call sensibility by the physical name of heart.

Charles Lamb made the most pithy criticism of Spenser when he called him the poets' poet. We may fairly leave the allegory on one side, for perhaps, after all, he adopted it only for the reason that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his ruff, not because it was becoming, but because it was the only wear. The true use of him is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two at a time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to cloy them. He makes one think always of Venice; for not only is his style Venetian,2 but as

1 Of this he himself gives a striking hint, where speaking in his own person he suddenly breaks in on his narrative with the pas

sionate cry,

"Ah, dearest God, me grant I dead be not defouled."
(Faery Queen, B. I. c. x. 43.)

2 Was not this picture painted by Paul Veronese, for example?

"Arachne figured how Jove did abuse

Europa like a bull, and on his back

Her through the sea did bear:

She seemed still back unto the land to look,

And her playfellows' aid to call, and fear

The dashing of the waves, that up she took

the gallery there is housed in the shell of an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory. And again, as at Venice you swim in a gondola from Gian Bellini to Titian, and from Titian to Tintoret, so in him, where other cheer is wanting, the gentle sway of his measure, like the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats you lullingly along from picture to picture.

"If all the pens that ever poet held

Had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts
Their minds and muses on admirëd themes,
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,

If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness;

Yet should there hover in their restless heads

One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best,
Which into words no virtue can digest."
"1

Spenser at his best, has come as near to expressing this unattainable something as any other poet. He is so purely poet that with him the meaning does not so often modulate the music of the verse as the music makes great part of the meaning and leads

Her dainty feet, and garments gathered near. . . .
Before the bull she pictured winged Love,

With his young brother Sport,

And many nymphs about them flocking round,

And many Tritons which their horns did sound."

(Muiopotmos, 281-296.)

Spenser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599) with this beautiful verse, "Fair Venice, flower of the last world's delight."

Perhaps we should read “lost”?

1 Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I. Act V. 2.

the thought along its pleasant paths. No poet is so splendidly superfluous as he; none knows so well that in poetry enough is not only not so good as a feast, but is a beggarly parsimony. He spends himself in a careless abundance only to be justified by incomes of immortal youth.

verse.

"Pensier canuto nè molto nè poco

Si può quivi albergare in alcun cuore ;

Non entra quivi disagio nè inopia,

Ma vi sta ogn'or col corno pien la Copia.” 1

This delicious abundance and overrunning luxury of Spenser appear in the very structure of his He found the ottava rima too monotonously iterative; so, by changing the order of his rhymes, he shifted the couplet from the end of the stave, where it always seems to put on the brakes with a jar, to the middle, where it may serve at will as a brace or a bridge; he found it not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another line, and then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in which the melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward after that which is to follow. There is no ebb and flow in his metre more than on the shores of the Adriatic, but wave follows wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with and carried forward by the next. In all this there is soothingness indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but a

1 "Grayheaded Thought, nor much nor little, may
Take up its lodging here in any heart;
Unease nor Lack can enter at this door;
But here dwells full-horned Plenty evermore."

(Orl. Fur., c. vi. 73.)

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