and the stream of speech once more let loose, seeks out its old windings, or overflows musically in unpractised channels. The service which Spenser did to our literature by this exquisite sense of harmony is incalculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of barbarous dissonance, his dainty tongue that loves to prolong the relish of a musical phrase, made possible the transition from the cast-iron stiffness of "Ferrex and Porrex" to the Damascus pliancy of Fletcher and Shakespeare.

The language and verse of Spenser at his best have an ideal lift in them, and there is scarce any of our poets who can so hardly help being poetical. Spenser was an epicure in language. He loved "seld-seen costly" words perhaps too well, and did not always distinguish between mere strangeness and that novelty which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some charm of seeming association. He had not the concentrated power which can sometimes pack infinite riches in the little room of a single epithet, for his genius is rather for dilation than compression. But he was, with the exception of Milton and possibly Gray, the most learned of our poets. His familiarity with ancient and modern literature was easy and intimate, and as he perfected himself in his art, he caught the grand manner and highbred ways of the society he frequented. But even to the last he did not quite shake off the blunt rusticity of phrase that was habitual with the generation that preceded him. - LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1875-90, Spenser, Prose Works, Riverside ed., vol. IV, pp. 299, 303, 308.

With all one's allegiance to Spenser, it is trying to feel, much more to think, one's way through the tropically thorny luxuriance of his language. -GROSART, ALEXANDER B., 1876, Memorial Introduction to Giles Fletcher's Poems, p. 50.

Spenser's poetry is indeed the precise antipodes of Pope's, and its tender romance aimed against all those canons of common sense in which Johnson was the sturdiest of believers. For that reason his fairyland was a delightful retreat for poets weary with the prevailing rigidity of form and coldness of sentiment. Steele had tried to bring Spenser into notice in the Tatler" and "Spectator." Thomson's charming "Castle of Indolence"

and Shenstone's "Schoolmistress" were popular echoes of Spenser's style; Beattie makes his "Minstrel" confute Hume in Spenserian stanzas; William Thompson, Gilbert West, the defender of the Resurrection, Lloyd, the friend of Colman, Wilkie, of the "Epigoniad," Mickle, the translator of Camoens, and Cambridge, best known by the "Scribleriad," all wrote imitations of more or less elaborate kind; Collins loved Spenser, and Gray paid him a more discriminating homage than that of sheer imitation, for he never wrote a line himself without attuning his mind by first reading Spenser for a considerable time. Pope himself, it may be noticed, was a lover of Spenser in his boyhood, though a coarse burlesque seems to imply that he regarded him with. no particular reverence. In fact, the poets of the eighteenth century, with one or two exceptions, show a disposition to edge away from the types which they professed to admit as ideally correct.STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, p. 359.

Spenser's perception of beauty of all kinds was singularly and characteristically quick and sympathetic. It was one of his great gifts; perhaps the most special and unstinted. Except Shakespere, who had it with other and greater gifts, no one in that time approached to Spenser, in feeling the presence of that commanding and mysterious idea, compounded of so many things, yet of which the true secret escapes us still, to which we give the name of beauty. A beautiful scene, a beautiful person, a beautiful poem, a mind and character with that combination of charms, which, for want of another word, we call by that half-spiritual, half-material word "beautiful," at once set his imagination at work to respond to it and reflect it. His means of reflecting it were as abundant as his sense of it was keen. They were only too abundant. They often betrayed him by their affluence and wonderful readiness to meet his call.CHURCH, RICHARD WILLIAM, 1879, Spenser, (English Men of Letters), p. 143.

In readiness of descriptive power, in brightness and variety of imagery, and in flow of diction, Chaucer remained unequalled by any English poet, till he was surpassed-it seems not too much to say,

in all three respects-by Spenser. WARD, ADOLPHUS WILLIAM, 1880, Chaucer, (English Men of Letters), p. 168.

No man ever set thought to sweeter music, and there are some who are content with a mere enjoyment of the outward charm of Spenser's manner, as if that were all. But Spenser was the Elizabethan Milton, Puritan like Milton with no narrow zeal against the innocent delights of life, but with grand yearning for the victory of man over all that opposed his maintenance of a pure soul obedient to God in a pure body obedient to the laws of Nature. Shakespeare was universal poet. He saw through the accidents of life to its essentials. But the accidents of his time are never out of Spenser's verse. He is a combatant poet.-MORLEY, HENRY, 1881, Of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria, p. 31.

To Chaucer a beautiful woman is a beautiful creature of this good earth, and is often nothing more; her beauty suddenly slays the tender heart of her lover, or she makes glad the spirit of man as though with some light, bright wine. She is more blissful to look on than "the new perjonette tree," and softer than the wether's wool; her mouth is sweet as "apples laid in hay or heath;" her body is gent and small as any weasel. For Spenser behind each woman, made to worship or to love, rises a sacred presence -womanhood itself. Her beauty of face and limb is but a manifestation of the invisible beauty, and this is of one kin with the Divine Wisdom and the Divine Love. In the poet of Edward's reign a gay and familiar side of chivalry is presented, which existed in life and in art and literature along with that chivalry which was the mysticism of human passion. The more modern poet retains of chivalry only what is exalted, serious, and tender. DOWDEN, EDWARD, 1887, Transcripts and Studies, p. 305.

He is one of those few who can challenge the title of "greatest English poet, and the reader may almost of right demand the opinion on this point of any one who writes about him. For my part I have no intention of shirking the difficulty. It seems to me that putting Shakespere aside as hors concours, not merely in degree but in kind, only two English poets can challenge Spenser for the primacy.

These are Milton and Shelley. The poet of "The Faerie Queene" is generally inferior to Milton in the faculty of concentration, and in the minting of those monumental phrases, impressive of themselves and quite apart from the context, which often count highest in the estimation of poetry. His vocabulary and general style, if not more remote from the vernacular, have sometimes a touch of deliberate estrangement from that vernacular which is no doubt of itself a fault. His conception of a great work is looser, more excursive, less dramatic. As compared with Shelley he lacks not merely the modern touches which appeal to a particular age, but the lyrical ability in which Shelley has no equal among English poets. But in each case he redeems these defects with, as it seems to me, far more than He is never counterbalancing merits.

prosaic as Milton, like his great successor Wordsworth constantly is, and his very faults are the faults of a poet. He never (as Shelley does constantly) dissolves away into a flux of words which simply bids good-bye to sense or meaning, and wanders on at large, unguided, without an end, without an aim. SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 93.

And thus the first poet of the new era was yet more emphatically the last poet of the old - at once the morning star of England's later, and the evening star of her earlier literature. Where Spenser is himself, the greatness of his ideal hangs around his poetry like the halo round the head of a saint. His poetry has that gift without which all others, including even that of imagination itself, leaves it but a maimed and truncated thing-a torso without a head. It has a soul. In this respect Spenser was as like Tasso as he was unlike Ariosto, whom he too often imitated, but from whom he derived little save harm.

I cannot but believe that those stains on the surface of Spenser's poetry which, though seldom snares to moral principle, are serious insults to moral taste, and need to be stepped over like bad spots on a road, came to him from the coarseness of the age in which he lived, and to which the great Elizabethan drama, excepting in the main Shakespeare, bears so deplorable a witness.-DE VERE, AUBREY, 1887, Essays Chiefly on Poetry, vol. 1, pp. 3, 4, 21.

O master, it was not on oaten reeds
Thou madest music for the world's delight,
Nor yet on Pan's shrill pipe didst thou e'er
Aute;

To sing of courtly grace and lordly deeds,
Of lovely Una and the Redcross Knight,
Behold! thou hadst Apollo's silver lute.
-KENYON, JAMES B., 1892, At the Gate
of Dreams, p. 326.

No English poets have surpassed Spenser, in a melodious marshalling of words. CORSON, HIRAM, 1892, A Primer of English Verse, p. 87.

Spenser stands alone, the one supremely great undramatic poet of a play-writing time. In his youth he had, indeed, composed nine comedies, now lost, but the quality of his genius was apart from the dramatic temper of his greatest poetical contemporaries. With a wonderful richness and fluency of poetic utterance, with the painter's feeling for color, and the musician's ear for melody, Spenser lacked the sense of humor, the firm grasp of actual life, indispensable to the successful dramatist.-PANCOAST, HENRY S., 1893, Representative English Literature, p. 80.

Of all the nobly endowed men of his time he was the most spiritual. One feels in him that marvelous identification of the saint and the artist which gives the work of Fra Angelico a kind of spiritual radiance.-MABIE, HAMILTON WRIGHT, 1893, Short Studies in Literature, p. 126.

The opulence of Spenser's muse will always be the despair of the anthologist. -QUILLER-COUCH, A. T., 1894, The Golden Pomp, p. 334, note.

Heaven pardon me! I do not care much for Spenser.-LOCKER-LAMPSON, FREDERICK, 1895, My Confidences, p. 177.

Great poet as Spenser was, yet his landscape dissappoints us. It seems to form an exception we might perhaps call it a reaction from the general quality of the English Nature-poetry we have been surveying. PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TURNER, 1896, Landscape in Poetry, p. 133.

Generally speaking, during the first half of the seventeenth century the genius of the author of the "Faerie Queene" is a far more potent influence in English literature than that of the author of "Hamlet." MULLINGER, J. BASS, 1897, The Age of Milton, by Masterman, Introduction, p. xv.

The place of Spenser in the History of Poetry is a very peculiar one. He cannot

be ranked with the great poets whose universal ideas, applicable to human nature in all times and places, raised them to the empyrean of imagination-with Homer and Dante and Shakespeare. He cannot be ranked with that great, though secondary, order of inventors whose penetrating insight pierces through the outward shows surrounding them in their own age to the ideal truth of things—with ChauIn most recer, Ariosto, and Cervantes. spects his position in the world of imagination is analogous to the position of Sidney in the world of action. Both were inspired by ideals springing out of a decaying order of society; and the same environment of circumstance which prevented Sidney from putting his theories of knighthood into practice gave an appearance of unreality to Spenser's epical conceptions. Whatever virtue

there is in the subject-matter of Spenser's poetry, proceeds not from the ideas themselves so much as from the mind of the poet.-COURTHOPE, W. J., 1897, A History of English Poetry, vol. II, p. 283.

It is neither possible ncr wise to attempt here a catalogue of books especially adapted to children. I should myself put Spenser high in the list.-BATES, ARLO, 1897, Talks on the Study of Literature, p. 197.

Lyrics in these forms reach their chief perfection, perhaps, in the more literary poets, such as Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Browne, Drummond, and Milton. In Spenser's "Epithalamion" and the "Four Hymns," especially, is exemplified what has been called the Greater Lyric, the long-breathed lyric of elaborate involutions in subject-matter and in metrical form, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is represented principally by the formal ode, Pindaric and otherwise. No one in English has managed this difficult form of art with such constancy of poetic inspiration, and such unfailing harmony of the parts and of the whole, as has Spenser. CARPENTER, FREDERIC IVES, 1897, English Lyric Poetry, 1500–1700, Introduction, p. xxxvii.

Spenser's poetry is the very mirror of the times at their best. Its bright and chivalric spirit scorns money as much as it cherishes what money brings. - SCUDDER, VIDA D., 1898, Social Ideas in English Letters, p. 83.

Born about 1530: died about 1600.

For though the poore gentleman laboreth greatly to proue, or rather to make Poetrie an art, and reciteth as you may see in the plural number, some pluralities of patterns, and parcels of his owne Poetrie, with diuers pieces of Partheniads and hymnes in praise of the most praisworthy; yet whatsoever he would proue by all these, sure in my poore opinion he doth proue nothing more plainly, then that which M. Sidney and all the learneder sort that haue written of it, do pronounce, namely that it is a gift and not an art, I say he proueth it, because making himselfe and so manie others so cunning in the art, yet he sheweth himselfe so slender a gift in it. HARRINGTON, SIR JOHN, 1591, Orlando Furioso, Preface.

Of the dignity of Poetry much hath beene said by the worthy Sir Philipp Sidney, and by the gentleman which proved that Poets were the first Politicians, the first Philisophers, the first Historiographers. CAMDEN, WILLIAM, 1605, Remaines of Greater Works concerning Britaine, etc. Queen Elizabeth's verses, those which I have seen and read, some extant in the elegant, witty and artificial Book of the "Art of English Poetrie," the work as the fame is of one of her gentlemen-pensioners, Puttenham, are Princely, as her prose.-BOLTON, EDMUND, 1624, Hyper

critica.

It contains many pretty observations, examples, characters, and fragments of poetry for those times, now nowhere else to be met with.-OLDYS, WILLIAM, 1738, Life of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Puttenham was a candid but sententious critic. What his observations want in argument is made up for by the soundness of his judgment; and his conclusions, notwithstanding their brevity, are just and pertinent. HASELEWOOD, JOSEPH, 1811, The Arte of English Poetry, Preface, Ancient Critical Essays, vol. 1, p. xi.

By far the most valuable work which was published in the province of criticism, during the life-time of Shakspeare, was

written by George Puttenham.-DRAKE, NATHAN, 1817, Shakspeare and his Times, vol. I, p. 465.

Puttenham is perhaps the first who wrote a well-measured prose: in his "Art of English Poesie," published in 1589, he is elaborate, studious of elevated and chosen expression, and rather diffuse, in the manner of the Italians of the sixteenth century, who affected that fulness of style, and whom he probably meant to imitate. In some passages of Puttenham, we find an approach to the higher province of philosophical criticism. - HALLAM, HENRY, 1837-39, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, vol. II, pt. ii, ch. vii, par. 9, 34.

Was this critic qualified by nature and art to arbitrate on the destines of the Muses? Were his taste and sensibility commensurate with that learning which dictated with authority, and that ingenuity which reared into a system the diversified materials of his critical fabric? We hesitate to allow the claims of a critic whose trivial taste values "the courtly trifles," which he calls "pretty devices," among the inventions of poesy; we are startled by his elaborate exhibition of "geometrical figures in verse;" his delight in egg or oval poems, tapering at the ends, and round in the middle; and his columnar verse, whose pillars, shaft, and capital can be equally read upwards and downwards. This critic, too, has betrayed his utter penury of invention in "parcels of his own poetry," obscure conceits in barbarous rhymes; by his intolerable "triumphals," poetical speeches for recitation; and a series of what he calls "partheniades, or new-year's gifts,"-bloated eruptions of those hyperbolical adulations which the maiden queen could endure, but which bear the traces of the poetaster holding some appointment at court. When the verse flowed beyond the mechanism of his rule of scanning, and the true touch of nature beyond the sympathy of his own emotions, the rhetorician showed

the ear of Midas.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1841, The Arte of English Poesie, Amenities of Literature.

The most valuable part of this work is that which treats of the formal requisites of poetry, and especially of versification, because it throws a good deal of light on the pronunciation of that age-a subject respecting which we are far from being well informed. When, however, we compare these chapters of Puttenham with what had long before been accomplished in the Romance languages in the same branch of criticism for example, with for example, with the Provencal Flors del Gay Saber, estier dichas Las Leys d'Amors, of the fourteenth century, published by Gatien Arnoult we must admit that the technicalities of the poetic art, if instinctively practised, had been as yet but imperfectly discussed in England. - MARSH, GEORGE P., 1862, Origin and History of the English Language, etc., p. 552.

It must ever be remembered that this Ladies' book was first published anonymously; that the printer was or feigned to be in ignorance of its Author; that similarly Sir John Harington, in 1591, only refers to him as "that unknowne Godfather, that this last yeare saue on, viz. 1589, set forth a booke called the 'Arte of English Poesie,'" and again as that "same Ignoto;" and lastly, that the authorship of the work was never openly claimed by any of Elizabeth's contemporaries. —ARBER, ARBER, EDWARD, 1869, Puttenham, English Reprints, p. 3.

Has given us the most complete and elaborate Elizabethan treatise of its kind. He upholds the dignity and universality of poetry, and affirms, with entire confidence, the possibility of an art of English poetry, as complete and as perfect as that of either Greece or Rome. While drawing many of his illustrations, both historical and other, from the classic and foreign authors, he does not hesitate to give

his judgment of the previous English poets, although in this, as we have seen above, greatly limited, as to his contemporaries, by his courtly vision. In Puttenham's second book we have an intelligent and systematic presentation of the subject of the art of versifying, in which not a few of the real principles underlying the subject are clearly set forth. If the chatty old critic does go off into a needlessly particular examination of the carmina figurata anagram and other curiosities, we can pardon him for the humor and good sense which form the two pervading traits of this engaging book. SCHELLING, FELIX E., 1891, Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth, p. 94.

The writer shows wide knowledge of classical and Italian literature; in his sections on rhetoric and prosody he quotes freely from Quintilian and other Classical writers, and bestows commendation on English poets that is often discriminating. He may fairly be regarded as the first English writer who attempted philosophical criticism of literature or claimed for the literary profession a high position in social economy. Compared with it, Webbe's "Discourse of English Poetry" (1586) and Sidney's "Apologie for English Poesie," first published in 1595, are very slight performances. The "Arte" at once acquired a reputation. - LEE, SIDNEY, 1896, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XLVII, p. 64.

Puttenham, who quotes his own verse freely and seems to have written it fairly in the stiffer manner of the first half of the reign, is rather a formalist, but his judgment, when he can get it out of stays, is not contemptible. The book is very full, learned, and careful, the work of a scholar and a gentleman, and far exceeding in detail and scope anything of the kind that was written for ages afterwards. -SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p. 306.