subject. Some of our statesmen would do well to follow the Earl of Chatham's example; if they read the "Faerie Queene" occasionally, they would not have to trust to the reporters to make their jagged utterances smooth and continuous. Good John Wesley had many foolish fancies respecting education, and therefore one is all the better pleased to find him, with his shrewd, practical sagacity, recommending this great allegory to his divinity students.

STANLEY. Not even for the sake of an argument dare I say one word derogatory to the genius of Spenser; so it seems we are all agreed to love and honour this noble poet. In this hasty, restless age his great poem does not meet with half the praise it merits. Every long poem is considered tedious; every imaginative work that requires earnest study, in order that it may be understood and appreciated, is consigned at once to the oblivion of our uppermost shelves. We expect our authors to be brilliant, epigrammatic, laconic, and that they should amuse and instruct us without any fatigue or trouble to ourselves in the process. We possess, doubtless, more varied knowledge than our forefathers were able to gain; but the wisdom that is to be won from a thoughtful, brooding sympathy with minds of highest power, and from a searching quest into our own heart's secrets, is seldom acquired, and very rarely appreciated. Look at some of the most popular religious literature of the present day. How barren it is in thought, how loaded with interjections and ejaculations, with slang phrases and stereotyped expressions.

HARTLEY. This is scarcely just, Stanley. Remember

that the blessings of Christianity are offered to the poor, the ignorant, the weak-minded.

STANLEY. And what then?

HARTLEY. You should not despise a literature which answers to the wants of the half-ignorant or wholly uninformed, even though it prove of no service to a mind that is carefully cultivated, and richly endowed.

STANLEY. You mistake me altogether. God forbid that I should speak slightingly of the most humble effort to spread a knowledge of His truth. I am alluding only to what I cannot but regard as nothing less than pretentious clap-trap, or at best a sky-blue exposition of certain dogmas which the author has always ready at hand, cut and dried, on the shelf of his brain; dogmas which have been accepted without thought, and almost without reason. One feels certain that by writers of this stamp, and by the readers who patronise them, Spenser's great poem, instead of being regarded as a deeply religious work, will be either slighted as frivolous, or condemned as improper.

HARTLEY. Certes, the "Faerie Queene " was not framed for popularity, and never can be popular; but, if it does not reach the bulk of the reading public, it has had more influence over our greatest minds, than any other imaginative work in the language.

TALBOT. What really great poem ever does "reach the bulk of the reading public?" A true poem may sometimes be vastly popular, but never, I take it, for its intrinsic poetic worth. Have you seen Mr. Craik's small volumes on Spenser and his poetry?

STANLEY. I have just dipped into them, but no more.

The work seemed to me a clever attempt to achieve an impossibility. "Luxuriant, remote Spenser-immortal child in poetry's most poetic solitudes," how can such exquisite dreams as thine ever be revealed in all their loveliness to the popular mind; or how, by retaining only so much of thy verse as may seem "most worthy of note," can the true idea of thy work in all its varied perfection be in any wise presented to the mind?

TALBOT. Your glance at Craik's book has not given you a fair notion of its purport. It is certain that a poem containing about 35,000 lines, is likely to lose a great many readers (capable, up to a certain point, of appreciating it), solely on account of its length. Is it not better, then, that these readers should learn something of the poem in a compendium, than remain ignorant of it altogether? Mr. Craik has done his work admirably, and shows by his discriminative criticism that he has attempted it in no irreverent spirit. "The student of poetry," he says, will of course keep to the work as Spenser wrote it; and our compendium will assuredly withdraw no readers from the original, but may send some to it. Let it be regarded as like an engraved copy on a reduced scale of a great painting; or as only an introduction to the study of the 'Fairy Queen'-a porch to that magnificent temple; still it has its use."

I should like to read you one or two extracts from Mr. Craik's work. He does not indulge in criticism at any length, but what he does say is pointed and appreciative. Take the following for example :

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Spenser is surely one of the greatest painters in words; diffuse and florid, no doubt, rather than energetic and expres

sive; but of what affluence and prodigality of power and resources in his own style; of what inexhaustible ingenuity and invention; of what flowing freedom of movement; of how deep and exquisite a sense of beauty! He is, indeed, distinctly and pre-eminently the Poet of the Beautiful. Of the purely beautiful, as consisting simply in form and colour, his poetry is the richest storehouse in the literature of the world. But Spenser's poetry is full also of the spirit of moral beauty. It is not a passionate song, but yet it is both earnest and lighttoned, and it is pervaded by a quiet tenderness that is always soothing, often touching. A heart of gentleness and nobleness ever lives and beats in it. With all its unworldliness, too, it breathes throughout a thoughtful wisdom, which looks deep even into human things, and oftenest sad and pitying, is yet also sometimes stern."

This is fine criticism, is it not? The remarks, too, on Spenser's versification, are equally truthful, and have besides a dash of humour in them.

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Spenser's verse is the most abundantly musical in English poetry. Even Milton's, more scientific and elaborate, and also rising at times to more volume and grandeur of tone, has not so rich a natural sweetness and variety, or so deep a pathos. His poetry swims in music. He winds his way through stanza after stanza of his spacious song, more like one actually singing than writing, borne along it might seem almost without effort or thought, reminding us of his own Lady of the Idle Lake in her magic gondelay, that,

"Away did slide

More swift than swallow shears the liquid sky,

Withouten oar or pilot it to guide,

Or winged canvas with the wind to fly ;
Only she turned a pin, and by and by
It cut away upon the yielding wave.
Nor cared she her course for to apply;

For it was taught the way which she would have,
And both from rocks and flats itself could wisely save.'

"It must be confessed, indeed, that from rocks and flats Spenser does not always wisely save himself; he not unfrequently runs against both the one and the other; but it is wonderful to see how little he minds such an accident, when it occurs. He gets always off in some way or other, and he takes apparently not the least trouble or forethought to avoid the same thing another time. On he floats, singing away as if nothing had happened, after the narrowest conceivable escape from being run aground or stove in. His treatment of words upon such occasions is like nothing that ever was seen, unless it might be Hercules breaking the back of the Nemean lion. He gives them any sense and any shape that the case may demand. Sometimes he merely alters a letter or two; sometimes he twists off the head or the tail of the unfortunate vocable altogether. In short, it is evident that he considers his prerogative in such matters to be unlimited. But this fearless, lordly, truly royal state in which he proceeds, makes one only feel the more how easily, if he chose, he could avoid the necessity of having recourse to such outrages. After all, they do not occur so frequently as much to mar the beauty of his verse. The more brilliant passages of the poem are for the most part free from them. Perhaps they sometimes heighten the general effect, upon one of his own favourite principles that 'discord oft in music makes the sweeter lay.' At the worst they are little wilfulnesses for which none who love him at all will love him the less."

STANLEY. I like that. Poets are the absolute rulers over language, and may use words as it likes them. A few petty wilfulnesses, the result of an unlimited prerogative, can well be forgiven, especially by us Englishmen ; for all the force and harmony and sweetness of our language have been brought into play by the poets. In their hands, how marvellous an instrument it becomes !

HARTLEY. Sage remarks, no doubt, but by no means to the point, which is indeed true of all which has been