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A. OLUTE CRITICISM ^^ 
 
 The ■'■''" -'r. By 
 
 -> SPENSEK .^,^^_^, 
 
 la,meg 
 
 zas ; 
 ibiicatioi l^Q^gh 
 
 logy. Berkeley, U.S.A. The University Press. |1.) ticism 
 
 Mr. Cory, avowedly in quest of the " absolute method of » ,, 
 criticism," provides us with an illuminating experiment. He . , 
 attempts to put before us the true estimate of Spenser by a , ,. -. 
 comparative study of the judgments that literary criticism . , 
 has produced during the three centuries since the poet's , 
 
 time. He is of course fortunate in his example, for few of ' „,, 
 the great English writers have endured the whole history . 
 of English Literary Criticism, or have weathered the chang- ' .' 
 ing climates of so many eras and thought-movements. We ^ ^ ' 
 stand now at a very convenient remove from Spenser's day, .. ' 
 and it would be a much more difficult, if equally fascinating, ,' 
 
 task to determine in like manner the quality, say, of Brown- , 
 
 ing, or even of Shelley. Nevertheless, that the method is , 
 
 instructive and valuable appears abundantly in the course of ' 
 Mr. Cory's present study. ^ . 
 
 Criticism is apt to be biassed not only by the individual ^ p ii 
 taste of the critic, but also by that indefinable Zeitgeist which ^ ^^ . 
 works so subtly in all ages. The very qualities which are , 
 the worship of one age are often the execration of the next. ' . 
 Spenser's poetry was born in what the essayist calls the Age ^ ,' 
 of Enthusiasm. It was the dawn of a National Literature, ^^ , 
 when anything English was greeted with whole-hearted' 
 praise. There is scarcely a dissonant note, therefore, in all 7^^ , 
 the chorus of adulation which characterises the period imme- 
 diately succeeding Spenser's own time. It is extravagant 
 with a unanimity that is nowadays rare. One admirer 
 places him forthright with Theocritus and Virgil, while l Spenser 
 another pits him bravely against the world; even shrewd with the 
 Drayton couples him with Homer. link this 
 
 Then, as a natural reaction, comes an Age of Reason, when ©verse of 
 the real spirit of criticism awakes. Rugged Ben Jonson ^mporary 
 leads the way, and Spenser's archaisms, his disregard of the "*^^y ^^ 
 caesura, his didactic tone, and his allegorical method, all ^^' . ® 
 come in for adverse discussion. The break-up of the old ®P^®^^^^ 
 ideals follows with what Mr. Cory distinguishes as the Age , 
 
 of Literary Anarchy. He makes the chaos of this period ^■, i^ 
 the subject of a piquant parallel : — rr- g^g^^ 
 
 It is a breach of decorum now to try to believe less than ^ "educed 
 five conflicting theories at once. . . . Science has'^® admire 
 destroyed religion, we wail. But never was the world so full ^^^^} ^^^" 
 of creeds, innumerable variations of Christianity, the ^iiction of 
 worship of mankind, the worship of the superman, the 
 worship of the Unknown God, neo-paganism, the religion of iricanism, 
 a literary man, the religion of an undergraduate, the reli- are mis- 
 ' gioii of the free-thinking proprietor of a country grocery ga,y hides 
 store. We have a magnificent choice. We preach ^^i flaws 
 demcaracy and practise oligarchy. . . . Never was the [j^terested 
 hun^an mind in a more active and a more healthy state. So 
 
return as to deserve a continuance of her kindness, a 
 "* ( is ill health had very much affected hi'? • 
 iig, yet he had still enough to make him i 
 
 '. /are she had of him, and there is nothing /i^ - 
 . _^i ,j>^e as the parting with an old friend. .. .^^ 
 
 The book is embellished with many good pox A^aHs. 
 genealogical tree showing the connection between 
 William Temple and Lord Palmerston closes the volui 
 with which one is sincerely sorry to part. 
 
 A HANDBOOK OF GOTHIC ART 
 
 Oothic Architecture in England and France. By the R 
 G. H. West. (G. Bell and Sons. 6s. net.) 
 
 In the preface this book is described as a handbook rat! 
 
 than an encyclopaedia. Its author is a clergyman, and a 
 
 an architect. Its essential feature is an appreciation of 
 
 historic parallelism of Gothic methods in England i 
 
 France, including a comparison of the divergencies in des 
 
 and detail of Gothic structures in the allied countries. G 
 
 introduction contains an interesting discussion of the p 
 
 blem of church building from the point of view of 
 
 material locally available. Owing to the difficulties i 
 
 cost of transport, the early architect was, of coui 
 
 largely dependent on the district of his labours for the i 
 
 material to be used in construction. In cases in which th 
 
 obstacles were overcome, and exotic stone, &c., were employ 
 
 we have evidence of growing wealth and enterprise. 1 
 
 present writer has at the moment to deal with the probl 
 
 of constructing a railway in close vicinity to a noble Got 
 
 cathedral. His first glance at Mr. West's book was the 
 
 fore to see if the word " foundations " occurred in 
 
 Index. It does not, and the author is silent on t 
 
 branch of his subject. It may perhaps be argued that 
 
 design of typical structures does not necessarily involv 
 
 discussion of the varying conditions of platform on wh 
 
 such structures are intended to rest. Part I. of the b< 
 
 consists of four admirable chapters devoted to details 
 
 design. In Part II. the author attacks his subject from 
 
 historical side. With great skill he draws the moral of 
 
 inbred idealism of the Latin race type, as reflected in Fre: 
 
 Gothic architecture, comparing this with the invetei 
 
 makeshift of the Teuton, as illustrated by correspond 
 
 church work on this side of the Channel. The auth< 
 
 nearest approach to a definition of the principles of Got 
 
 art is given on page 199, where he states four canons of c 
 
 atruction, in which he says the race characteristics of 
 
 Norman builder are enshrined. Few will agree with A. 
 
 CloucT^ 
 
 < ome, leave your Gothic worn-out st^^ry, ^■ 
 an Giorgio and the Eedentore, 
 from no building gay or solemn 
 
 Jan spare the shapely Grecian column. 
 
it was at the close of the sevente' 
 lujah ! " shouted the Elizabethaus. ' ;• 
 the rationaUsts. After that the dehige. 
 
 Many distinct schools began- to form, : een thelfi all 
 
 Spenser's importance begins to wane ; ^vitts i\\e emergence, 
 of Dry den, however, comes a more distinct note. He blames 
 Spenser's lack of unity, and the ** ill choice of his stanzas ; " 
 but judges him " established in " his " reputation," though 
 here again the queer distortion of contemporary criticism 
 appears in his naming Waller as superior to Spenser. 
 
 The interest of the subject deepens with the rise of the 
 Neo-Classicism. Mr. Cory claims that Spenser exercised a 
 greater influence on the Augustans than he afterwards did 
 on the Romanticists ; in reality each age took only a partial 
 view of the poet — that, of course, which best suited it — and 
 it is curious to compare the respective judgments. The 
 Neo-Classicists emphasised beauties in Spenser that were lost 
 on the Romanticists, The former loved his fidelity to Virgil, 
 and deplored his " debauchery " by Ariosto ; while the latter, 
 when their day came, praised him for his debt to the Italians, 
 and regretted his Latin " blemishes." His didactic tone and 
 his allegorical method are his chief excellences to the 
 Augustans. But when the Romantic Revival came, the 
 boot was on the other leg. He is now sought " rather as a 
 poet of ardent emotion and sensuous glow than as a poet of 
 vast moral visions " ; his appeal is to the " feelings of the 
 heart rather than the cold approbation of the head." He is 
 even conceived as a true Romanticist blushing for his enthu- 
 siasm, and cloaking his romance in morals to hide his shame. 
 
 There is no attempt at a conclusive summary or final 
 statement on the part of the essayist ; he leaves the reader 
 to form his own judgment. His own leanings, however, are 
 sufficiently apparent. He has no sympathies with the 
 modern cult of VArt pour VArt : indeed, he often pauses to 
 launch a bolt at the doctrine. 
 
 Our present-day romanticists sometimes look upon Si)enser 
 askance because of his idealism, and sum it up with the 
 accusation that he has no human interest. They think this 
 because present-day romanticism often means the reverse of 
 idealism. . . . It is certainly true that contemporary 
 romanticists need a revival of sentimentalism as badly as 
 the eighteenth century, though for a different reason. The 
 Augustans were hard because they believed in repression 
 and glittering reason. Present-day romanticists are hard 
 because they are jaded and do not respond to normal 
 emotions. And better for us than sentimentalism would be 
 the beautiful idealism of Edmund Spenser. His sweet 
 leisureliness would cure us of our literary dyspepsia induced 
 by our breathless short- story technique which we admire 
 with such blind exclusiveness. His profound moral con- 
 sciousness would impress us again with the high function of 
 poetry and make us laugh at Art for Art's sake. 
 
 We are occasionally startled by a queer Americanism, 
 such as " disgruntled " (!) and " nearby." There are mis- 
 prints on pp. 125, 133, and 134 — where Allan Ramsay hides 
 under the alias of " Aamsay ; " but these are small flaws, 
 and the essay is well worth reading to all who are interested 
 in literary criticism. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS 
 
 IN 
 
 MODERN PHILOLOGY 
 
 Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 81-t82 June 30, 1911 
 
 THE CRITICS OF EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 BY 
 
 HERBERT E. CORY 
 
 BERKELEY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS 
 
 IN 
 
 MODERN PHILOLOGY 
 
 Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 81-182 June 30, 191 1 
 
 THE CRITICS OF EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 BY 
 
 HEEBEET E. COEY. 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Absolute Criticism. A Foreword 81 
 
 II. The Age of Enthusiasm and Spenser-Worship 89 
 
 III. The Age of Eeason and the Eise of Literary Criticism 98 
 
 rV. The Age of Literary Anarchy 106 
 
 V. The Neo-Classical Despotism 127 
 
 VI. The Triumph of Eomanticism 159 
 
 ABSOLUTE CRITICISM. A FOREWORD 
 
 No age, by its own resources alone, can appreciate the many 
 sides of a supreme poet. How can we then escape from the nar- 
 rowness of our times and gain a really large and adequate appre- 
 ciation of our Titans? For some time I have been meditating 
 upon an absolute method in criticism — a scheme by which our 
 own estimate of a poet may be modified and enriched through 
 a study of his critics in the ages previous to our own. We can- 
 not test the poet and our glittering generalities by the superior 
 wisdom of unborn generations. But we can subject our ideas to 
 a most severe examination in the light of the wisdom of a spacious 
 past — a wisdom which I do not think, despite my belief in human 
 progress, will be ever improved in fundamentals as long as 
 
 2t(lRao 
 
82 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 mankind has the fundamental habits of loving, hating, and of 
 occasionally enjoying poetry. Spenser, for instance, will be thor- 
 oughly appreciated for the first time when we learn what the men 
 of consequence in his own days and since have thought of him 
 and when we place our own ideas, warped by our times and our 
 personalities, in a proper perspective. But I hear a still, small 
 voice saying that even this cannot be absolute criticism, that my 
 investigations cannot be absolutely exhaustive, that I cannot 
 absolutely escape from my own personality. I recognize the 
 the presence of this voice, but I scorn it. In an age whose chief 
 disease is doubt I will not administer to the widespread evil by 
 apologizing for the grandiloquence of my phrase — absolute 
 criticism. Nor am I tormented by the popular disease of the 
 academic mind, the absurd worry as to whether my idea of abso- 
 lute criticism is old or new. The only thing that disturbs me is 
 that absolute criticism, because it involves some dreary citation, 
 partakes too much of the nature of the catalogue to be as pleas- 
 urable and therefore as profitable as impressionistic criticism. 
 Yet I believe that my method has a right to exist as a sister of 
 the more artistic method. I purpose, therefore, to recount the 
 history of Spenserian criticism and its significance in relation to 
 our opinion of Spenser to-day. 
 
 Of the Golden Age of English literature, the Age of Enthu- 
 siasm, I will say little, for the moment, because it is well under- 
 stood by all lovers of good English books. Volcanic floods of 
 rhetoric on the subject now harden and glisten in countless 
 volumes. It is enough to remember that in the spacious days of 
 Queen Elizabeth Shakespeare made the splendors of English 
 history move in a vast, heroic pageant across a little wooden 
 stage. It was the age of Spenser-worship because the English 
 worshipped everything English. It has long been a popular 
 superstition among the ignorant and the learned that great poets 
 are not appreciated in their own day. It is true, as I have said, 
 that they are not completely appreciated, but nothing could be 
 more ill-supported by evidence than the notion that they are not 
 appreciated by contemporaries within certain limits. It is. true 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 83 
 
 that the world often allows a great poet to go threadbare because 
 the w^orld has a disgusting habit of being loth to pay for 
 what it can get free. But the world is always liberal in the 
 appreciation of great poets, even in their own age. As a matter 
 of fact, poets are generally more heartily if less shrewdly appre- 
 ciated in their own day than later. Shakespeare, for instance, 
 when we make due allowance for the freer intercourse of nations 
 and the increase of cheap editions and text-books was much more 
 widely appreciated in his own day than in this. He is a fairly 
 popular poet now except with certain critics who have grown 
 ashamed of our sturdy English worship and who point out, with 
 breathless pseudo-radicalism, the faults that we all have long 
 known and indulgently loved. For thousands he is a delectable 
 bundle of aphorisms. Whether the words are taken from the 
 mouth of Desdemona or lago, Hamlet or Polonius, they are 
 quoted as Scripture with that damnable label, ** Shakespeare 
 says — '\ But compare with these days when Shakespeare is occas- 
 ionally ' ' revived ' ' on the stage the times when Shakespeare was a 
 living force in the theatres, when he was talked about in the 
 adjoining stews, when his words held fine nobles and dirty 
 apprentices, when, despite the jealousies of the craft, he was 
 loved by many a fellow-writer. Take another example. For a 
 long time the misanthrope could tell us, with cloudy brow, how 
 insignificant was the fame of Milton in his own day. But recent 
 scholarship has dispelled the fantasy. Provided that a poet is 
 supreme, provided that his worth is dazzlingly undeniable, the 
 world has always been ready to nourish a starving poet with 
 appreciation to the choking point. Now Phineas Fletcher wrote a 
 rhetorical alexandrine about Spenser which runs : 
 
 *' Poorly — poore man — he liv'd; poorly — poore man — he di'd" 
 And Ben Jonson, when he was delightfully sour and fantastical, 
 told Drummond wild tales of Spenser's poverty and misery. 
 Many more spread the myths. Hence some students of English 
 literature have taken it for granted that Spenser was of little 
 consequence to his contemporaries. Whether Spenser could rea- 
 sonably complain to his empty purse is a matter which biogra- 
 
84 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 phers have yet to settle. But I will show presently that it was 
 the age of Spenser-worship as it was the age of worship of all 
 things English. 
 
 Then came the Age of Reason, and England developed a real 
 literary criticism for the first time. When we find Davenant and 
 others complaining about certain defects in the Faerie Queene we 
 must not say, as some have said, that Spenser had fallen into the 
 hands of the Philistines. We must ask ourselves whether these 
 censors had not just cause for complaint and whether their appre- 
 ciation, if less wildly enthusiastic, was not more true for all time. 
 Of course we cannot date the Age of Reason or any other age. 
 We can only say vaguely that Ben Jonson of the rocky face and 
 mountain belly stood like a rock of reason in the very midst of 
 the turbulent ocean of enthusiasm, scarred, sullen, but immov- 
 able, a prophet of the age at hand. We can only say that by 
 about the middle of the seventeenth century the seas of enthus- 
 iasm were stagnant and the rock of reason stood dominant but not 
 triumphant. For reason has no feelings and therefore never 
 triumphs. England needed an Age of Reason to develop literary 
 criticism as an art. And many of the words written about 
 Spenser in those days will enrich our appreciation of the master. 
 
 But England had to pay the inevitable penalty for her Age 
 of Reason. When reason comes in at the window faith is rather 
 likely to fly out at the door. I think we may better understand 
 the currents of English literature in the latter half of the seven- 
 teenth century if we call it the Age of Literary Anarchy. We 
 can understand if we think for a moment of our own age. The 
 Romantic Age was a time of great faiths. Now if mankind is to 
 progress all faiths must be tried in the balance. So we had a 
 Victorian Age of reason and doubt. Now we have an age of 
 intellectual anarchy. It is a breach of decorum now to try to 
 believe less than five conflicting theories at once. It is unpardon- 
 able to suppose that theory and practice have the remotest rela- 
 tions. Science has destroyed religion, we wail. But never was 
 the world so full of creeds, innumerable variations of Chris- 
 tianity, the worship of mankind, the worship of the superman, 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 85 
 
 the worship of the Unknown God, neo-paganism, the religion of a 
 literary man, the religion of an undergraduate, the religion of 
 the free-thinking proprietor of a country grocery store. We have 
 a magnificent choice. We preach democracy and practice 
 oligarchy. We believe in socialism after a frugal breakfast and 
 after an eight-course dinner we call it twaddle. Never was the 
 human mind in a more active and a more healthy state. So it 
 was at the close of the seventeenth century. ''Hallelujah!" 
 shouted the Elizabethans. **But hold," murmured the ration- 
 alists. After that, the deluge. There was the same confusion in 
 theories of literature that there was in polities. There was the 
 same deafening discord in matters religious. Dry den, as we 
 shall see, epitomizes the age. I should like to cast a vote for 
 Dryden 's much-debated sincerity. Men changed creeds, literary, 
 political, and religious, every day not only for reasons of policy 
 but because they could not honestly cling long to one faith. A 
 man dogmatized on page one and roundly contradicted himself on 
 page two because it was an age of anarchy. There was a score of 
 schools, sometimes sharply separated, sometimes overlapping. We 
 often talk of our Augustan Age as though it was established by 
 Waller or Denham or Dryden. But before the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, classicism in England struggled desperately for a bare 
 existence against a horde of foes. Even in the days of Pope, clas- 
 sicism never attained the splendid perfection and unity that we 
 find in France when Racine and Boileau reigned. And before 
 Pope what a riot there was! Think of Henry More and the 
 Cambridge Platonists losing a noble cause against Hobbes and 
 the materialists. Think of Bunyan, inconsistency incarnate, with 
 his intense hopes and fears, at the beck and call of the least mood 
 of the moment. It was the age when Locke could write that man 
 *'must not be in love with an opinion, or wish it to be true, until 
 he knows it to be so, and then he will not need to wish it." Mil- 
 ton, in his maturest days, kept scornfully aloof from the restless 
 yeas and nays of the age and chose his ideals with calm, sure 
 certainty. Samuel Butler, a child of the age, sought cheap 
 refuge from the bewildering maze of opinions in indiscriminate 
 mockery. Dryden, another child of the age, groped about like all 
 
86 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 the others, hesitated, professed, recanted, dallied with neo-classi- 
 cism, almost returned to Elizabethanism, and at last struggled to 
 a position not as high as Milton's but above his age and the next. 
 Lyric poets like Sedley and Rochester showed the complete 
 Pyrrhonism of the age by their attitude toward love. Love could 
 bring them no Vita Nuova, no white faith to lead them to the 
 fulfillment of vast enterprise. It was their lot to write of false 
 love or love which they knew to be already on the wing. Cowley, 
 Sprat, Waller, Dryden, and others convened to form an Academy 
 that would dispel the murky anarchy in letters. But nothing 
 came of it. 
 
 Then came the Augustan Despotism. Wise scholars are 
 slowly and painfully teaching us to appreciate how much the neo- 
 classicists did for England when they finally brought a faith to 
 the tortured sceptics and the hundred jarring sects. But it will 
 take time to right the wrongs inflicted by the great Romanticists 
 in their splendid youth. For Keats wrote of the Augustans : 
 
 "Yes, a seism 
 Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, 
 Made great Apollo blush for this his land. 
 Men were thought men who could not understand 
 His glories: with a puling infant's force 
 They sway'd about upon a rocking horse, 
 And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd! 
 The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd 
 Its gathering waves — ye felt it not. The blue 
 Bar'd its eternal bosom, and the dew " ■ 
 
 Of summer nights collected still to make 
 The morning precious; beauty was awake! 
 Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead 
 To things ye knew not of, — were closely wed 
 To musty laws lined out with wretched rule 
 And compass vile: so that ye taught a school 
 Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit. 
 Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit. 
 Their verses tallied. Easy was the task; 
 A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask 
 Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! 
 That blasphem 'd the bright Lyrist to his face, 
 And did not know it, — no, they went about. 
 Holding a poor, decrepid standard out 
 Mark'd with most flimsy mottos, and in large 
 The name of one Boileau!" 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 87 
 
 Of course there is much truth in this glorious abuse. Neverthe- 
 less we are beginning to see that after all the Augustans were not 
 heavy villains but very useful ancestors. Their apologists, how- 
 ever, still make the mistake of thinking that they are not worth 
 while unless they contain some symptoms of romanticism, real 
 or fancied. Too much current scholarship on eighteenth century 
 England is a mad scramble in search of romanticism. I would 
 try to prove how much the Augustans, with their purely classi- 
 cal ideals, have done for a fuller appreciation of Spenser if we 
 would only listen to them. 
 
 But the principles of Augustanism, in their turn, served 
 their purpose, were distrusted, and flung aside. Then came the 
 Triumph of Romanticism. I do not need to rhapsodize the great 
 days of the new faith. In spite of the pasteboard dragons, real- 
 ism, science, commercialism, romanticism still flourishes and is, 
 in some aspects, even a menace. Poe, in his sonnet on science, 
 voiced a 'thought still popular when he accused the men of scal- 
 pels and acids of driving the faun from the forest, the light of 
 romance from men's eyes. As a matter of fact the romanticists, 
 whatever they may have said by way of theory, have developed a 
 highly organized method that may be often quite accurately 
 termed Scientiflc Romanticism. Sometimes the romanticist 
 makes of himself a delicately adjusted machine with works of 
 fairy frailty that responds to the least shadow of a sensation and 
 records it with painful accuracy. Hair is no longer merely golden 
 to the eyes of the romanticist. ''A citron colour gloomed in her 
 hair." And man no longer merely rejoices. He is said to suffer 
 in some glorious agony of delight. Like the seismograph which 
 registers to the watching scientist the least tremor of the earth, 
 this sensation-loving Scientific Romanticist, with body and soul 
 magnetized to the point of disease, shudders exquisitely and lux- 
 uriously at the most dim adumbration of a feeling. Sometimes 
 the romanticists have practically taken over the realistic methods 
 of Zola. But instead of examining all human nature in a 
 scientist 's laboratory, as Zola advocates, they have confined them- 
 selves to an elaborate vivisection of the ego. Too often w^e mis- 
 
88 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 use Spenser, who projected vaster, saner things, as a mere picture- 
 gallery, a mere bundle of unregulated emotions, an exotic drug to 
 feed an already over-developed part of our organisms. But we 
 are not as decadent as our Jeremiahs and even some of our poets 
 themselves would have us believe. When our poets are discerning 
 enough to use the materials instead of the methods of science, 
 when they abandon themselves to the magnificent fairy-land of 
 the crowded skies, of a lichen, which the scientists have given us 
 in place of the already outworn fairy-land that they took away, 
 then truly our poets walk erect. Like reckless nature, we indulge 
 in a princely waste of energy and hopes and fears. Something 
 will come of our superb restlessness. How much poorer were the 
 Elizabethans in source of inspiration with only Drake, Frobisher, 
 and the round world to fire their sense of mystery ! 
 
 By a study of all the critics who have felt these mighty cur- 
 rents of thought which I have sketched with such impertinent 
 brevity we ought to come, for the first time, to a full apprecia- 
 tion of Spenser. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 89 
 
 II 
 
 THE AGE OF ENTHUSIASM AND SPENSER-WORSHIP 
 
 I have said that Spenser's day was aglow with ardent faith 
 in everything English and therefore with Spenser-worship. At 
 the very outset, The Shepheards Calender was acclaimed with a 
 full chorus of idolatrous panegyrics. There were those who de- 
 murred at praising The Faerie Queene. Gabriel Harvey was, 
 for the moment, purblind with his plethora of eccentric classi- 
 cism. Poets like Michael Drayton and Phineas Fletcher, to whom 
 The Shepheards Calender was not a cold pastoral but an inti- 
 mate song of youth's joys and sorrows and aspirations, of the 
 delightful miseries of calf-love, preferred their master's maiden 
 effort until maturity taught them to feel the sultry splendour 
 and the more impersonal note of The Faerie Queene. A belated 
 and perhaps solitary relic of this opinion appears in 1679 in Dr. 
 Samuel Woodford's preface to his Legend of Love, a translation 
 of the Canticles. Woodford was no obscure eccentric outside the 
 literary circles of his day. In his Epoda to the Legend of Love, 
 moreover, he used the stanza of The Faerie Queene and borrowed 
 from the allegorical lore of the epic. But in spite of the good 
 divine 's religiosity he could not refrain from expressing a boyish 
 preference for the work of Spenser's dawn, and his devotion to 
 the love of God did not keep him from sharing with Spenser a 
 keen interest in Rosalind, the widow's scornful daughter of the 
 Glen. The Shepheards Calender has been justly classed by Mr. 
 Schelling with the Arcadia and the Euphues as being one of the 
 greatest contemporary influences. It is difficult for us, among 
 whom formal pastorals have fallen into disrepute, to understand 
 how the light of this first great poem of modern England dilated 
 the eyes of those who were hungering for a countryman with a 
 poet 's insight. And those who do realize the immense popularity 
 of the poem are too apt to attribute it merely to the flow of easy 
 
90 University of California Puhlications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 melody, the variety and perfection of form. But to young men, 
 poets and lovers, in the age of Elizabeth, The Shepheards Calen- 
 der, despite its so-called artificiality, was a scripture to meditate 
 upon. Those who were less enthusiastic at first about The Faerie 
 Queene were, in the main, those who wished to hear more about 
 Colin and his fortunes with Rosalind. Even Harvey, lost in 
 learned meditations over the introduction of classical prosody 
 into English, felt the same mood. 
 
 "CoUyn, I see, by thy new taken taske, 
 Some sacred fury hath enricht thy braynes, 
 That leades thy muse in haughty verse to maske. 
 And loath the layes that longs to lowly swaynes; 
 That lifts thy notes from Shepheardes unto kinges: 
 So like the lively Larke that mounting singes. 
 
 *'Thy lovely Eosalinde seems now forlorne, 
 And all thy gentle flockes forgotten quight: 
 Thy chaunged hart now holdes thy pypes in scorne, 
 Those prety pypes that did thy mates delight: 
 Those trusty mates, that loved thee so well; 
 Whom thou gav'st mirth, as they gave thee the bell, "i 
 
 But those whose enthusiasm for Spenser's personal confessions 
 made them at first reluctant to see him retire to the heights of the 
 epic poet, came forward, almost without exception, a little later, 
 with the highest praise. And their hesitant protests had already 
 been lost in a storm of laudation with which others had welcomed 
 the poet 's masterpiece. Even Harvey, though he has been always 
 recorded as a most uncompromising enemy of The Faerie Quellne, 
 appears, on investigation, to have recanted. 
 
 The relations of Spenser and Harvey have not been carefully 
 stated. It is probable that we have been overestimating the influ- 
 ence of the self-made dictator on the young poet. It is true that 
 Spenser revered Harvey. He did not, however, share unre- 
 servedly his would-be mentor's enthusiasm for classical metres 
 in English ; his own experiments seem to have been few and the 
 product of almost whimsical moments. He made restrictions on 
 
 1 Verse by Harvey, To the learned Shepheard, prefixed to the first three 
 books of The Faerie Queene when published in 1590. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 91 
 
 classical metres in a letter to Harvey where he shows one of his 
 few glimmerings of humour. 
 
 "For the onely or chief est hardness; whyche seemeth, is in the 
 accente; which sometime gapeth, and, as it were yawneth illflavouredly, 
 comming shorte of that it should, and sometimes exceeding the measure 
 of the Number, as in Carpenter the middle sillable, being used shorte in 
 speache, when it shall be read long in Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling 
 that draweth one legge after her; and Heaven being used shorte as one 
 sillable, when it is in Verse stretched out with a Diastole, is like a lame 
 Dogge that holds up one legge. But it is to be wonne with Custome and 
 rough words must be subdued with use." 
 
 And it is to be observed that all Spenser 's real efforts were being 
 spent on poems that bristled with rhymes. By 1580, at a time 
 when Harvey's star was still in the ascendant, Spenser had at 
 least begun work on his Faerie Queene. Harvey, to be sure, had 
 mostly golden words for his friend. He liked the Dreams ' ' pass- 
 ingly well ' ' because ' ' they savour of that singular extraordinarie 
 veine and invention which I ever fancied moste, and in a manner 
 admired onely in Lucian, Petrarche, Aretine, Pasquila." He 
 gave his younger brother "a certaine famous Book called the 
 newe Shepheardes Calender" telling him to make Willye's and 
 Thomalin's emblems in March into English verse. Above all, in 
 his address to the reader in The First Booke of the Preservation 
 of King Henry VII, though he is praising classical metres and 
 poets, he adds: 
 
 "Nevertheless I confesse and acknowledge we have many singular 
 good poets in this our age .... whom I reverence in that kind of prose 
 rhythme [viz. rhyming] ; wherein Spenser (without offense spoken) hath 
 surpassed them all." 
 
 It is not even safe to follow the beaten path of the historians 
 of English literature and set down Harvey as the enemy of The 
 Faerie Queene. It is true that his first attitude was cold. The 
 strictures in his famous letter to Spenser are a commonplace of 
 quotation. 
 
 "To be plaine, I am voyde of all judgement if your nine Comoedies 
 .... come not neerer Ariostoes Comoedies eyther for the fineness of 
 plausible elocution or the rareness of Poetical Invention, than that elvish 
 queene doth to his 'Orlando rurioso'."2 
 
 2 Harvey 's letter of April 7, 1580. Spenser certainly could not have 
 gone far with The Faerie Queene thus early. 
 
92 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 His commendatory verses, with their grudging praise of the new 
 poem and their regret for the abandoned vein of pastoral poetry, 
 have already been transcribed. On the other hand we find a 
 manuscript note in his own writing in his copy of Gascoigne's 
 Certain Notes of Instruction which shows a clear appreciation of 
 the stanza of The Faerie Queene. To Gascoigne^s advice, *'To 
 hold the just measure wherewith you begin your verse," Harvey 
 added : * * The difference of the last verse from the rest in everie 
 stanza, a grace in the 'Faerie Queene'."^ In the New Letter of 
 notable Contents (1593) there is a more general statement that 
 certainly is not reconcilable with Harvey's earlier animadver- 
 sions: ''Or is not the verse of M. Spencer in his brave Faery 
 Queene the Virginall of the divinest Muses and gentlest Graces ? ' ' 
 
 Among Spenser's other friends Sidney's generous praise is a 
 matter of both fact and tradition. In his Apology for Poesie he 
 saw in the anonymous author of The Shepheards Calender a great 
 poet in an age of little achievement, although he disapproved of 
 "that same framing of his stile to an old rustick language." 
 Tradition, too, has it that the terrible picture of Despair, in the 
 ninth canto of the first book of The Faerie Queene, opened the 
 floodgates of Sidney's generous praise and loosened the tassels 
 of his purse. 
 
 Nor were the earlier Elizabethan critics who were less closely 
 connected with the poet less enthusiastic. William Webbe, in his 
 Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), is full of enthusiasm for 
 the new poet. He longed for the appearance of the Dreames, 
 Legends, Court of Cupid, and the prose English Poet. He depre- 
 ciated English poetry in general but judged Spenser not inferior 
 to Theocritus and Virgil. In his remarks on eclogues, after prais- 
 ing Theocritus and Virgil and after approving of Chaucer with 
 qualifications, he remarks : 
 
 "But nowe yet at the last hath England hatched uppe one Poet of 
 this sorte, in my conscience comparable with the best in any respect; 
 even Master Spenser. '* 
 
 3 Quoted by Professor E. P. Morton in * * The History of the Spenserian 
 Stanza before 1700, ' ' Modern Philology, IV, no. 4, April, 1907. 
 
1911] • Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 93 
 
 Again : 
 
 "What one thing is there in them so worthy admiration whereunto 
 we may not adjoyne something of his of equall desert. ' ' 
 
 Thomas Nashe, in his preface to Greene's Menaphon (1589), in 
 
 which he heartily championed the glory of English poetry, held 
 
 forth in praise of Spenser with his customary exuberance. 
 
 "And should the challenge of deepe conceit be intended by any 
 forreiner to bring our English wits to the tutchstone of Arte, I would 
 preferre divine Master Spenser, the miracle of wit to bandie line for line 
 for my life in the honor of England, gainst Spaine, France, Italic, and 
 all the worlde. ' ' 
 
 When he dedicated his Christs Tears over Jerusalem to Lady 
 Elizabeth Carey, the highest compliment he could pay was that 
 ** Fames eldest favourite, Maister Spencer, in all his writings hie 
 prizeth you." Puttenham, or the author of The Art of English 
 Poesie (1859), mentions ''that other gentleman who wrote the 
 late Shepheards Callender" among the English poets to be com- 
 mended. Soon all England shared Nashe 's sublime faith in the 
 native poets. Francis Meres wrote his Palladis Tamia (1598) to 
 prove them the peers of the singers of all the world. Concerning 
 Spenser he uttered a stately pageant of elaborate compliments: 
 
 "As Sextus Propertius said 'nescio quid magis nascitur Iliade': so I 
 say of Spenser's I'airy Queene, I know not what more excellent or 
 exquisite poem may be written." 
 
 In his remarks on the epic poets he declared : 
 
 "As Homer and Vergil among the Greeks and Latins are the chief e 
 Heroic Poets: So Spenser and Warner be our chief e heroicall makers." 
 
 Spenser, it seems, was perfect in everything : 
 
 "As Pindarus, Anacreon, and Callimachus among the Greeks, and 
 Horace and Catullus among the Latines are the best Lyrick poets; so in 
 this faculty the best among our poets are Spenser (who excelleth in all 
 kinds), Daniel, Drayton, Shakespere and Breton. ... As Theocritus in 
 Greek, Virgil and Mantuan in Latine, Sana2ijir in Italian and the 
 Authour of Amintae Gaudia and Walsingham's Melibaeus are the best 
 for Pastorall, so amongst us the best in this kind are Sir Philip Sidney, 
 Master Challener, Spenser, Stephen Gosson, Abraham Fraunce and Barne- 
 field." 
 
 This is typical work of the Age of Enthusiasm. Unbounded 
 faith in Spenser, appreciation of Shakespeare, Drayton, and 
 
94 University of California Fuhlications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Daniel is accompanied by a grotesque lack of discrimination in 
 citing such names as those of Fraunce and Gosson without a 
 smile. We can see from the literary swashbuckling of men like 
 Nashe and Meres what England had to learn before literary 
 criticism became an art and what a rare world of fine frenzy 
 England had to lose to buy her discrimination. 
 
 We can touch upon but a few of the more interesting poems in 
 the torrent which sang the praises of Spenser. Samuel Daniel 
 requires special attention. In one of the best known sonnets to 
 Delia, Daniel had cried somewhat scornfully : 
 
 **Let others sing of knights and paladins 
 In aged accents and untimely words.'* 
 
 This has often been plausibly assumed to be a refererce to The 
 Faerie Queene. In consequence some have thought that Daniel 
 did not reciprocate Spenser's kindly admiration.^ But it is easy 
 to show that Daniel had the same rapturous faith that stirred 
 Nashe and Meres to intemperate eloquence. In his Dedication of 
 Cleopatra he lamented that England is bounded by the ocean and 
 longed that her songs might be known to other nations. 
 *' Whereby Great Sidney and our Spenser might 
 With those Po Singers being equalled, 
 Enchant the World with such a sweet Delight 
 That their eternal Songs forever read. 
 May shew what great Elisa 's Eeign hath bred. ' ' 
 
 Michael Drayton's weighty Epistle to Henry Reynolds of Poets 
 and Poesie should be always remembered as a piece of remark- 
 ably acute criticism at a time when national self-confidence and 
 the spirit of eulogy ran so high that literary criticism was prac- 
 tically impossible. Drayton's estimate of his immediate prede- 
 cessors was genial, sympathetic, and extraordinarily shrewd. For 
 Spenser, however, nothing but hallelujahs could be expected from 
 his pen. His noble lines are famous. 
 
 "Grave moral Spenser after these came on, 
 
 Than whom I am persuaded there was none. 
 
 Since the blind bard his Iliads up did make, 
 
 Fitter a task like that to undertake; 
 
 To set down boldly, bravely to invent, 
 
 In all high knowledge surely excellent. ' ' 
 
 4 See Colin Clouts Come Home Again, 11. 405-416, for Spenser's kindly 
 praise of the younger poet. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser, 95 
 
 Joseph Hall, bishop and rough-and-ready satirist, has per- 
 plexed more than one critic with what they consider his incon- 
 sistent attitude toward Spen^£r.^ He has been named as an 
 admirer of Spenser, as an enemy of Spenser, as hopelessly, even 
 treacherously, inconsistent. But with those who have found him 
 at any time hostile lies the burden of proof. All the definite refer- 
 ences to Spenser laud him. The harsh lines tell no tales and have 
 been quoted too often without any explanation of their general 
 context. A careful examination of Hall's poems in toto makes 
 his attitude perfectly clear. He called himself the first English 
 satirist. He believed that the age of creative poetry was at least 
 temporarily over. His was the academic or bookish attitude 
 common in many ages. The great writers have said it all. What 
 is the use of writing feeble echoes? And to Hall one of the 
 supreme writers who had left nothing more to be done was 
 Edmund Spenser. In 1597 the disgruntled bishop brought out 
 his Virgidemiarum containing six books of satires. As a kind of 
 preface he wrote a Defiance of Envy, the seventh stanza of which 
 has offended the admirers of Spenser. He asserted that he did 
 not care to 
 
 ". . . . Secure the rusted swords of Elvish Knights, 
 Bathed in Pagan blood; or sheath them new 
 In misty morall Types, or tell their fights, 
 Who mightie Giants, or who Monsters slew. 
 And by some strange inchanted speare and shield, 
 Vanquisht their foe, and won the doubtful field.'' 
 
 This certainly seems, by itself, like girding at The Faerie Queene. 
 But let us look at the poem as a whole. It begins humbly enough 
 with the statement that the pines of Ida may fear the sudden 
 fires of heaven. With his lowly shrubs, in their humble dales, he 
 may feel secure. If his muse did attempt to "scoure the rusted 
 swords of Elvish Knights, ' ' then Envy might attack him. 
 *'But now such lowly Satyres here I sing. 
 Not worth our Muse, not worth their envying." 
 
 5 Thus Dr. Grosart, Hall's Poems ed. Manchester, 1879, p. xviii: "I 
 cannot help regretting his double-dealing treatment of Spenser as the most 
 unpleasant alloy of the satires." Thomas Warton, too, (quoted by Grosart, 
 ibid.), was very much disturbed over the same problem. Other critics have 
 conveyed even more unfortunate impressions by tearing fragmentary selec- 
 tions inconsiderately from HalPs references or possible references to 
 Spenser. 
 
96 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 The swords are rusted, then, because there is no Spenser to draw 
 them. That is the point. The poem is full of Spenserian phrases 
 and ends with an unmistakable tribute. He dares try no high 
 pastoral strain but 
 
 **At Collin's feete I throw my yeelding reede. '' 
 
 It is not possible to use these lines as evidence that Hall loved 
 The Shepheards Calender but thought meanly of The Faerie 
 Queene. For elsewhere he writes : 
 
 '*Tli' eternall Legends of thy Faerie Muse, 
 Eenowned Spenser: whom no earthly wight 
 Dares once to emulate, much less dares despight 
 Salust of France and Tuscan Ariost 
 Yeeld up the Lawrell garland ye have lost: 
 And let all others willow wear with me 
 Or let their undeserving Temples bared be. "« 
 
 It is important to know, moreover, that our quotation closes with 
 a vigorous attack on Romantic poems, particularly the Orlando 
 Furioso, but makes careful exception in the case of Spenser. And 
 we should note Hall's conviction of the futility of writing new 
 poems in emulation of the master. It is the satiety of the bookish 
 mind. 
 
 ''Whilome the sisters nine were Vestal maides. 
 
 Now is Parnassus turned to a stewes 
 
 And on Bay-stocks the wanton Myrtle grewes. "7 
 
 The great poets have written. Times are degenerate. What 
 seem like attacks on Spenser generally close with self-abasement. 
 So it was with the Defiance of Envy. So we find it in another, 
 passage that has worried the critics. 
 
 ''Nor Ladies wanton love, nor wandering knight, 
 Legend I out in rimes all richly dight," 
 
 but 
 
 * * Eather had I, albee in careless rymes. 
 Check the mis-ordered world and lawlesse times. "8 
 
 This is the characteristic attitude of the Jeremiah who thinks 
 that all the beautiful things have been said and that the present 
 
 « Book I, Sat. IV, 11. 21 sq. 
 
 7 Book I, Sat. II, 11. 1-18. 
 
 8 Book I, Sat. I, 11. 30 sq. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 97 
 
 is diseased, A few lines below he is more specific in self-efface- 
 ment. 
 
 '^Or if we list [viz. to make lofty songs] what baser muse can bide, 
 To sit and sing by Grantaes naked side? 
 They haunt the tyded Thames and salt Medway 
 Ere since the fame of their late Bridall day. "9 
 
 This is evidently a reference to Spenser's beautiful description 
 of the marriage of the Thames and the Medway^*^ and an expres- 
 sion of diffidence. We may complete our citations by quoting 
 from Hairs lines to William Bedell on his poem, A Protestant 
 Memorial,^^ which are at once imitative of Spenser and a tribute. 
 
 "Willy, thy Khythms so sweetly run and rise 
 And answers rightly to thy tuneful Eead 
 
 That Collin dying, his Immortal Muse, 
 Into thy Learned Breast did late infuse. ' ' 
 
 It is ridiculous to attempt, in the face of all this, to attack Hall ^s 
 attitude toward Spenser. 
 
 We cannot pause over the myriad voices of the other poets 
 who threw their garlands at the feet of the great singer. Every- 
 one should know Barnfield's exquisite sonnet, "If Music and 
 sweete Poetrie agree." Peele, Breton, Browne, Davies, William 
 Basse, Francis Beaumont, a legion, glowed with the most gener- 
 ous praise. The sweet persuasiveness of some well-known lines 
 from The Return from Parnassus may fitly represent the full- 
 chorused laud. 
 
 "A sweeter swan than ever sang in Po, 
 A shriller nightingale than ever blessed 
 The prouder groves of self -admiring Kome! 
 Blithe was each valley, and each shepherd proud. 
 While he did chant his rural minstrelsy; 
 Attentive was full many a dainty ear; 
 Nay, hearers hung upon his melting tongue. 
 While sweetly of his Faerie Queene he sung, 
 While to the waters' fall he tun'd his fame." 
 
 9 Book I, Sat. I, 11. 30 sq. 
 
 10 Faerie Queene, Book IV, Canto 11. 
 
 11 Bedell 's poem is an imitation of The Shepheards Calender. 
 
University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 III 
 
 THE AGE OF EEASON AND THE RISE OF LITERARY 
 
 CRITICISM 
 
 While the Elizabethans were in the first rapture of self-dis- 
 
 / covery, extravagant mutual eulogy was to be expected. But when 
 
 they dropped back to the C-major of this life and rodomontade 
 
 ceased to be the fashion, a genuine literary criticism was born. 
 
 Even in the Age of Enthusiasm, Drayton and Hall have been 
 seen to show some critical discrimination. But Ben Jonson's 
 burly figure looms largest among the first English writers of 
 critical works. Unfortunately he gave us no well-rounded esti- 
 ^mate of Spenser although he was liberal with tantalizing allus- 
 ions. With Spenser's stanza and diction he was clearly out of 
 V tune. He told Drummond {Conversations, 1619), that '^Spenser's 
 stanzaes pleased him not, nor his matter; the meaning of which 
 Allegoric he had delivered in papers to Sir Walter Rauglie." 
 But Jonson was grumbling almost unintermittently at this 
 famous symposium. And perhaps Drummond tinged his record 
 more deeply with his own apparent impression of Ben 's perennial 
 surliness. Jonson, at all events, had some good words for Spen- 
 ser's matter in his Discoveries (1625-35 ?) . 
 
 "Spenser, in affecting the Ancients writ no Language. Yet I would 
 have him read for his matter, but as Virgil read Ennius. ' ' 
 
 The attack on Spenser's archaisms was promptly caught up by 
 subsequent critics.^ In another part of the Discoveries Jonson 
 says, somewhat inconsistently : 
 
 ** Words borrowed of Antiquity doe lend a kind of Majesty to style, 
 and are not without their delight sometimes." 
 
 1 There is a bare possibility that Jonson was influenced in his distaste 
 for Spenser's diction by Sidney. Professor J. E. Spingarn (Crit. Essays 
 of the 17th Century Introd. p. xiii) points out that the Prologue to Every 
 Man in his Humour is "a noble patchwork of passages from the Apology 
 for Poesie. Jonson may have learned his distaste for Spenser's old words 
 from the stricture in the same work. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 99 
 
 But, on the whole, he prefers the newest words. That Ben Jon- 
 son of the rocky face and mountain belly was not always imper- 
 vious to Spenserian appeal is attested in Drummond 's record that 
 
 *'He hath by heart some verses of Spenser's Calender about wyne, be- 
 tween Coline and Pereye. " 
 
 Jonson 's masque, The Golden Age Restored, introduces Chaucer, 
 Gower, Lydgate, and Spenser as ideal figures of the good old days. 
 When Pallas has driven away Iron Age and her rout of Vices, 
 she summons Astraea and Golden Age with a flourish of her 
 aegis. And for their retinue she calls : 
 
 **You far-famed spirits of this happy isle, 
 That, for your sacred songs have gained the style 
 Of Phoebus' sons, whose notes the air aspire 
 Of the old Egyptian, or the Thracian lyre 
 That Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Spenser hight. 
 Put on your better flames and larger light. 
 To wait upon the Age that shall your names new nourish. 
 Since Virtue pressed shall grow, and buried Arts shall flourish. ' ' 
 
 This readiness to accept Spenser as at least a traditional classic *^' 
 is also apparent in a characteristic fling at the rascal many in the 
 Discoveries. 
 
 ''There were never wanting those that dare prefer the worst poets. 
 . . . Nay, if it were put to the question of the water-rimers works 
 against Spenser's, I doubt not but they would find more suffrages; be- 
 cause the most favor common vices out of a prerogative the vulgar have 
 to lose their judgements and like that which is nought. ' ' 
 
 It is not unlikely that Jonson, on the whole, was an admirer of 
 Spenser. And his animadversions are those of a man who prob- 
 ably loved Spenser as he loved Shakespeare — ''on this side 
 idolatry. ' * 
 
 Edmund Bolton, although his contribution to Spenserian 
 criticism is slight, should not be forgotten, because he has con- 
 siderable significance in the history of English criticism. He 
 reacted against the irresponsible sentences and parti-coloured dic- 
 tion of Elizabethan novelists and pamphleteers. In feeling the 
 need of conscious ideals in prose style he was of the new age. His 
 Hypercritica, Or A Rule of Judgment For Writing Or Beading 
 
100 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Our Histories (completed e. 1618 but first published in 1722 )2 
 treated not only the problem of sources but the kind of prose 
 that was suitable for good historical writing. For this purpose 
 Bolton considered the manner of both English poetry and prose. 
 He seems to have had a wide knowledge and a fair appreciation 
 of English literature. For prose suitable to the writing of his- 
 tories he preferred, sensibly enough, the poetry of Jonson and 
 the prose of Bacon as supreme models. But he found Spenser's 
 Hymns valuable for the same purpose. 
 
 ''In verse there are Ed. Spencer's Hymns. I cannot advise the 
 allowance of other of his Poems, as for practick English, no more than 
 I can do Jeff Chaucer, Lydgate, Pierce Ploughman, or Laureate Skelton. ' ' 
 
 For the use of **old outworn words" in history was, in Bolton's 
 opinion, to be condemned. 
 
 In the tenth chapter of his Compleat Gentleman (1622) 
 Henry Peacham pointed out the value of the study of poetry and 
 closed his review of great poets with a brief but flattering pic- 
 ture of those of Elizabeth's days. 
 
 "In the time of our late Queen Elizabeth which was truly a golden 
 age .... above others who honoured Poesie with their pennes and 
 practise .... were Edward Earle of Oxford, the Lord Buckhurst, Henry 
 Lord Paget; our Phoenix, the noble Sir Philip Sidney; M. Edward Dyer, 
 M. Edmund Spencer, M. Samuel Daniel, with sundry others whom .... 
 not out of Envie but to avoide tediousnesse I overpasse. This much of 
 Poetrie.'' 
 
 William L'isle in prefatory words to the reader before his 
 translation of Du Bartas (1625) made a thoroughly neo-classical 
 comment on Spenser's alexandrines that should be quoted as 
 among the comparatively few definite criticisms of Spenser's 
 stanza in the seventeenth century. 
 
 "The Bartasian verse (not unlike herein to the Latin Pentameter) 
 hath ever this propertie, to part in the mids betwixt two wordes: so much 
 doe French prints signifie with a stroke interposed. . . . The neglect of 
 this hath caused many a brave stanza of the Faerie Queene to end but 
 harshly, which might have been prevented at the first; but now the fault 
 may be sooner found than amended." 
 
 2 By Anthony Hall, at the end of his Nicolai Triveti Annalium Contin- 
 uatio, Oxford, 1722. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 101 
 
 In the next century a critic as acute as Thomas Warton expressed 
 the same insistence on the middle caesura and the same blindness 
 to the charm of the flowing, pauseless alexandrine that Spenser 
 used, at times, with such felicity. 
 
 The self-abasement or doubt that comes with an Age of Rea- 
 son appears in Henry Reynolds, the mystic, to whom Drayton 
 addressed his Epistle, Of Poets and Poesie. Reynolds lamented 
 the bad state of English poetry, a mood which would not have 
 occurred to a full-fledged Elizabethan, in his Mythomestes 
 wherein a short survay is taken of the nature and value of true 
 Poesie, and the depth of the Ancients above our Moderne Poets 
 (1633). It is significant of the growing sense for criticism care- 
 fully weighed, and significant of Spenser's impregnable fame, 
 that Reynolds included him in a brief list of well-selected poets 
 whom he regarded as exempt from the sweeping condemnation 
 that he had bestowed on most moderns. With the judgment of 
 the acute connoisseurs who always know what will last in litera- 
 ture, Reynolds selected Chaucer (especially in his Troilus), Sid- 
 ney, Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton as the true elect. 
 
 ''Next, I must approve the learned Spencer, in the rest of his Poems 
 no lesse than his Fairy Queene, an exact body of the Ethicke doctrine; 
 though some good judgments have wisht, and perhaps not without cause, 
 that he had therein been a little freer of his fiction, and not so close 
 rivetted to his Morall. " 
 
 This guarded criticism of Spenser 's didactic method is an expres- 
 sion of an attitude toward the Faerie Queene which we have 
 inherited as a birthright and an affliction principally from the 
 later romanticists who are responsible for many of our limita- 
 tions in appreciating Spenser. But they are less careful in their 
 statements than this gentle, far-seeing mystic of the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
 The general tendency, however, throughout the seventeenth 
 century and the first part of the eighteenth was to take Spenser's 
 moralistic aspect very seriously and, on the whole, more justly 
 and sympathetically than many of us do to-day. Sir Kenelm 
 Digby's Observations on the Twenty -Second Stanza of the Ninth 
 Canto of the Second Book of Spencer's Faery Queen (1644) is 
 
102 University of California PuMications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 typical of the attitude of so many who accepted Spenser as poet 
 and teacher. Sir Kenelm Digby took one of the most abstruse 
 stanzas in The Faerie Queene and gave it an elaborate philosophi- 
 cal interpretation. 
 
 We approach a figure who was so significant in his own day 
 and such a bare name at the present time that he must be elab- 
 orately considered. I have said that the Age of Reason inevit- 
 ably begot a doubt which scattered into anarchy. Henry More, 
 the Cambridge Platonist, is a figure to be expected at such a crisis. 
 Serene-eyed with the still-deep wisdom of Plato, he turned 
 proudly and calmly from the growing materialism of the day and 
 wrought strange, dim tapestries of mystical dreams. His cult 
 was a power in its time against the rationalism of Descartes so 
 ready to link hands with the ideals of the new classicists, "vrai- 
 semblance," ''nature," " commonsense. " He was one of the 
 many forces that kept this neo-classicism starving in England 
 for a half -century. In 1642 More published his Psychodia 
 Platonica and in 1647 he brought out an enlarged edition of this 
 Platonick Song of the Soul under the general heading Philosophi- 
 call Poems. This gigantic affair in Spenserian stanzas was cer- 
 tainly not calculated to captivate the masses who run. But it was 
 the profound if eccentric utterance of a man who stood on the 
 battle-line of a great controversy of the day. More's dedication 
 to his father indicates how much of his idealism must have grown 
 out of a life-long intimacy with Spenser 's poems. 
 
 "You deserve the Patronage of better Poems than these though you 
 may lay a more proper claim to these than to any. You having from my 
 childhood tuned mine ears to Spenser's rhymes, entertaining us on winter 
 nights, with that incomparable Piece of his, The Fairy Queen a Poem 
 as richly fraught with divine Morality as Phansy. '^ 
 
 To More, then, the poet was a noble priest, a conception too 
 unpopular in our own day since the romanticists have taught us 
 to toy with his seductive music alone. More, indeed, was at the 
 other pole. He was one of those quixotic idealists who reared, 
 with pathetic enthusiasm, towers of Babel in a noble but almost 
 fruitless cause. He wrote in the days when men dared to justify 
 the ways of God to man, though he wrote when the doubting 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 103 
 
 Thomases were becoming legion. In the eighteenth century men 
 took to celebrating in song the cotton industry or The Art of 
 Preserving Health. Today some of us have fallen lower and 
 write for ''Art's sake." 
 
 In the growing Age of Literary Anarchy we have already 
 noted another figure proudly independent of the frailties of one 
 age---John Milton. He, too, gave sturdy praise to the moralistic 
 aspect of Spenser's genius. In the Areopagitica (1644) he wrote 
 of ''Our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare be kno^vn to 
 think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas. ' ' Edward Dowden 
 has made this the text of the richest essay on Spenser that our 
 age can claim. 
 
 We come now to one of the earliest apostles of that neo-classi- 
 cism which in England struggled only with great difficulty 
 through the Age of Literary Anarchy and gained supremacy at 
 last when Pope and Addison planted the standard on the heights. 
 
 The first important critical document of the neo-classicists 
 was Sir William Davenant's preface to Gondihert. This has been 
 inconsiderately damned as crass and unsympathetic in its atti- 
 tude toward Spenser. In Davenant 's own day Aubrey wrote : 
 
 *'Sir John Denham told me that A. BP. Usher, Lord Primate of 
 Armagh was acquainted with him [Spenser], by this token, when Sir W. 
 Davenant 's 'Gondibert' came forth, Sir John askt the Lord Primate if 
 he had seen it? Said the Primate, 'Out upon him, with his vaunting 
 preface, he speaks against my old friend, Edmund Spenser '. ' ' 
 
 Something like the Lord Primate's idea seems to have prevailed 
 
 ever since. But to call Davenant hostile to Spenser is to read his 
 
 preface without any sense of perspective. Davenant shared the 
 
 generally increasing objections to the archaisms. 
 
 ''But as it is false husbandry to graft old branches upon young 
 stocks: so we may wonder that our language . . . should receive from his 
 [Spenser's] hand, new grafts of old wither 'd words." 
 
 Again : 
 
 * ' The unlucky choice of his stanza hath by repetition of Rime brought 
 him to the necessity of many exploded words. ' ' 
 
 Although the preface is emphatic in its identification of the ideal 
 poet and the moralist, yet Davenant was not in sympathy with 
 
104 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Spenser's method of inculcating virtue, — ''His allegorical Story 
 . . . . resembling (methinks) a continuation of extraordinary 
 Dreams; such as excellent Poets, and Painters, by being over- 
 studious may have in the beginning of Feavers." These are the 
 shrewd complaints of Sir William Davenant, a sane literary 
 critic who believed criticism to be the noble art of praise with 
 intelligent qualifications. We must consider the general scheme 
 of his essay to understand his full estimate of Spenser. He was 
 about to propound the rules for an ideal epic and he began by 
 naming those whom he considered the supreme writers of heroic 
 poetry. He thus placed Spenser with Homer, Virgil, Lucan, 
 Statins, and Tasso. He then pointed out the failings of each 
 writer and Spenser hardly fared worse than any of the others. 
 In this way Davenant gave Spenser implicitly the highest praise. 
 
 "Spencer may stand here as the last of this short File of Heroick 
 Poets — Men whose intellectuals were of so great a making (though some 
 have thought them lyable to those few Censures we have mentioned) as 
 perhaps they will in worthy memory outlast even the Makers of Laws 
 and Founders of Empires, and all but such as must live equally with 
 them because they have recorded their manner; and consequently with 
 their own hand led them to the Temple of Fame. And since we have 
 dar'd to remember those exceptions which the Curious have against 
 them, it will not be expected I should forget what is objected against 
 Spenser whose obsolete Language we are constrain 'd to mention, though 
 it be grown the most vulgar accusation that is laid to his charge. ' ' 
 
 Davenant 's tone was distinctly apologetic. He more than once 
 foisted his adverse criticisms on ' ' the Curious. ' ' He feared that 
 his censures of ''this short File of Heroick Poets" would make 
 Hobbes, to whom he addressed his preface, think him "malicious" 
 in observing the faults which "the Curious" had found with the 
 revered writers. His detailed criticisms, restored to their con- 
 text, become! then of minor importance. There have been ardent 
 admirers of Spenser, in every period, who could subscribe with 
 little emendation to Davenant 's complaints. 
 
 Abraham Cowley's delightful tribute needs no comment. 
 
 "I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head 
 first with such chimes of verse, as have never since left ringing there: 
 for I remember, when I first began to read, and to take some pleasure 
 in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 105 
 
 accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devo- 
 tion) — but there was wont to lie Spenser's works; thus I happened to 
 fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, 
 and giants, and monsters, and brave houses, which I found everywhere /^ 
 
 there (though my understanding had little to do with all this); so that, 
 I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and thus 
 was made a poet as irremediably as a child is made a eunuch. ' '3 
 
 In 1669 Edward Howard, Dryden's disputant and a fairly 
 staunch neo-classicist, brought out his The British Princes. Spen- 
 ser was remembered as ''the first of England's poets'' and *'by 
 many granted a Parallel to most of the Antients. ' ' 
 
 The Age of Reason, meanwhile, had been verging rapidly 
 into the Age of Literary Anarchy. But it seems fitting to begin 
 our review of the later period with John Dryden who, as I have 
 said, epitomizes its spirit. 
 
 y 
 
 3 Essays in Prose and Verse 1668. No. XI. 
 
106 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 IV 
 
 THE AGE OF LITERARY ANARCHY 
 
 Many times already, in this study, we have had occasion to 
 note the change from the Elizabethan Age of rapturous faith to 
 an age of doubt, of unrest, finally of absolute literary anarchy 
 which corresponded well with the great political upheavals which 
 distressed England throughout the reign of the Stuarts. Eliza- 
 bethan ideals were unified by their abounding faith. In spite 
 of our disgust for the fulsome eulogies of Elizabeth, we must 
 admit that, when the last shred of the courtier's mask is torn 
 away, there glows a genuine admiration, a deep faith in the 
 sovereign. We have seen that the climax of the Elizabethan Age 
 was the time of boyish panegyric, and that England's faith in 
 her literature was so immense that .sanely regulated literary 
 criticism was impossible until the canker doubt had done deadly 
 work. Then English poetry, which had moved in comparative 
 harmony, gradually divided and subdivided itself into a hundred 
 jarring sects. Hostile schools despised each other and doubted 
 themselves. Men became inconstant or inconsistent members of 
 two warring cults. The neo-classical credo, which was to unify 
 literature once more, gained ground slowly, and did not, as some 
 have thought, triumph in the days of Waller, Denham, or Dryden. 
 It struggled for bare existence till Pope and Addison became 
 dictators. 
 
 The Age of Literary Anarchy had no well-defined beginning. 
 It came about very slowly. Such men as William Drummond of 
 Hawthornden, Ben Jonson, and Edward Fairfax spread, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, the spirit of sedition. Drummond 
 and Fairfax combined the Elizabethan love of sensuousness with 
 a truly classical interest in form. Fairfax lived in the limelight 
 and his tastes descended to Waller, who was glad to acknowl- 
 edge him as a model. Drummond was unusually fond of using 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 107 
 
 and polishing the couplet, the form that the neo-classicists were 
 to accept as supreme. His bookishness sent him directly back to 
 the Latin poets again and again. His love of form stimulated 
 him to experiment more with sonnet-schemes than any man in 
 the language. In the abandon of the Elizabethan genius, then, 
 his almost over-cultivated mind must have found some rough 
 dissonances. Ben Jonson was a more definite classicist and his 
 influence was immense. Of these earlier figures Edward Fair- 
 fax interests us most of all because, as the ardent student of 
 Spenser and the acknowledged master of Waller, he linked Spen- 
 serian traditions with neo-classicism, the two currents of English 
 literature that critics have long mistakenly regarded as anti- 
 pathetic. In 1600 Fairfax published his translation of Tasso's 
 Jerusalem Delivered {Godfrey of Bulloigne or The Becoverie of 
 Jerusalem Done into English Heroicall Yerse), a poem which, 
 though in ottava rima, taught Waller how to fashion the smooth 
 couplets that made him the model of all true believers in neo- 
 classicism. Fairfax was an enthusiastic follower of Spenser, and 
 frequently departed from his original to draw more near to The 
 Faerie Queene. Spenser, for instance, had already translated 
 and in many cases improved passages from Tasso in his sensuous 
 account of the Bower of Bliss. As Fairfax turned his Italian 
 into English, memories of Spenser often led him delightedly 
 astray. He describes the two wantons, who would have lured 
 Carlo and Ubaldo from their quest for Rinaldo, with an evident 
 relish of Spenser's exquisite translation in his mind.^ One siren 
 loosed her long tresses so that they fell down and half hid her 
 naked body. 
 
 "Withal she smiled and she blushed withal, 
 Her blush, her smilings, smiles her blushing graced. 
 Over her face her amber tresses fall, 
 Whereunder Love himself in ambush placed." 
 
 The play on words is ultimately Tasso 's. But Spenser wrote : 
 
 ''Withall she laughed, and she blusht withall 
 That blushing to her laughter gave more grace. ' ' 
 
 1 Tasso, C. 15. St. 62. Spenser, B. II, C. 12, St. 
 
108 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Fairfax was plainly captivated by the charming cadence of the 
 repeated ''withal" and pillaged Spenser's first line. In his 
 description of the amorous Armida (C. 16, St. 18), Fairfax adds 
 to the conceits of Tasso with a phrase from Spenser. 
 
 "Her breasts were naked for the day was hot. 
 Her locks unbound waved in the wanton wind; 
 Some deal she sweat tired with the game you wot. 
 Her sweat-drops bright, white, round, like pearls of Inde; 
 Her humid eyes a firey smile forthshot 
 That like sunbeams in silver fountains shined. 
 O'er him her looks she hung and her soft breast 
 The pillow was, where he and love took rest." 
 
 From Spenser's interpolation, "pure Orient perles," (2, 12, 78) 
 Fairfax borrowed his simile, "like pearls of Inde," (for there is 
 no trace in the original) to overweight a picture already langor- 
 ous to the last degree. He constantly sought words as well as 
 fancies from his master, making free use of Spenser's archaisms. 
 In emulating the highly wrought technique of Spenser and Tasso 
 the lesser man doubtless found himself forced into that more 
 conscious attention to finish which caught the eye of Edmund 
 Waller. At all events, Waller and Dryden considered Fairfax 
 as one of their sacred authorities for the new couplet. 
 
 In decadent Elizabethans, who outlived the Elizabethan spirit 
 of youth, ruddy enthusiasm became hectic disease, careless fancy 
 was metamorphosed into ingenious artifice, the sensuousness of 
 Petrarch was laid aside for the conceits of Marini. Such a spirit 
 laid prematurely a blighting finger on the large soul of Donne and 
 spread even more insidiously through the religious ecstasy of 
 Crashaw. By 1630 England's poetry was visibly disturbed by 
 the struggles of these discordant forces. 
 
 From about 1650 to the end of the century the influence of 
 Spenser was at its lowest ebb in the history of English poetry. 
 The cause of this lies precisely in that multiplicity of artistic 
 theories that brought about the literary civil wars. When the 
 Elizabethans thought that they tallied all antecedents they can- 
 nonized Spenser in a thoroughly uncritical way. He was their 
 morning star, their high priest of poetry. He was with Homer. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 109 
 
 The admiration of later writers .was no less deep and sincere, but 
 doubt had sharpened their critical insight. The influence of 
 Spenser was no less great than that of any other writer. It was 
 only that influences were legion. There were no great central 
 convictions like those which inspired the Elizabethans, Augustans, 
 and romanticists at their highest point of development. The 
 wonder is that Spenser was hospitably received in so many antag- 
 onistic gfoups of writers. In this way, indeed, a slender* bond of 
 unity remained. But it was a mere shadow of the old community 
 of feeling. 
 
 The spirit of classicism had as yet but a thin voice in the 
 literary affairs of the age. The heavy cloth of gold of the renais- 
 sance made a mantle which the poets were loth to relinquish. 
 Giles and Phineas Fletcher, for instance, those pastor-poets of 
 Cambridge University who sang, in Spenser 's allegorical manner, 
 of the sacrifice of Christ and the soul of man, founded a school 
 of poets who perpetuated the sensuous Spenserian manner even 
 into the eighteenth century. Quarles, Thomas Robinson, Dr. 
 Joseph Beaumont, and others published ambitious attempts in 
 imitation of Spenser and the Fletchers, and emulated their spirit 
 in an age when chaotic sectarianism was vitally connected with 
 the issues of the day. As late as 1679 this movement was very 
 much alive in Samuel Woodford 's Legend of Love and its Epoda 
 in Spenserian stanzas. Even in the eighteenth century, when 
 neo-classicism held full sway, "William Thompson registered his 
 name as the last in this school with his Hymn to May (1757), a 
 piece which closely followed Spenser 's Epithalamion and Phineas 
 Fletcher's Purple Island and which is pure Elizabethan even in 
 an age of trim paterres. From Cambridge came a man who owed 
 a debt to the school of the Fletchers although he was too large 
 to be imprisoned as a member, John Milton, the supreme poet of 
 his age, who learned from Spenser much of the eloquence with 
 which he wrought his great religious and political experiences 
 into immortal song. The spirit of the dreamer of The Faerie 
 Queene was not, after all, so far remote from the great issues 
 of the middle decades of the seventeenth century. These poets. 
 
 /T 
 
110 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 with the exception of Milton (who, like all supreme artists, knew 
 how to reconcile classicism and romanticism), formed one of the 
 many groups of seventeenth century poets who still preferred to 
 worship beauty with Elizabethan exuberance and childlike 
 enumeration of infinite detail rather than by attention to finish, 
 the sense of finiteness, of repression which attracted the new 
 classicists. 
 
 Literary anarchy became bewildering toward the close of the 
 century because English poetry had fallen among little men. 
 During the last two decades of the seventeenth century, except 
 for Dryden, there were only the very dregs. The various warring 
 creeds quarreled to the end. Marinism, which found its most 
 brilliant supporter in Crashaw, was upheld by men like John 
 Norris of Bemerton in his Miscellanies (1678). Two very dif- 
 ferent schools worked against them: the boisterous satirists of 
 the type of John Cleveland and Dr. Robert Wild, who battled 
 with the decadent poets by using a rugged style which constantly 
 broke down into doggerel; Waller, Denham, and Sidney Godol- 
 phin, who fought for neo-classicism. Then there was the great 
 number of belated Elizabethans, the school of the Fletchers and 
 many more. These men were generally perfectly conscious of 
 their conservatism. Mr. Edmund Gosse notes a volume by Philip 
 Ayres, Lyric poems, made in Imitation of the Italians, as ''the 
 very last effort made to restore romantic poetry to its old place 
 in English literature." There were some who inconsistently 
 wrote in different veins. Such a man was Sir Richard Fanshawe, 
 a good friend of the classicist Denham, but having many sym- 
 pathies with the Elizabethans and Marinists. In 1676 a number 
 of his miscellaneous poems appeared along with his translation of 
 Guarini's II Pastor Fido. A Canto of the Progress of Learning, 
 though in Spenserian stanzas, is far less florid than some of his 
 sonnets and lyrics. On the other hand its opening line, * ' Tell me, 
 O Muse, and tell me Spencer's Ghost," seems to indicate that the 
 master's poetry was not far from his thoughts. Again he trans- 
 lated Virgil, the idol of the Augustans, in the Spenserian stanza, 
 a form quite generally regarded, even by its admirers in that day. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. Ill 
 
 as unfit for heroic poetry. The civil wars in English poetry might 
 easily be illustrated far beyond due proportion in this study. 
 Charles Cotton continued at once the wholesome nature poetry 
 of Browne, Herrick, and Marvel and wrote amorous lyrics in 
 the vein of Suckling, Lovelace, Carew, men who cared little 
 for the quiet country, who preferred the rustle of the silk j:,owns 
 of court ladies to the wind among the trees. Cowley's eccentric 
 Pindaric odes fell into disrepute toward the close of the century. 
 Yet Thomas Flatman, one of the very few lyrists who wrote with 
 high seriousness at the end of the century, followed Cowley almost 
 exclusively. Flatman ^s friends, Dr. Samuel Woodford, the Spen- 
 serian, and Katherine Philips, *'the matchless Orinda," wrote 
 often in the manner of Cowley. Yet Katherine Philips, with her 
 affected elegance and her importation of French ideals from the 
 Hotel Eambouillet, contributed definitely to the rise of neo- 
 classicism. Finally Dryden, who was to give the death-blow to 
 Abraham Cowley, wrote one of his maturest poems, To Mrs. Anne 
 Killegreiv, (1686) in the Pindaric and metaphysical vein of the 
 despised poet. Against the lyrics of the court amorists we may 
 pit the long line of religious lyrics from Crashaw, himself as 
 ardent a royalist as Lovelace or Suckling, to Vaughn. In the 
 love-lyric, too, the approach of the dissolution of faith, of the 
 Age of Anarchy, may be seen in Habington's Castara, a some- 
 what uneasy, overconscious attempt to fuse the erotic cavalier 
 poetry with religion and Platonism, utterly unlike the fiery 
 Platonism of the Elizabethans. Then complete cynicism broke in. 
 At the close of the century Rochester, Sedley, Aphra Behn, and 
 others were retailing the commonplaces of the amorists, striving 
 to eke out their slender originality and to heal their shattered 
 faith in the finer things of life with feverish sensuality, cynicism, 
 and obscenity. Except for the slow and hotly contested rise of 
 neo-classieism, this degradation of the court lyric is typical of 
 the degradation of English poetry. Neo-classicism promised at 
 least a wholesome repression in style and a theory, if no more, 
 of the moral responsibility of poetry in its highest moods. It 
 promised a much needed increase of intellectuality as opposed to 
 unbridled fancy. 
 
112 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 In turning to the heralds of Augustanism we must never for- 
 get that they were not outside the influence of Spenser and did 
 not regard Spenser as necessarily opposed to their regime. We 
 shall see how they came more and more to reconcile him with 
 their ideals much as they reconciled Virgil. Sir John Denham 
 classed Spenser and Jonson together as exponents of "Art" as 
 opposed to the less revered native woodnotes wild which were 
 falling into disrepute. 
 
 "Next (like Aurora), Spenser rose 
 Whose purple blush the day foreshows; 
 Old Mother Wit and Nature gave 
 Shakespeare and Fletcher all they have, 
 In Spenser and in Jonson, Art 
 Of slower Nature got the start. "2 
 
 Edmund Waller, as we have noted, learned his devotion to finish 
 from Fairfax. He seems to have returned to Spenser as well for 
 that mellifluousness which is characteristic of his smooth, sen- 
 suous verse. His most elaborate poem, The Battle of the Mid- 
 summer Islands, follows Spenser and Fairfax in the creation of 
 a sort of tropical Bower of Bliss, or Eden.^ A reference in the 
 third canto seems to show that Waller, unlike many professed 
 students of English literature, had arrived as far as the fifth 
 book of The Faerie Queene. For he describes a wounded whale 
 scourging the waves *'like Spenser's Talus with his iron flail." 
 Similarly Katherine Philips, whom we have described as mainly 
 neo-classical, draws from Spenser to adorn a polite and languid 
 Sapphic effusion. Content, To my dearest Lucasia. 
 
 "Content, the false World's best disguise, 
 
 The search and faction of the wise. 
 
 Is so abstruse and hid in night 
 
 That, like that Fairy Eed-Cross ]S[night, 
 Who treacherous Falsehood for clear Truth had got. 
 Men think they have it when they have it not.'' 
 
 But it was Dryden who sanctified Spenser for the Augustans 
 of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With Dryden Eng- 
 
 2 On Mr. Abraham Cowley *s Death. 
 
 3 Canto I. See Mr. G. Thorn Drury's notes on this poem in the Muses' 
 Library edition of Waller. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 113 
 
 lish criticism came to a brilliant climax and the Age of Literary 
 Anarchy received complete and powerful expression. England 
 felt a growing interest in the superbly unified French theories 
 of poetry, but found them practically impossible to reconcile 
 with her sturdy native traditions and the restless spirit of the 
 age. When we learn to realize thoroughly how some writers took 
 refuge in an idolatrous worship of the classics, how others clam- 
 ored for the perpetuation of the Elizabethan manner, how many 
 caught up th» extravagances of the English Marinists, the attempt 
 to goad jaded emotions with the highly spiced diet of jaded con- 
 ceits, and carried the hectic fancies of Cowley, Crashaw, and their 
 crew to excess beyond excess, how some gave up hope of solution 
 and sought false relief in cynicism and rough mockery, how the 
 exquisite idyllic vein of Andrew Marvel could turn to barren 
 and querulous satire, when we realize that it was the day of a 
 hundred schools, the age of literary anarchy, as it was the age of 
 civil broils and political plots, then we can understand Dryden 
 with some human sympathy. In Dryden 's day uncertainty ran 
 riot. His admirers and detractors have long puzzled over his 
 vacillations in matters religious, literary, and political. How- 
 ever servile he may have been, it is difficult to deny that he was 
 a man of strong if somewhat fickle convictions that changed, not 
 merely with the breeze of public opinion, but with his own true 
 moods. Some of his inconsistencies are readily explainable by his 
 enthusiasm for the subject under immediate consideration. In 
 his Discourse on Epick Poetry (1697), he devoted much time to 
 proving triumphantly, in spite of Aristotle, that heroic poetry is a 
 greater form than tragedy. But in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie 
 (1667), where all his eloquence was being spent on the drama, 
 he did not even pause to support a confident parenthesis: 
 ''Though tragedy may be justly preferred to the other," [viz., 
 epic]. In his Preface to the second Miscellany (1685), Spenser's 
 endeavour to imitate the rustic speech of Theocritus by an infus- 
 ion of archaic and dialect words is adjudged unsuccessful. 
 
 "Spenser has endeavoured it [to imitate the Doric of Theocritus] in 
 his Shepherds Kalendar; but neither will it succeed in English [any more 
 
114 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 than in the severe Latin tongue] for which reason I have forbore to 
 attempt it. ' ' 
 
 Yet in his Dedication of the Pastorals of Virgil (1697), he wrote : 
 
 **But Spencer being master of our northern dialect, and skilled in 
 Chaucer's English, has so exactly imitated the Dorick of Theocritus, that 
 his love is a perfect image of that passion which God infused into both 
 sexes, before it was corrupted with the knowledge of arts, and the cere- 
 monies of what we call good manners." 
 
 Without pausing to consider any more of Dryden's many 
 self-contradictions, we may turn to his comments on Spenser as 
 disclosing matters most significant for our general conception 
 of Dryden as a critic. His first reference to Spenser occurs in a 
 preface Of Heroic Plays, published in 1672 with an edition of 
 The Conquest of Granada, where he merely cites The Faerie 
 Queene in support of the use of gods, spirits, and ''enthusiastic 
 parts ' ' in poetry. In his youth Dryden, like many young writers, 
 was a victim of the poets of his own generation. His early servi- 
 tude to the conceit-hunters is well known. He himself tells us 
 in his Dedication of The Spanish Friar (1681), that he once 
 thought "inimitable Spenser a mean poet in comparison of Syl- 
 vester's Dubartas." But he came to dub the idol of his callow 
 days a writer of ' ' abominable fustian. ' * 
 
 In his maturity Dryden spoke enthusiastically and discern- 
 ingly about Spenser. In his Essay on Satire (1693), he made his 
 most elaborate criticism. In a long digression on heroic poetry, 
 in which he asserted that no one equalled Homer and Virgil, he 
 criticised Lucan, Statins, Ariosto, and Tasso, scorned utterly the 
 French epics, and added : 
 
 **The English have only to boast of Spenser and Milton, who neither 
 of them wanted either genius or learning, to have been perfect poets; 
 and yet, both of them are liable to many censures. For there is no uni- 
 formity in the design of Spenser: he aims at the accomplishment of no 
 one action: he raises up a hero for every one of his adventures; and 
 endows each of them with some particular moral virtue which renders 
 them all equal, without subordination or performance. Every one is 
 most valiant in his own legend; only we must do them that justice to 
 observe, that magnanimity, which is the character of prince Arthur, 
 shines throughout the whole poem; and succours the rest, when they are 
 in distress. The original of every knight was then living in the court 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 115 
 
 of queen Elizabeth; and he attributed to each of them, that virtue which 
 he thought most conspicuous in them: an ingenious piece of flattery, 
 though it turned not much to his account. Had he lived to finish the 
 Poem, in the six remaining legends, it had certainly been more of a 
 piece; but could not have been perfect, because the model was not true. 
 But prince Arthur, or his chief patron. Sir Philip Sidney, whom he 
 intended to make happy by the marriage of his Gloriana, dying before 
 him, deprived the Poet both of means and spirit to accomplish his design: 
 for the rest his obsolete language and ill choice of his stanzas, are 
 faults but of the second magnitude; for, notwithstanding the first, he is 
 still intelligible, at least after a little practice: and for the last, he is 
 the more to be admired, that, labouring under such a difficulty, his verses 
 are so numerous, so various, and harmonious, that only Virgil, whom he 
 professedly imitated, has surpassed him among the Komans; and only 
 Mr. Waller among the English." y 
 
 It is important to observe that this very just criticism of the y^ 
 general structure of The Faerie Queene began with Dryden and 
 has become the current comment to our own day. Even Thomas 
 Warton had nothing to add to it. It is moreover worth special 
 attention that Dryden did not share Jonson's and Davenant's 
 aversion for the use of obsolete words. Nor did he always regard 
 them as even "faults of the second magnitude." We have seen 
 that he first condemned but later praised the archaisms in The 
 Shepheards Calender. And in his discussion of Milton in this 
 same digression in the Essay on Satire he treats archaisms with a 
 justice that is beyond reproach : 
 
 *'His [Milton's] antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; 
 for therein he imitated Spenser as Spenser imitated Chaucer. And though, 
 perhaps, the love of their master may have transported both too far, in 
 the frequent use of them; yet, in my opinion words may then be laud- 
 ably revived, when either they are more sounding or more significant, 
 than those in practice; and, when their obscurity is taken away, by join- 
 ing other words to them which clear the sense; according to the rule of 
 Horace, for the admission of new words. But in both cases a moderation 
 is to be observed in the use of them. For unnecessary coinage, as well 
 as unnecessary revival runs into affectation; a fault to be avoided on 
 either hand. ' ' 
 
 Dryden 's association of the names of Spenser and Virgil in 
 the discussion of the structure of The Faerie Queene quoted above 
 is only one of many passages that indicate that Spenser and the 
 darling of the neo-classicists were endeared to him as poetical 
 
 X 
 
116 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 comrades. In his Discourse on Epick Poetry (1697) Dryden 
 
 wrote : 
 
 **I must acknowledge that Virgil in Latin and Spencer in English, 
 have been my masters. ' ' 
 
 Again : 
 
 **If the design be good and the draught be true, the colouring is the 
 first beauty that strikes the eye. Spencer and Milton are the nearest, in 
 English, to Virgil and Horace in Latin; and I have endeavoured to form 
 my style by imitating their masters." 
 
 The association of Virgil and Spenser is very significant because 
 it throws a clear light on an aspect of neo-classicism completely 
 misunderstood. The Augustans did not, as has been so con- 
 stantly averred, forget or despise Spenser. They found him, on 
 the whole, sufficiently reconcilable with their ideals and appre- 
 ciated sides of his poetry to which the romanticists, to our own 
 day, have remained blind. Dryden taught the Augustans to 
 accept Virgil and Spenser as common models. The cherished 
 project of his own life was to write an epic about Arthur, the 
 hero of The Faerie Queene, or the Black Prince, ''wherein, after 
 Virgil and Spenser, I would have taken occasion to represent 
 my living friends and patrons of noblest families, and also 
 shadowed the events of future ages, in the succession of our Im- 
 perial lines."* But he was unfortunately encouraged only by 
 the "fair words of Charles II" and ''my little salary ill paid." 
 But the thorn which seems to have pricked the sides of all who 
 read Dryden, devoutly or sacrilegiously, is his admiration for 
 the faultless commonplaces of Waller and Denham with their 
 rippling heroic couplets. In his Dedication of The Rival Ladies 
 (1672) Dryden asserted of "rhyme" that: 
 
 "The excellence and dignity of it were never fully known till Mr. 
 Waller taught it. ' ' 
 
 In the Defence of the Epilogue to The Conquest of Granada he 
 said: 
 
 "Well-placing of words, for the sweetness of pronunciation, was not 
 known till Mr. Waller introduced it." 
 
 4 The Essay on Satire. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 117 
 
 By the time we arrive at the Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) 
 we become belligerent when we read : 
 
 "They [the Elizabethans] can produce .... nothing so even sweet, 
 and flowing as Mr. Waller nothing so majestic, so correct, as Sir John 
 Denham. ' ' 
 
 In the Essay on Satire, to be sure, this fetish-worship lends op- 
 portunity for gratifying praise of Spenser and a new interweav- 
 ing of his name with Virgil's. For, having been advised by Sir 
 George Mackenzie to imitate "the turns of Mr. Waller and Sir 
 John Denham, " it " first made me sensible to my own wants, and 
 brought me afterwards to seek for the supply of them in other 
 English authors.'' Not even "the darling of my youth, the 
 famous Cowley," rewarded a search. 
 
 ' ' Then I consulted a greater genius (without offense to the manes of 
 that noble author) I mean Milton; but as he endeavours everywhere to 
 express Homer, whose age had not arrived to that fineness, I found in him 
 a true sublimity, lofty thoughts which were clothed with admirable 
 Grecisms, and ancient words which he had been digging from the mines 
 of Chaucer and Spenser, and which, with all their rusticity, had some- 
 what of venerable in them. At last I had recourse to his master, 
 Spenser, the author of that immortal poem called The Fairy Queen; and 
 there I met with that which I had been looking for so long in vain. 
 Spenser had studied Virgil to as much advantage as Milton had done 
 Homer and among the rest of his excellencies, had copied that." 
 
 This is truly mellifluous to the ear of the ardent Spenserian. 
 
 But a famous passage in the Preface to the Fables (1700), the 
 
 brilliant work of Dryden's maturity, has been most unduly 
 
 exalted into prominence and cited as an example of that crass- 
 
 ness which is said to have tainted even the large mind of Dryden 
 
 in an age of literary narrowness. We expect only the choicest 
 
 wisdom in this preface. We gloat over the damnation of the once 
 
 revered Cowley. We breathe the fire of the noble eloquence which 
 
 exalts Chaucer. But, as Dryden's thought reverts to metrics, 
 
 our enthusiasm grows pale. 
 
 ''Equality of numbers in every verse which we call heroick, was 
 either not known or not always practised in Chaucer's age. . . . We can 
 only say that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is 
 brought to perfection at first. We must be children before we grow men. 
 There was an Ennius, and in process of time a Lucilius and a Lucretius 
 before Virgil and Horace. Even after Chaucer, there was a Spencer, a 
 
118 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Harrington, a Fairfax, before Waller and Denham were in being and our 
 numbers were in their nonage till these appeared. '^ 
 
 These sentences have brought reproach on the memory of 
 Dryden. It is surprising to see how widespread is the opinion 
 that here Dryden, in his splendid maturity, capriciously expressed 
 a senile preference for Waller and Denham over Chaucer and 
 Spenser. But it is to be observed that most of Dryden 's refer- 
 ences to Denham and Waller have to do with technique — and 
 with the technique of the heroic couplet solely. It is the ' ' num- 
 bers" and ''rhyme'* (which readers of the Essay of Dramatick 
 Poesie will recognize as practically technical terms for the coup- 
 let) which Dryden admired in Waller and Denham. When Dry- 
 den wrote of the peers of the ancients and considered poetry in 
 all its aspects he praised Chaucer, Tasso, Spenser, Jonson, Shake- 
 speare, Milton, and Corneille in the highest terms. But Waller 
 and Denham were not mentioned. That he did not rate mere 
 technique highest among the qualifications of a poet is proved 
 by a glance at his preference for Chaucer over Ovid in the 
 Preface to the Fables. From his point of view Chaucer was an 
 inferior metrist. The best he could say of Chaucer 's melody was 
 that "there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which 
 is natural and pleasing though not perfect.'' As a confirmed 
 lover of Latin poetry he could not but greatly prefer the artful 
 cadences of Ovid's lines, though he was probably not blind to 
 their saccharine qualities as compared with the stronger music 
 of Virgil. But, though he was emphatic in favor of Ovid's 
 metrical superiority, the Latin poet came off very badly in the 
 comparison and was ranked definitely below Chaucer. It is evi- 
 dent that he ranked Chaucer, whom he considered somewhat 
 primitive, far above Ovid, a poet of the days of a great nation's 
 mature culture and formal perfection. By the same token it is 
 not fanciful to argue that while Dryden considered Waller and 
 Denham to be great as the perfectors of the popular heroic coup- 
 let of the day, he would not have dreamed a moment of placing 
 them as high as Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton. 
 
 We have observed that whenever Dryden took a poet or an 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 119 
 
 ideal as the topic of an essay or a text for the exploitation of a 
 pet theory he exalted the subject with a youthful enthusiasm 
 for the interest of the hour and a fine indifference to what he 
 had ever said before. When we consider the consistent and high 
 praise in his many references to Spenser, it does not seem illogi- 
 cal to suppose that had he written an essay on his acknowledged 
 master he would have glowed with an eloquence sublimated with 
 his patriotic preference for English poets over the ancients and 
 over the immaculate French rule-worshippers.^ As it is, he has 
 left some generalizations on Spenser that are at once in the spirit 
 of warm and rational admiration. In the Discourse on Epick 
 Poetry he found that ''the file of heroick poets is very short." 
 There had been only one Iliad and Aeneid. 
 
 "After these are entered some Lord Chamberlain should be appointed, 
 some critick of an authority should be set before the door to keep out a 
 crowd of little poets, who press for admission, and are not of quality. 
 . . . The next, but the next with a long intervall betwixt was the 
 Jerusalem; I mean not so much in distance of time as in excellency.'' 
 
 Pulci, Bojardo, Ariosto, Le Moine, Scudery, Chapelain are hud- 
 dled together and receive scant grace. But : 
 
 ''Spencer has a better plea for his Fairy Queen had his action been 
 finished, or had been one; and Milton, if the devil had not been his hero, 
 instead of Adam. . . . After these the rest of our English poets shall not 
 be mentioned. I have that honour for them which I ought to have; but 
 if they are worthies, they are not to be ranked amongst the three whom 
 I have named, and who are established in their reputation. ' ' 
 
 In the same essay we are told that : 
 
 "Spenser wanted only to have read the rules of Bossu; for no man was 
 ever born with a greater genius, or had more knowledge to support it. "6 
 
 Today we voice precisely the same complaints against Spenser's 
 form. To be sure, we fancy that we could prescribe something 
 better than the fossilized Bossu. But though we all bow to Spen- 
 ser 's marvellous genius we wish, with Dry den, that he had chosen 
 
 5 See the Essay of Dramatick Poesie for his preference for English and 
 modern poetry. 
 
 « Luke Melbourne, a contentious parson, gained much notoriety, includ- 
 irg a savage trust from Pope (Essay on Criticism, 11. 462, sq.) for a book 
 o^- observations on Dryden's translation of Virgil. But Melbourne at least 
 made just and grim sport of Dryden's prescription of Bossu for Spenser. 
 
120 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 or perfected a mould more vertebrate into which to pour the 
 immense treasures of his mind. In the Dedication of his transla- 
 tion of the Pastorals of Virgil (1697) Dryden, besides praising 
 the ^ * imitation ' ^ of the Doric of Theocritus, as before noted, gave 
 Spenser the highest rank among the shepherd-poets. Having 
 discussed the bucolics of Theocritus and Virgil he added : 
 
 "Our own nation has produced a third poet in this kind, not inferior 
 to the two former. For the Shepherd's Calendar of Spencer is not to be 
 matched in any modern language, not even by Tasso 's Aminta, which 
 infinitely transcends Guarini's Pastor-Fido, as having more of nature in 
 it, and being almost wholly clear from the wretched affectation of learn- 
 ing. I will say nothing of the piscatory eclogues, because no modern 
 Latin can bear criticism. It is no wonder that rolling down through so 
 many barbarous ages, from the spring of Virgil, it bears along with it 
 the filth and ordures of the Goths and Vandals. Neither will I mention 
 Monsieur Fontenelle, the living glory of the French. It is enough for 
 him to have excelled his master, Lucian, without attempting to compare 
 our miserable age with that of Virgil or Theocritus. Let me only add, 
 for his reputation, 
 
 si Pergama dextra 
 
 Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent. 
 
 But Spencer being master of our northern dialect, and skilled in Chaucer 's 
 English, has so exactly imitated the Dorick of Theocritus, that his love 
 is a perfect image of that passion which God infused into both sexes, 
 before it was corrupted with the knowledge of arts, and the ceremonies 
 of what we call good manners." 
 
 The obvious conclusions from these citations certainly add 
 little but lustre to Dryden 's fame as a critic. Mr. Waller and Mr. 
 Denham are given credit only for what they actually accom- 
 plished. To be sure, Dryden overrated the heroic couplet, which 
 from his point of view they perfected, as a measure. But it is 
 absurd to suppose that he placed them, on these grounds, above 
 the acknowledged masters of English poetry. As for Spenser, 
 no man has praised more nobly and more rationally than Dryden. 
 We have little occasion to question the opinions of those who hold 
 him to be the greatest English critic. 
 
 Thomas Rymer interests us because he was an important man 
 in his own day, because he espoused neo-classicism, in an age of 
 struggle and doubt, with an uncompromising faith, and because 
 he shows how readily the Augustans reconciled Spenser, on the 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 121 
 
 whole, with their ideals. In his preface to the translation of 
 
 Rapin's Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie (1674) he 
 
 wrote : 
 
 "Spencer, I think, may be reckoned the first of our Heroick Poets; 
 he had a large spirit, a sharp judgement, and a Genius for Heroick Poesie, 
 perhaps above any that ever writ since Virgil. But our misfortune is, 
 he wanted a true Idea, and lost himself by following an unfaithful guide. 
 Though besides Homer and Virgil, he had read Tasso, yet he rather 
 suffer 'd himself to be misled by Ariosto; with whom blindly rambling on 
 marvellous adventures he makes no conscience of Probability. All is 
 fanciful and chimerical, without any uniformity, without any foundation 
 in truth; his Poem is perfect Fairy-land. . . . They who can love Ariosto 
 will be ravish 'd with Spencer, whilst men of juster thoughts lament that 
 such great Wits have miscarried in their Travels for want of direction 
 to set them in the right way. But the truth is, in Spencer's time, Italy 
 itself was not well satisfied with Tasso; and few amongst them would 
 allow that he had excell'd their divine Ariosto. And it was the vice of 
 these times to affect superstitiously the Allegory; and nothing would 
 then be current without a mystical meaning. We must blame the Italians 
 for debauching great Spencer's judgement; and they cast him on the 
 unlucky choice of the stanza which in no wise is proper for our Lan- 
 guage." 
 
 In 1675 Edward Phillips published his Theatrum Poetarum 
 Anglicanorum, a work which became very popular as a handbook 
 of criticisms and accounts of English Poets, and from which 
 writers of similar treatises, Gerard Langbaine, William Win- 
 stanley, and others, borrowed with great freedom. Critics have 
 doubtless been right in ascribing some of the real wisdom and 
 largeness of Phillips' utterances to the influence of his uncle, 
 Milton. Thus it was, perhaps, that he never bowed in blind wor- 
 ship to the heroic couplet. Indeed his curious preference of an 
 irregular lyrical verse, which he called ' ' Pindarick, ' ' to the coup- 
 let for tragedy suggests that his mind may have been full of the 
 rafified choruses of Samson Agonistes. The keynote of his atti- 
 tude toward poetry is opposed to the Augustan worship of reason 
 and sounds like Milton. 
 
 "Wit, ingenuity and learning in verse, even elegancy itself, though 
 that comes nearest, are one thing; true native poetry is another; in 
 which there is a certain air and spirit, which, perhaps, the most learned 
 and judicious in other arts do not perfectly apprehend; much less is it 
 attainable by any study or industry." 
 
122 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 His appreciation of the Spenserian stanza is notable and almost 
 unique in his period. 
 
 ''How much more stately and majestic in epic poems, especially of 
 heroic argument, Spenser's stanza (which I take to be but an improve- 
 ment upon Tasso 's Ottava Eima, or the Ottava Rima itself, used by many 
 of our once-esteemed poets) is above the way, either of couplet, or altera- 
 tion of four verses only, I am persuaded were it revived, would soon be 
 acknowledged. ' ' 
 
 Phillips may have influenced Dr. Samuel Woodford who pub- 
 lished, in 1679, A Paraphrase Upon the Canticles with a preface 
 that is full of interest for us. 
 
 "Among the several other Papers that we have lost of the Excellent 
 and Divine Spenser, one of the happiest Poets that this Nation ever 
 bred (and out of it the world it may be (all things considered) had not 
 his Fellow, excepting only such as were immediately Inspired) I bewail 
 nothing methinks so much, as his Version of the Canticles. For doubt- 
 less, in my poor Judgement, never was Man better made for such a Work, 
 and the Song itself as directly suited, with his Genius and manner of 
 Poetry (that I mean wherein he best shews and even excels himself, His 
 Shepherd's Kalender, and other occasional Poems, for I cannot yet say 
 the same directly for his Faery Queen designed for an Heroic Poem) 
 that it could not but from him receive the last Perfection, whereof it 
 was capable out of its original. '' 
 
 Woodford's eccentric notions and terrifying plesiosaurian sen- 
 tences do not prove that he was out of the literary world of his 
 day. He was the friend of Sprat, the famous biographer of 
 Cowley, and seems to have commanded no small respect from 
 Flatman, **the matchless Orinda," and other distinguished con- 
 temporaries that are now with the snows of yesteryear. His 
 opinions are always interesting and often sound and suggestive. 
 He thinks that couplets are best in an heroic poem, *'as in Mr. 
 Cowley's Davideis (for the Quatrains of Sir William Davenant, 
 and the Stanza of Nine in Spenser 's Faery Queen, which are but 
 an Improvement of the Ottava Rima, to instance in no more, 
 seem not to me so proper)." But that he had some admiration 
 for the Spenserian stanza, for other purposes, seems certain, for 
 he employed it himself in his most pretentious poem, The Legend 
 of Love. 
 
 In his paraphrase of the Canticles Woodford carried the 
 dialogue-setting of Quarles (S ion's Sonnets) even farther and 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 123 
 
 attempted an approximation of the classical drama and the classi- 
 cal epithalamium. The verses are not only assigned to the Spouse 
 and the Beloved but to the friends on either side and to a chorus. 
 "Woodford takes occasion, incidentally, to condemn blank verse as 
 used by Milton, though he is an enthusiastic lover of Paradise 
 Lost. For blank verse, he thinks, as ''likest prose," is unfit for 
 any form but the drama. The Song of Solomon may be divided, 
 he thinks, into such parts as a Protasis, the ** Divine Amoris 
 Ecstasis, an Epitasis or the counterturn of action, the Dolor de 
 Absentia Sponsi," and a third division. The unity of action, 
 we are told, is ''strictly observed in this Hymn, and the Chorus, 
 which is everywhere regular." In short, Woodford is a com- 
 pound of the Spenserians, the Marinists, and the neo-classicists, 
 a very characteristic poet of the late seventeenth century. 
 
 To his version of the Canticles Woodford prefixed a stern 
 Proazma bidding the profane to ''avoid." He was evidently 
 somewhat disturbed over the possible influence of the Oriental 
 love-language. In his preface he was scandalized by some un- 
 speakable freethinkers who dared to murmur that the Song of 
 Solomon might, after all, be a literal love-lyric and have nothing 
 to do with an allegory of Christ and the Church. To make his 
 cheveux de frise perfect against any loose lovers of wanton lyrics 
 who should chance on his ground in search of amorous poetry to 
 their taste, he added his moralistic Epoda or Legend of Love, imi- 
 tated partly from Spenser's Hymne to Divine Love and partly 
 from the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins in The Faerie Queene. 
 We may let Woodford describe its content in his own words. After 
 defending his use of the term ' ' Epoda, ' ' he says : 
 
 *'The ^Legend,' further, of 'Love' I have stiled it, for honour's sake 
 to the great Spenser, whose Stanza of Nine I have used, and who has 
 Intituled the six Books which we have compleat of his Faery Queen, by 
 the several Legends of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship Jus- 
 tice and Courtesy, and to any who knows what the word Legend there, 
 or in its true and first notion signifies, it will neither seem strange, 
 ridiculous, or improper. I have made it to consist of three Cantos, agree- 
 able enough to the nature of an Epode or Legend, if it be judged indecent, 
 as indeed it is, considering its length, for an Epilogue; the first whereof 
 taking occasion from the Canticles, to which in the beginning it refers, 
 
124 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 I have endeavoured to shew the true Nature of Love, and what it was in 
 the State of Innocence, describing it by the liveliest Images, which I 
 form to myself suitable to a poetical composition. In the second I have 
 considered the thing whatever it be, vulgarly called Love, under the 
 dominion and government of Sense, exclusive of Reason, which it too 
 often either draws to its party or wholly extinguishes, than which noth- 
 ing can be conceived more absurd, unreasonable, extravagant, and 
 inhumane. The third canto, in the close of it, is designed for the Eestau- 
 ration of Love, by Sacred Marriage, or Wedlock, according to the Divine 
 Institution, to its ancient Dignity and Lustre." 
 
 John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave and Duke of Buckingham- 
 shire, published in 1682 a very clever Essay on Poetry in the last 
 couplet of which he asserted that the ideal poet 
 
 **Must above Cowley, nay, and Milton too, prevail 
 Succeed where great Torquato and our greater Spenser fail." 
 
 In the edition of 1713 he revised these lines, significantly striking 
 out the name of Cowley, who had then been dashed from the 
 firmament of poets. Here he decided that the poet 
 * ' Must above Milton 's lofty flights prevail 
 Succeed where Spenser and even Torquato fail." 
 
 In 1723 the couplet was made to read : 
 *'Must above Tasso's lofty flights prevail. 
 Succeed where Spenser and even Milton fail. ' ' 
 
 Dr. Johnson was the first to comment on these revisions as a mark 
 of the increase of Milton 's fame. But they have another import- 
 ance as well. The names of Tasso, Spenser, and Milton were 
 plainly not marshalled merely to make a high-sounding couplet, 
 but the shifts in the order and the omission of Cowley indicate 
 that these men were carefully selected because of their eminence 
 and, most probably, with a shrewd eye to their popular eminence. 
 I must not omit some lines from a satire by John Oldham 
 (Poems and Translations 1683) because, though their connection 
 with Spenserian criticism is of the slightest, there is something 
 in their grim despair that is typical of the poet 's attitude at the 
 end of the seventeenth century. Poets are always complaining 
 that their times care not for the muse. But there is something 
 in the raw power of these lines that is more than the proper and 
 customary protest against the indifference to those who practice 
 the humble slighted shepherd's trade. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 125 
 
 *'Oiie night, as I was pondering of late 
 On all the miseries of my hapless Fate, 
 Cursing my rhiming Stars, raving in vain 
 At all the Pow.'rs, who over Poets reign: 
 In came a ghastly Shape, all pale and thin, 
 As some poor Sinner, who by Priest had been 
 Under a long Lent's Penance, starv'd and whip'd. 
 Or par-boil'd Lecher, late from Hot-house crept: 
 Famish 'd his Looks appear 'd his eyes sunk in, 
 Like Morning-Gown about him hung his Skin: { 
 
 A Wreath of Laurel on his Head he wore, 
 A book inscribed the Fairy Queen he bore." 
 
 This spectre, who is no other than Spenser himself, dissuades the 
 young poet from the unrewarded allegiance to the muses. It is 
 difficult to realize that this harsh, crude verse was written by 
 a poet highly esteemed in his day. But Dryden wrote one of his 
 noblest, most genuine poems in his memory. Crude as these 
 verses are, they show a spirit much more real than the complaints 
 of the Elizabethan shepherd-poets in the Age of Enthusiasm and 
 are much more manly than the everlasting whines of our dis- 
 gruntled magazine poets of the twentieth century against com- 
 mercialism. They show a feeling for a real fin de siecle. 
 
 In Sir William Temple's essay Of Poetry (1685) Ariosto, 
 Tasso, and Spenser are selected as the three supreme modern 
 poets to name with the Ancients. 
 
 *' After these three I know none of the Moderns that have made any 
 achievements in Heroic poetry worth recording.'' 
 
 Of Spenser in particular he wrote : 
 
 "Spenser endeavoured to supply this with morality to make instruc- 
 tion instead of story, the subject of an epic poem. His execution was 
 excellent and his flights of fancy very noble and high, but his design 
 was poor, and his moral lay so bare that it lost the effect. ' ' 
 
 Those timid tasters of The Faerie Queene who believe with 
 Lowell that the allegory is the grit in the dish of strawberries 
 and cream, will find this critcism in some accord with their views, 
 views. 
 
 William Winstanley has been long spurned as a wretched 
 barber and a graceless thief from the writings of Edward 
 Phillips. In his account of Spenser {Lives of the most famous 
 English Foets, 1686), he referred to him as: 
 
126 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 ''Especially very happy in English Poetry, as his learned, elaborate 
 Works do declare .... and though some blame his Writings for the 
 many Chaucerisms used by him, yet to the Learned they are known not 
 to be blemishes but rather beauties to his Book. ' "^ 
 
 Again : 
 
 ''But his main Book, and which I think Envy itself cannot carp at, 
 was his Fairy Queen, a Work of such ingenuous composure as will last as 
 long as time endures.'^ 
 
 In 1694 Sir Thomas Pope Blount brought out a collection of 
 remarks on poets and poetry called De Be Poetica, an important 
 document to determine the standing of critics of that period and 
 the ideas of an author apparently held by the reading public. 
 Spenser fares excellently. The eulogies of Edward Phillips, 
 Camden, and Fuller are quoted together with the high praise, 
 with its rational qualifications, of Temple, Bymer, and Dryden 
 {Essay on Satire). 
 
 In these days English poetry was at its lowest ebb and Spen- 
 ser 's influence at its faintest was coincident with this drab age. 
 The fact that it was an Age of Literary Anarchy, that there 
 were many conflicting influences and many hostile ideals, was the 
 cause of this degeneration. It is remarkable, under the circum- 
 stances, to find Spenser admired and followed by poets in other 
 respects so inimical to one another. Neo-classicism was neces- 
 sary to save English poetry. But it grew only very slowly and 
 painfully. Neo-classicism, when it did prevail, found inspiration 
 in Spenser and reconciled him, for the most part, with its ideals. 
 It is significant, as we have already seen, to note how often he 
 was named with Virgil. It is not true that Spenser fell into dis- 
 repute and so remained until the romanticists * ' revived ' ' him. 
 
 7 This sentence is lifted bodily from Thomas Fuller 's account of Spenser 
 in The History of the Worthies of England 1662. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 127 
 
 V 
 
 THE NEO-CLASSICAL DESPOTISM 
 
 All scholarship on eighteenth century literature has of late 
 been a mad scramble in search of romanticism. Since Professor 
 Phelps and Professor Beers traced its growth in the eighteenth 
 century it has become so fashionable to detect signs of revolt, 
 even among the most hard-shelled neo-classicists, that some 
 brilliant critic of the future may gain distinction by turning 
 the tables and by proving that a school of Pope actually existed. 
 It becomes necessary, then, to attempt to describe romanticism 
 at the very outset of this section of our study. 
 
 For our purposes it is best to enumerate a number of the 
 most commonly accepted types of romanticism, realizing how 
 seldom they exist in combination, and that they are often utterly 
 unlike one another, occasionally even irreconcilable. The most 
 distinctive feature of Coleridge's romanticism, in his greatest 
 poems, is the passion for mystery in the most exalted sense, the 
 power of suggestion, the devotion to things that may be real. 
 In Woodsworth, romanticism lies in the intimate relating of 
 man's soul and nature. The romanticism of Byron is intense 
 subjectivity and the spirit of revolt. Sometimes the roman- 
 ticism of Keats, a luxurious heaping up of exquisite details, is 
 the exact opposite. It may be the passion for things as they are. 
 The delight in the bee and the flower brings no yearning for 
 things as they should be. Often, however, Keats is the idealist 
 with a spirit of intense longing. Again, in a few lines in the Ode 
 to the Nightingale, in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, in The Eve of 
 St. Mark, Keats is with Coleridge. In Shelley it is, more broadly, 
 the spirit of revolt; at its best, a peculiarly refined and intense 
 spirit of aspiration and of intellectual adventure. In Scott it is 
 a passion for the grandeur of the past which, however, by no 
 means implies a dissatisfaction with the present. Professor 
 
128 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Phelps finds the most notable characteristics of romanticism to 
 be: *' Subjectivity, Love of the Picturesque, and a Reactionary 
 Spirit." Theodore Watts-Dunton 's phrase, ''The Renaissance 
 of Wonder," is worth a book on romanticism. These assertions, 
 while they do not absolutely define romanticism, are sufficiently 
 inclusive of those qualities generally urged in defence of all 
 newly discovered eighteenth century romanticists so that we may 
 use them as touchstones. 
 
 It is certainly true that the great poets, if not all poets, are 
 both romantic and classical. But one temper generally predom- 
 inates. It will take a hardy investigator to find much roman- 
 ticism in the first few decades of the eighteenth century. For my 
 part, beginning as romanticism-hunter, I have gradually parted 
 with my hopes. The amount of neo-classical survival even among 
 the poets of the first third of the nineteenth century, is much 
 more striking than the amount of significant romantic material 
 even in the last half of the eighteenth. The classicism of Byron 
 is much more remarkable than the romanticism of Gray and 
 Collins. The Neo-classical Despotism, once fully established, 
 was profound and lasting. 
 
 In the search for neo-classical beginnings, in the last infirmity 
 of noble scholars, the desire to find signs of a new movement 
 farther back than any investigator has hitherto indicated, we 
 exaggerate the relations of Ben Jonson, Waller, Denham, even 
 Dryden, to this Neo-classical Despotism. I have already tried to 
 make it clear that the latter part of the seventeenth century 
 was not an Augustan Age, as the text-books would have it, but 
 an Age of Literary Anarchy, that neo-classicism gained head- 
 way only with desperate slowness. The Neo-classical Despotism 
 may be said (for convenience only, for exact dates are impossible), 
 to have struggled into supremacy by 1709, the date of the appear- 
 ance of the Pastorals of Pope and Ambrose Philips, of Prior's 
 first poems, of the opening numbers of the Tatler, of the writing 
 of Pope 's dictatorial Essay on Criticism. 
 
 There is a wholesome lesson in a study of the development, 
 for better or worse, of Spenser-criticism in the hands of the 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 129 
 
 classicists and romanticists. It shows the inability of one age ^ 
 to appreciate all the merits of a supreme poet at one time. Be- 
 cause of ephemeral whims men term one aspect bad which the 
 next age will admire. The neo-classicist appreciated sides of 
 Spenser to which the romanticists became stone-blind. The 
 romanticists revealed beauties in Spenser that had been tarnished 
 by the disregard of a century and some beauties, perhaps, that 
 had never before been discerned. 
 
 Two fallacious ideas about the neo-classical attitude toward 
 Spenser are current ; that he was unpopular even among literary 
 men, and that the Augustans approached him in a spirit of 
 mockery. Professor Phelps, for instance, quotes some platitudes 
 in Addison's boyish Epistle to Sacheverel to indicate how little 
 Addison knew or cared about Spenser. But he does not take 
 into consideration a long series of admiring references in Addi- 
 son's mature work, including a prose allegory professedly in 
 the manner of Spenser which Addison once aspired to develop 
 in poetic form. Similarly Professor Phelps makes too much of 
 the Spenserian burlesque. The Alley, which Pope and Gay wrote 
 in a few moments of triviality. If we examined consistently all 
 the vulgar parodies in eighteenth century poetry and made the 
 same deductions, we should be forced to conclude that the eigh- 
 teenth century admired nobody, ancient or modern. Eighteenth 
 century England devoted occasional moments of recreation to 
 that peculiarly pointless type of obscenity that is now current 
 among boys at grammar schools. It is of little significance. 
 
 The essential truth is that the neo-classicists had a genuine 
 admiration for Spenser, and that they appreciated a great aspect 
 of his genius now misunderstood through the influence of literary 
 epicures, from Leigh Hunt down to our "Art for Art's Sake" 
 men who know not what they do. The Augustans appreciated 
 Spenser 's moral earnestness and his allegory. Nowadays we have 
 a morbid fear of didacticism. We consider it all bad. The 
 Augustans considered it all good. The golden mean is to know 
 the difference between crude didacticism — almost any sermon, 
 the Essay on Man — and artistic didacticism — the last lines of the 
 Ode to a Grecian Urn, the first lines of Tennyson's Ulysses. 
 
130 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 The Augustans also knew and often named many of Spenser's 
 qualities which we admire today, his sweetness, his peculiar kind 
 of naive simplicity, his tenderness, his copious fancy. 
 
 They wrote so-called Spenserian ' ' Imitations, ' ' not as a mere 
 literary exercise but because one of their fundamental ideals 
 was to imitate. And the Augustan imitations of Spenser are no 
 more unlike the model than their Virgilian imitations are unlike 
 their idol, Virgil. 
 
 It is well to begin an account of the attitude of the Augustan 
 critics towards Spenser with an investigation of the ideas of the 
 two dictators, Addison and Pope. In 1694 Addison's Epistle to 
 Sacheverel, a very youthful account of the greatest English poets, 
 appeared. It is simply a succession of boyish platitudes in 
 decorous couplets and is insignificant from every point of view. 
 Whatever he may have known or thought about Spenser at first, 
 Addison became, in his mature years, a deep admirer of The 
 Faerie Queene. A comment in the Spectator (No. 62) where he 
 made famous classification of the kinds of "Wit," is extremely 
 significant because it is at once thoroughly Augustan and in 
 praise of Spenser. Whatever romantic tendencies Addison may 
 have felt, he here admires Spenser because Spenser, if you please, 
 is at one with all true believers. He is with Monsieur Boileau. 
 
 "As true Wit consists in the Eesemblance of Ideas, and false "Wit in 
 the Eesemblance of Words, according to the foregoing Instances; there 
 is another kind of Wit which consists partly in the Eesemblance of 
 Ideas, and partly in the Eesemblance of Words; which for Distinction 
 Sake I shall call mixt Wit. This Kind of Wit is that which abounds in 
 Cowley more than in any Author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has like- 
 wise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton had 
 a Genius much above it. Spencer is in the same class with Milton. The 
 Italians, even in their Epic Poetry are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who 
 formed himself upon the Ancient Poets, has everywhere rejected it with 
 Scorn.'' 
 
 For US the significant points to notice are : the neo-classical mania 
 for mechanical definition and classification, the surprising attack 
 on the immortal Mr. Waller, the usual Augustan onslaught on the 
 Italian poets, the fact that Spenser and Milton are classed with 
 the divine Monsieur Boileau and the venerable Ancients, even 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 131 
 
 above Dry den. Plainly the Augustan had no need to think 
 meanly of Spenser here. It must be added, however, that Spen- 
 ser, from another point of view, was once grouped by his urbane 
 critic with the censured Italians. In the Spectator, Number 297, 
 he wrote : 
 
 "Milton has interwoven in the Texture of his Fable some particulars 
 which do not seem to have Probability enough for an Epic Poem, particu- 
 larly in the Actions which he ascribes to Sin and Death. . . . Such alle- 
 gories rather savour of the Spirit of Spencer and Ariosto, than of Homer 
 and Vergil." 
 
 But our critic seems to have recanted. For in a subsequent num- 
 ber (419), Addison wrote of what Dryden called ''The Fairy 
 Way of Writing" in a tone that has been called romantic, and 
 lauded these ''allegories." 
 
 ''There is another sort of imaginary Beings, that we sometimes meet 
 with among the Poets, when the Author represents any Passion, Appetite, 
 Virtue or Vice, under a visible Shape and makes it a Person or an Actor 
 in his Poem. . . . We find a whole Creation of the like shadowy Persons 
 in Spencer, who had an admirable talent in Eepresentations of this kind. ' ' 
 
 However romantic the general tenets of this paper may be con- 
 sidered, the comments on Spenser are but that praise of allegory 
 which was becoming orthodox among the Augustans. We may 
 assume that, at this latter date, Addison would have been less 
 ready to have his fling at Milton's Sin and Death, at Spenser and 
 the Italians. Indeed the neo-classical admiration for the allegory 
 of The Faerie Queene, though native to the didactic temperament 
 of the eighteenth century, doubtless received some stimulus from 
 the words of the revered Addison. He asserts that : 
 
 ''Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many Tracks of Light in / 
 
 a discourse, that makes everything about them clear and beautiful, "i V 
 
 Identifying "Fables," for the moment, with allegory he writes 
 approvingly : 
 
 "Spencer's Fairy Queen is one continued Series of them from the 
 Beginning to the end of that admirable Work. "2 
 
 He regrets the little cultivation of allegory and, in the Guardian 
 for September 4, 1713, leaves us his most interesting tribute to 
 Spenser : 
 
 1 Spectator, 421. 
 
 2 Spectator, 183. 
 
132 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 "Though this kind of composition was practised by the finest authors 
 among the ancients, our country-man, Spenser, is the last writer of note 
 who has applied himself to it with success. 
 
 I was once thinking to have written a whole canto in the spirit of 
 Spenser, and in order to do it, contrived a fable of imaginary persons 
 and characters. I raised it on that common dispute between the com- 
 parative perfections and preeminence between the two sexes. 
 
 Since I have not time to accomplish this work, I shall present my 
 reader with the naked fable, reserving the embellishments of verse and 
 poetry to another opportunity." 
 
 The "fable" is then transcribed.^ It is apparent that Spenser 
 was not only favored by Addison the critic, but was no small 
 force in the making of those graceful and attractive allegories 
 which were widely imitated by the host of urbane essayists in the 
 eighteenth century who took Addison for their model. 
 
 Pope's admiration for Spenser is emphatically expressed in 
 his words to Hughes (1715).* He wrote: 
 
 "Spenser has been ever a favorite poet to me; he is like a mistress, 
 whose faults we see, but love her with them all." 
 
 But Pope left little detailed criticism. His only elaborate com- 
 ments are to be found in the Discourse on Pastoral Poetry which 
 he prefixed to the 1717 edition of his Pastorals. This is partially 
 borrowed from Dryden's preface to his translation of Virgil's 
 eclogues but contains the fullest and best consideration of The 
 Shepheards Calender that had yet appeared. The tendency to 
 reconcile Spenser with the ' ' Ancients ' ' in true Augustan fashion 
 is again apparent. 
 
 "Among the moderns, their success has been greatest who have most 
 endeavoured to make these ancients [viz Theocritus and Virgil] their 
 pattern. The most considerable genius appears in the famous Tasso and 
 our Spenser. . . . Spenser 's Calendar, in Mr. Dryden 's opinion, is the most 
 complete work of this kind which any nation has produced ever since 
 the time of Vergil." 
 
 3 Samuel Wesley's Poems on Several Occasions (second edition, 1763) 
 contains a versification of The Battle of the Sexes in Prior-Spenserian 
 stanzas. 
 
 4 Quoted by Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Eomatitic Movement, 
 Boston, 1893, p. 53. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 133 
 
 He critcises Spenser justly for his imitation of Mantuan's 
 
 satirical eclogues and crassly for one of his chief merits, the 
 
 introduction of varied stanza-forms in the poem. Spenser should 
 
 have used the everlasting couplet, of course. Pope criticises 
 
 Spenser for imitating the Doric of Theocritus by the use of * ' old 
 
 English and country phrases." In this he may have followed 
 
 Dryden who, as we have seen, once condemned and once praised. 
 
 Yet Pope writes with discernment when he adds : 
 
 '^As there is a difference betwixt simplicity and rusticity, so the 
 expression of simple thoughts should be plain, but not clownish. ' ' 
 
 He is the first to give Spenser credit for inventing the device of 
 
 a "calendar:" 
 
 ' * The addition he has made of a calendar to his eclogues is very beau- 
 tiful; since by this, besides the general moral of innocence and sim- 
 plicity, which is common to other authors of Pastoral, he has one peculiar 
 to himself; he compares human life to the several seasons, and at once 
 exposes to his readers a view of the great and little worlds, in their 
 various changes and aspects." 
 
 Yet Pope, whose name is almost always connected with decorous 
 lawns, was the first to point out that Spenser's nature descrip- 
 tions are not always appropriate to the month, that : 
 
 "Some of his eclogues (as the sixth, eighth, and tenth for example) 
 have nothing but their titles to distinguish them." 
 
 Beginning with Dryden 's criticism, then. Pope developed the 
 first detailed study of the Shepheards Calender. His contribu- 
 tions are brilliant when we examine all that was written before. 
 Never had the Shepheards Calender been at once admired and 
 judged so discerningly. It is evident that the obscene Spen- 
 serian stanzas, The Alley (the product of a trivial hour with 
 Gay) can be relegated to their deserved insignificance. 
 
 We have seen that the two chiefs of the Augustans of the 
 early eighteenth century were not only warm admirers of Spen- 
 ser but that they made distinct contributions to the development 
 of Spenserian criticism. It is w^orth emphasizing that they did 
 this by no foreshadowing of doctrines that may by any means 
 be called romantic. They weighed him in the neo-classical bal- 
 ance and found him wanting in few respects. 
 
134 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Pope was not the only Augustan who was stimulated by The 
 
 Shepheards Calender. Mr. Phelps writes misleadingly : 
 
 "Some interest in Spenser on tlie Pastoral side was aroused by 
 Ambrose Philips (1671-1749), who was mainly inspired by Spenser in 
 writing his Pastorals (1709).*' 
 
 This is to suggest that there was a mere shadow of interest in 
 the Spenserian pastoralist at this time. Since there was a good 
 deal of interest, since the pastoral of this period is never noticed 
 by the literary historians, and since it involves some important 
 truths in connection with the Augustan attitude toward Spenser, 
 I must examine a few of the more important figures with some 
 detail. 
 
 The formal eclogue which, by the close of the seventeenth 
 century, contained, for the most part, the dregs of poetry, is 
 nevertheless of very considerable importance for the student of 
 Augustan poetry. It was, in general, a decadent form with the 
 neo-classicists. Elsewhere I have shown how the Elizabethan 
 pastoral, which became sprightly and lyrical and full of careless 
 charm soon after Spenser, through the influence of innovations 
 which he suggested when he naturalized the form in England, 
 sank rapidly into hopeless insipidity as the classical influences 
 came to mingle more freely with that of Spenser.^ The Virgilian 
 bucolic song was always sickly on English soil. 
 
 Decay and oblivion would seem inevitable for such anaemic 
 verse. Yet the Augustan pastoral attained an immense vogue 
 which lasted even into the early nineteenth century. In the skill- 
 ful hands of Ambrose Philips, Pope, and Gay it became one of 
 the minor forces which established the Neo-classical Despotism. 
 In another path rough burlesque, combined with a genuine relish 
 for the homely, led up to Allan Aamsay's blithe, fresh Gentle 
 Shepherd and to the spirited notes of Burns ; it had its share in 
 stimulating an interest in nature not to be found in books. The 
 immense vogue of the pastoral may have given it some share in 
 
 B I have discussed this in * ' The Golden Age of the Spenserian Pas- 
 toral, ' ' Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, June, 
 1910. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 135 
 
 the rise of the Gothic-romanticism, that jaded passion for some- 
 thing merely new and strange which gradually became exalted 
 into the fine spirit of revolt against what Watts-Dunton calls 
 the Age of Acceptance. The titles of Colin 's Oriental Eclogues^ 
 Chatterton's Arabian Eclogues, if not their content, show a 
 vague desire to pass beyond "Nature'' as Boileau conceived it, 
 beyond the town, beyond pseudo-imitations of the ancients, be- 
 yond the decorous lawns of an English manor. The craze for 
 this romantic pose which became romanticism may be indicated 
 by one title: '' Exaltation, An Eclogue; Translated from the 
 Original Babylonian.*'^ 
 
 In the first half of the eighteenth century the influence of 
 Spenser over the formal eclogue was remote but pervasive. In 
 1709 Ambrose Philips published his Pastorals in the Sixth Part 
 of Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies. Philips, in his preface, com- 
 plains unaccountably at the neglect of pastoral poetry. Per- 
 haps, however, he was only hitting at its insipidity : 
 
 *'It is somewhat strange to conceive, in an age so addicted to the 
 Muses, how pastoral poetry comes to be never so much as thought upon; 
 considering, especially, that it is of the greatest antiquity, and hath 
 ever been accounted the foremost, among the smaller poems in dignity. '* 
 Philips is explicit in the choice of masters : 
 
 '^Virgil and Spenser made use of it as a prelude to epic poetry: But, 
 I fear, the innocency of the subject makes it so little inviting. . . . 
 Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser, are the only poets who seem to have hit 
 upon the true nature of pastoral compositions; so that it will be suflficient 
 praise for me, if I have not altogether failed in my attempt." 
 
 In the first eclogue, Lobbin (a character in Spenser's Novem- 
 ber), like Colin Clout in Januarie and December, complains of 
 his unrequited love : 
 
 '* Lobbin, a shepherd-boy, one evening fair. 
 
 Thus plained him of his dreary discontent 
 
 Whilom7 did I, all as this poplar fair. 
 Upraise my heedless head then void of care. '^ 
 
 7 The Spenserian veneer will be apparent to all students of the Shep- 
 heards Calender in such phrases as "whilom" and "all as" and many 
 more. 
 
 6 This poem is printed in an anthology called The Poetry of the World, 
 London, 1791, vol. 3, p. 274. 
 
136 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 But now Colin is the victim of the heedless Lucy. Readers of 
 
 Spenser will recognize at once that Philips colors his Augustan 
 
 couplets with a slight infusion of Spenserian diction. 
 
 "The jolly grooms I fly, and all alone, 
 To rocks and woods pour forth my fruitless moan. 
 The gifts, alike, and giver she disdains 
 And now, left heiress of the glens she'll deem 
 Me, landless lad, unworthy her esteem. ' ' 
 
 Lobbin sings, with some real charm, of his devotion if Lucy would 
 
 listen. 
 
 * ' How would I wander, every day, to find 
 The choice of wildings, blushing through the rind! 
 For glossy plums how lightsome climb the tree, 
 How risk the vengeance of the thrifty bee ! ' ' 
 
 In the second Pastoral, ''Thenot and Colinet," Colinet^ com- 
 plains to Thenot, who is an aged shepherd as in Spenser's 
 Fehruarie, that he had left his native land for greater gain but 
 had become poor and ill. 
 
 "My sheep quite spent through travel and ill-fare 
 And, like their keeper, ragged grown and bare. 
 The damp cold greensward for my nightly bed, 
 And some slant willow 's trunk to rest my head. ' ' 
 
 For this motive Philips could find inspiration in Virgil, Man- 
 tuan, and Spenser's September. Eclogue three, ''Albino," con- 
 tains a resolution to write pastorals because they were cultivated 
 by Virgil and Spenser. 
 
 "And Spenser, when amid the rural throng 
 He carol 'd sweet and graz'd along the flood 
 Of gentle Thames, made every sounding wood 
 With good Eliza 's name to ring around. ' 'lo 
 
 Angelot and Palin sing an elegy for Albino. Angelot laments, 
 but Palin sings of hope in the vein popularized for English pas- 
 toral elegy by Spenser in his lament for Dido. The old Spen- 
 serian fashion of flower-passages is revived. 
 
 8 Spenser describes his Eosalind as ' * the widow 's daughter of the glen. ' * 
 
 9 A diminutive for Colin once used by Spenser himself {December y 1. 18, 
 "careful Colinet.") 
 
 10 Spenser sang to Eliza and Thames in April. Perhaps Philips remem- 
 bered also the Epithalamion: 
 
 "The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring." 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 137 
 
 "O now, if ever, bring 
 The laurell green, the smelling eglantine, 
 And tender branches from the mantling vine, 
 The dewy cowslip which in meadow grows, 
 The fountain violet and the garden rose. 
 Marsh-lilies sweet and tufts of daffodil. '^n 
 
 The fourth eclogue, "Myco and Argol," opens with a pretty- 
 picture which shows a genuine interest in nature, however frag- 
 mentary Philips ' real knowledge of rural scenery may have been. 
 
 **This place may seem for shepherd's leisure made. 
 So close these elms inweave their lofty shade; 
 The twining woodbine, how it climbs to breathe 
 Eefreshing sweets around on all beneath: 
 The ground with grass of cheerful green bespread. 
 Through which the springing flower up-rears the head; 
 Medley 'd with daisies white and endive blue, 
 And honeysuckles of a purple dye, 
 Confusion gay bright waving to the eye. ' ' 
 
 Myco sings to Argol the elegy on Stella which Colinet taught 
 him. In the fifth Pastoral, ' ' Cuddy, ' ' many shepherds sing. 
 
 "Then Cuddy last (who Cuddy can excel 
 In neat device?) his tale began to tell. "12 
 
 Cuddy's pipes are outsung by the nightingale. He takes a harp 
 and wins. The nightingale falls dead, Cuddy bewails her, and 
 breaks the cruel strings. The sixth Pastoral is one of the con- 
 ventional singing contest. 
 
 Philips had some real love for nature, though little apparent 
 knowledge at first hand. He was a master of smooth verse. The 
 influence of Spenser upon him is very marked. Like most Augus- 
 tans, he fused the Spenserian vein with the spirit of neo-classi- 
 
 11 Compare the famous flower set-piece in Spenser 's Song to Elisa in 
 April, and its many imitations, some of which are cited in The Golden Age 
 of the Spenserian Pastoral referred to above. In this eclogue occur two 
 other of Spenser's shepherd-names, Cuddy and Hobbinol. 
 
 12 The regular Spenserian trick much cultivated by Spenser and his fol- 
 lowers. Compare : 
 
 "A shepeheards boye (no better doe him call)." — Januarie. 
 "Poore Colin Clout (who knows not Colin Clout?)." — Faerie Queene, 6, 
 10, 16, etc., etc. 
 
138 University of California Fublications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 cism. The general qualities of Philips 's style may be best seen 
 in his version of Strada's famous "Nightingale," already men- 
 tioned, in ' ' Cuddy. ' ' Strada 's poem was very popular. It had 
 been translated with rare fineness by John Ford. Crashaw's 
 unpruned and exquisite fancy had twined it in a maze of true- 
 lover 's-knots. It is instructive to compare with these the liquid 
 passionless cadences of Philips, a clear brook which has flowed 
 out of its wonderful forest haunts to a flat land adorned with 
 trim paterres. 
 
 The same volume of Tonson's Miscellanies (1709) contained 
 the Pastorals of Alexander Pope, whose preface, written later, 
 with its interesting praise and censure of the Shepheards Calen- 
 der, has already been treated. His admiration for Spenser's 
 Calendar-idea induced Pope to name each of his four eclogues 
 after a season. Spenser's failure to make month, mood, and 
 nature correspond, Pope attributed, with true Augustan ignor- 
 ance, to the fact that : 
 
 * ' The year has not enough variety in it to furnish every month with 
 a particular description, as it may every season. ' ' 
 
 Pope claims for his Pastorals : 
 
 ''That they have as much variety of description, in respect to the 
 several seasons, as Spenser's, that, in order to add to this variety, the 
 several times of the day are observed, the rural employments in each 
 season or time of day, and the rural scenes or places proper to such 
 employments, not without some regard to the several ages of man, and the 
 different passions proper to each age. 
 
 **But after all, if they have any merit, it is to be attributed to some 
 good old authors, whose works, as I had leisure to study, so, I hope, I 
 have not wanted care to imitate." 
 
 The world has long laughed and sneered at Pope's jealousy 
 which led him to encourage the mad wag John Gay to pillory 
 ' ' namby-pamby Philips ' ' with coarse pastoral banter. As a result 
 the remarkable Shepherd's Week appeared in 1714. Steele, as 
 we shall see, had placed Philips in a flattering genealogy of 
 bucolic poets as descendant of Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser. 
 Pope had vented his spleen in a masterpiece of irony which he 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 139 
 
 had deluded the good-natured Addison into printing. Now, 
 being unable to take issue with the cudgel which the stalwart 
 *' namby-pamby Philips" had hung up in a tavern for future 
 argument, he was glad to crouch behind Gay's wit. But Gay 
 proved to be something more than a mere rhymster-mercenary. 
 In his burlesque he took pride in treading the ''plain highway 
 of Pastoral" in opposition to the ''rout and rabblement of 
 critical gallimawfry" that was "made of late days by certain 
 young men of insipid delicacy concerning, I wist not what, golden 
 age, and other outrageous conceits, to which they would confine 
 the Pastoral." Gay's introductory words throughout show the 
 strong influence of E. K.'s preface and glosses of The Shep- 
 heards Calender. That he got much stimulus from the more un- 
 couth aspects of some of Spenser 's eclogues may well be believed. 
 His comments on Spenser and avowals of indebtedness may be 
 taken with a degree of seriousness. 
 
 "For as much as I have mentioned maister Spenser, soothly I must 
 acknowledge him a bard of sweetest memorial. Yet hath his shepherd's 
 boy at some times raised his rustic reed to rhimes more rumbling than 
 rural. Diverse grave points also hath he handled of churchly matter and 
 doubts in religion daily arising, to great clerks only appertaining. What 
 liketh me best are his names, indeed right simple and meet for the 
 country, such as Lobbin, Cuddy, Hobbinol, Diggon, and others, some of 
 which I have made bold to borrow. Moreover, as he called his eclogues, 
 the shepherd's calendar, and divided the same into twelve months, I 
 have chosen (peradventure not over-rashly) to name mine by the days 
 of the week." 
 
 There is enough of the picturesque in Spenser's eclogues to have 
 given Gay much inspiration. Doubtless the memory of the good 
 rustic words in The Shepheards Calender which Gay used occas- 
 ionally gave him the main suggestion for doing something more 
 than merely mocking Philips and stimulated him to write with 
 some real interest of shepherdesses not "idly piping on oaten 
 reeds, but milking the kine, tying up the sheaves, or if the hogs 
 are astray driving them to their styes." He rose above mere 
 burlesque when he wrote : 
 
140 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 "Now he goes on, and sings of fairs and shows, 
 For still new fairs before his eyes arose. 
 How pedlar's stalls with glitt'ring toys are laid. 
 The various fairings of the country maid. 
 Long silken laces hang upon the twine. 
 And rows of pins and amber bracelets shine; 
 How the tight lass, knives, combs, and scissors spies. 
 And looks on thimbles with desiring eyes. 
 Of lotteries next with tuneful note he told, 
 Where silver spoons are won, and rings of gold. 
 The lads and lasses trudge the street along, 
 And all the fair is crowded in his song." 
 
 Gay's merry notes cleared a path for such true song of the 
 country-side as Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd. His satirical town- 
 eclogues, with those of Swift, Pope and Lady Mary Wortly Mon- 
 tague, stimulated wide-spread imitation. But the languid, seri- 
 ous pastoral with a Spenserian tinge continued. 
 
 Indeed, in the utterances of Isaac Browne we find a protest 
 against the irreverent spirits which may, with plausibility, 
 be taken as typical of many writers of the time. For Browne, 
 despite the choking dust and the mildew which his valiant or 
 docile reader encounters in pulling him off the shelves of a 
 twentieth century library, was a live figure in his day. His 
 Piscatory Eclogues (1729)^^ went through a number of editions 
 in answer to a demand which seems to have remained unabated 
 to the end of the century. Gay had not ruined the artificial pas- 
 torals for the Augustans. They were actively cultivated, as I 
 have said, even within the portals of the nineteenth century. And 
 in Browne's Essay in Defence of Piscatory Eclogue scoffers like 
 Gay and Swift were scorned. 
 
 "The Criticks, an arbitrary positive sort of men, have taken upon 
 them to make a much too nice comparison between the success of 
 Heroic and Pastoral Poetry: for they allow scarcely more than three 
 who are deservedly ranked in the class of writers of either sort; not- 
 withstanding there have been numerous performers in each kind, in 
 several ages; .... for besides Theocritus, Virgil and Tasso,i* whom 
 they make to have been the only writers of the true Pastoral, our Spen- 
 ser, Fletcher, and Milton, and I am free to add Mr. Phillips, Mr. Con- 
 greve and many others have a deserved praise for the pieces they have 
 given us of this kind. 
 
 13 Browne says they were written during the summer of 1727. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 141 
 
 "Clownish and low expressions, quaint obsolete phrases, on the one 
 hand, though they cover a false and improper sentiment; and on the 
 other, laboured turns of wit and amorous extravagancies, appear to be 
 mistook by some, for its distinguishing graces." 
 
 The last sentence is doubtless a hit at Gay, whose enmity he defies 
 
 by his defence of Philips. Browne would have placed pastoral 
 
 poetry in ''as high estimation as the epic." He pointed out that 
 
 many good poets, Virgil, Tasso, Spenser, succeeded in both. Like 
 
 a good Augustan he went to Rapin for definitions. 
 
 ** Pastoral is the imitation of the action of a Shepherd, or one taken 
 under that character." 
 
 Nature, contended Browne, is a wide field for contemplation and 
 beautiful ideas. Shepherds, however, were to be lovers as well 
 as shepherds. Angling was praised. The Piscatorie Eclogues of 
 the sedulous Spenserian, Phineas Fletcher, were mentioned with 
 admiration. It is a striking fact that Browne, endowed with an 
 enthusiastic angler's passion for real nature, believed in the 
 artificial pastoral and imitated Spenser in the Augustan manner. 
 
 It would be painful and unprofitable to stay longer in these 
 arid fields. Perhaps I have bullied the reader, with my dull 
 details, into accepting my conclusions. Through the early de- 
 cades of the eighteenth century the formal eclogue was definitely 
 influenced by Spenser and played some part in the development 
 of Augustan ideals. When the taste for ''Oriental" eclogues 
 developed, Spenserianism waned before this pastoral side of the 
 romantic pose. We must insist, with monotonous iteration, that 
 Spenser and neo-classicism were perfectly reconciled, that Spen- 
 ser sowed few seeds of romanticism. As for the insipid pastoral 
 it did, however, point vaguely to a revival of interest in nature 
 at first hand through the brisk verses of Ramsay, Ferguson, and 
 the more vigorous in proportion as they broke away from the 
 shadows of Spenser and Virgil. 
 
 Jolly quixotic Dick Steele, who has been mentioned as the 
 unwitting cause of that most unpastoral feud which involved 
 Pope, Philips and Gay, had some gallant words for Spenser. It 
 
 14 The critics generally chose Spenser rather than Tasso, as we have 
 seen. I have quoted Dryden's explicit praise of Spenser above Tasso. 
 
142 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 is easy to understand Sir Richard's admiration for Spenser's 
 chivalric spirit. On November 19, 1712, he published a Spectator 
 essay on Spenser. Professor Phelps, intent on proving the indif- 
 ference to Spenser during the first decades of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, mentions the article under consideration but is inclined 
 to question the sincerity of Steele's appreciation. But the paper 
 certainly shows some knowledge of The Faerie Queene, Steele 
 characteristically fixes upon Britomart, or Chastity, for special 
 admiration. He says justly that the "Legend of Friendship" is 
 more diffuse. At least, then, he has been reading the third and 
 fourth books of The Faerie Queejie, a pastime that our ravens 
 would have us believe quite out of date in our days of hurried and 
 dyspeptic reading. He is one of those who praised Spenser's 
 use of archaisms. 
 
 ''His old Words are all true English and Numbers exquisite; and 
 since of Words there is the Multa Eenascentur, since they are all 
 proper, such a Poem should not (any more than Milton's) subsist all of 
 it of common ordinary Words." 
 
 Still, were this all, we might share Mr. Phelps's doubt as to 
 Steele's sincerity. "How far Steele was prompted to all this by 
 real love of Spenser, or by the necessity of writing his sheet is 
 hard to say, ' ' writes Mr. Phelps. No doubt we might conjure up 
 pictures of our beloved knight, somewhat muddled with port, 
 tearing his hair at blear dawn over a Spectator article. A clouded 
 but ecstatic memory of Addison on Milton and lo! our hero's 
 pen wags madly about Spenser, upon whom he has nothing to 
 write except what wells from his good nature unsupported by 
 knowledge. This would make a plausible and attractive picture. 
 But there is more evidence, besides the article quoted, to make 
 us believe that Steele's admiration for Spenser was full of his 
 wonted sincerity and was founded on knowledge. In the Guar- 
 dian for April 15, 1713, he again praised Spenser and asserted 
 that Spenser and Ambrose Philips, in their pastorals, "have 
 copied and improved the beauties of the Ancients." He fol- 
 lowed Dryden in asserting that the English rustic language 
 makes imitation of the Doric of Theocritus more possible than 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 143 
 
 the language of the Latin poets. In the Guardian for April 17, 
 
 1713, he wrote a prose pastoral in which the great writers of 
 
 eclogues were treated allegorically. Spenser is made the son of 
 
 Virgil and the father of Philips, In 1762 Sir William Jones, the 
 
 famous Orientalist, versified Steele's pastoral allegory. We may 
 
 quote from the description of Spenser : 
 
 *'High in the midst the plaintive Colin rose, 
 Born on the lilied banks of royal Thame, 
 Which oft had rung with Eosalinda's name; 
 
 And, like the nymph who fir'd his youthful breast. 
 Green were his buskins, green his simple vest. 
 With careless ease his rustick lays he sung. 
 And melody flow'd smoothly from his tongue: 
 Of June's gay fruits, and August's corn he told. 
 The bloom of April, and December's cold; 
 The loves of Shepherds, and their harmless cheer 
 In every month that decks the varied year." 
 
 That Steele read Spenser con amove is further confirmed by a 
 
 very representative article in the Tatler for July 6, 1710. 
 
 "I was this morning reading the tenth canto of the fourth book of 
 Spenser, in which Sir Scudamour relates the progress of his courtship 
 of Amoret under a very beautiful allegory, which is one of the most 
 natural and unmixed of any in that most excellent author." 
 
 Steele appends a brief prose paraphrase * ' for the benefit of many 
 English Lovers, who have, by frequent letters desired me to lay 
 down some rules for the conduct of their virtuous Amours.'' 
 Spenser is adroitly turned into the graceful eighteenth century 
 style. Surely we may conclude that Dick Steele, devoted if not 
 always thoughtful lover of Prue, could hardly have resisted the 
 fascination of Spenser's court of love. 
 
 Another one of the most urbane spirits of the day and a tower 
 of Augustanism, Mat Prior, paid liberal homage to Spenser. In 
 1706 he brought out An Ode, Humbly Inscribed to the Queen, 
 on the Glorious Success of Her Majesty ^s Arms. Written in Imi- 
 tation of Spenser's style. His preface is a capital example of 
 the ease which the Augustan found in reconciling Spenser with 
 Augustan ideals. 
 
 '*As to the style, the choice I made of following the ode in Latin 
 determined me in English to the stanza: and herein it was impossible 
 
144 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 not to have a mind to follow our great countryman Spenser; which I 
 have done (as well, at least, as I could) in the manner of my expression, 
 and the turn of my number; having only added one verse to his stanza, 
 which I thought made the number more harmonious; and avoided such 
 of his words as I found too obsolete. I have, however, retained some 
 few of them, to make the colouring look more like Spenser's. . . . 
 
 "My two great examples, Horace and Spenser, in many things re- 
 semble each other; both have a height of imagination, and a majesty 
 of expression in describing the sublime; and both know to temper those 
 talents, and sweeten the description, so as to make it lovely as well as 
 pompous; both have equally that agreeable manner of mixing morality 
 with their story, and that curiosa felicitas in the choice of their diction, 
 which every writer aims at and so few have reached; both are particu- 
 larly fine in their images, and knowing in their numbers. ' ' 
 
 Mr. Phelps quotes this passage as exhibiting "that confusion of 
 ideals so often shown by the Augustans." He smiles at Prior's 
 comparison of Spenser and Horace. But the comparison is per- 
 fectly sound. Here is an Augustan who appreciated the moral- 
 istic side of Spenser which we romanticists are too likely to neg- 
 lect or despise. He respects Horace, a much better authority than 
 our * ' Art for Art 's sake ' ' men, for his association of the poet and 
 seer of morality. Prior's distortion of the Spenserian stanza 
 was indeed an example of Augustan stupidity. He was influ- 
 enced by the deadening cadence of the heroic couplet. In his 
 preface to Solomon, however, Prior shows a restless dissatisfac- 
 tion with the couplet, along with an admiration of Spenser that 
 Mr. Phelps should not have neglected. 
 
 "In our Language Spenser has not contented himself with this sub- 
 missive Manner of Imitation [i.e., the methods of the French and Italian 
 imitations of the orthodox Classical epics] : He launches out into flowery 
 Paths, which still seem to conduct him into one great Road. His Fairy 
 Queen (had it been finished) must have ended in the Account, which every 
 Knight was to give of his Adventures, and in the accumulated praises of 
 his Heroic Poem, but in another Cast and Figure, than any that had ever 
 been written before. Yet it is observable, that every Hero (as far as We 
 can judge by the Books still remaining) bears his distinguished Char- 
 acter and represents some particular Virtue conducive to the whole 
 Design. 
 
 "If striking out into Blank Verse as Milton did (and in this kind 
 Mr. Philipps, had he lived, would have excelled) or running the thought 
 into Alternate and Stanza, which allows greater Variety and still pre- 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 145 
 
 serves the Dignity of the Verse; as Spenser and Fairfax have done; If 
 either of these, I say, be a proper Kemedy for my Poetical Complaint, 
 or if any other may be found, I dare not determine: I am only enquiring, 
 in order to be better informed, without presuming to direct the judg- 
 ment of Others. ' ' 
 
 With all his diffidence, Prior was outspoken in his objection to 
 the couplet. He considered it "too confined," ''too broken and 
 weak for Epic," and that it tires both writer and reader. God 
 knows this is all true enough of poor Prior's Solomon, the ambi- 
 tion of his life. 
 
 We may now approach the Augustan attitude toward Spenser 
 through another medium, that of the Spenser-scholar of the 
 period. John Hughes (1677-1720), a contributor to The Spec- 
 tator, was the greatest Spenser-scholar of the early eighteenth 
 century. His edition of Spenser (1715) must still be taken into 
 account by students of The Faerie Queene}^ Hughes's methods 
 were for the most part thoroughly Augustan. He displays the 
 neo-classical interest in allegory and essays an elaborate discus- 
 sion of allegory as a type of literature in the same manner in 
 which Bossu had discussed the epic. A short citation will show 
 how strongly Hughes was influenced by the French makers of 
 mechanical rules for the creation of poetry. 
 
 '* There is no doubt but men of critical learning, if they had thought 
 fit, might have given us rules about Allegorical writing, as they have 
 done about Epick, and other kinds of poetry; but they have rather 
 chosen to let this forest remain wild, as if they thought there was some- 
 thing in the nature of the soil which could not be so well restrained and 
 cultivated in enclosures." 
 
 15 It may be worth noting here that Mr. Beers makes capital of Hughes 's 
 glossary to indicate how little the eighteenth century knew of Spenser. The 
 fact that it contains explanations of such words as ''baleful," "aghast," 
 ''behest," "dreary," "craven," "forlorn," "carol," "foray," "guer- 
 don," "plight," "welkin," "yore," — words well-known today through 
 our poets — argues, thinks Mr. Beers, for eighteenth century ignorance of 
 Spenser. Yet, to go no further, I find in the latest and best one-volume 
 editions, the Globe and the Cambridge, that all these words, except 
 "dreary," "craven," and "yore," are carefully explained in the glos- 
 saries. Furthermore, eighteenth century love of learned lumber, of foot- 
 less footnotes, and the Uke is enough explanation. Poems are constantly 
 adorned with notes explaining allusions to the commonplaces of Greek 
 myth. Why not argue from this that the Augustans did not know Homer, 
 Virgil, and Ovid? 
 
146 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Nothing daunted, however, Hughes formulates four rules. Tried 
 
 by this standard Spenser is found praiseworthy. 
 
 "Spenser's conduct [in respect to allegory] is much more reasonable 
 [than Tasso's]. As he designed his Poem upon the Plan of the Virtues 
 by which he has entitled his several Books he scarce ever loses sight of 
 his design." 
 
 Since Hughes's fourth rule is that the allegory ''must be clear 
 and intelligible, ' ' he censures Temple for his judgment that Spen- 
 ser 's "moral lay too bare." But we must not come* to consider 
 the Augustans as obsessed by their devotion to Spenser as an 
 allegorist. They knew many of his other essential qualities. In 
 his Remarks on the Faerie Queene Hughes writes : 
 
 "The chief merit of this poem consists in that surprising vein of 
 fabulous invention which runs through it everywhere with imagery and 
 description more than we meet with in any modern poem. . . . His abund- 
 ance betrays him into excess, and his judgement is overborne by the 
 torrent of his imagination." 
 
 These phrases should be remembered because, whoever first used 
 them, they were quickly adopted by a number of writers of hand- 
 books on poetry just as our compilers of short histories of English 
 literature paraphrase or adopt the orthodox statements of larger 
 works. Hughes followed Dryden in his criticism of unity in The 
 Faerie Queene as a whole. 
 
 "The several Books appear rather like so many several poems than 
 one entire fable : each of them has its peculiar Knight, and is independent of 
 the rest; and though some of the persons make their appearance in dif- 
 ferent Books, yet this has very little effect in connecting them. Prince 
 Arthur is, indeed, the principal person and has a share given him in 
 every legend: but his part is not considerable enough in any one of them; 
 he appears and vanishes again like a spirit; and we lose sight of him too 
 soon to consider him as the hero of the Poem. ' ' 
 
 Thomas Warton also imitated Dryden in his investigation of the 
 
 unity of The Faerie Queene and the assertions in the preface to 
 
 the translation of the Aeneid became, with Warton 's powerful 
 
 aid, the accepted utterance. To our own day critics have merely 
 
 , paraphrased or agreed with Dryden, whether they knew his 
 
 comments at first hand or not. 
 
 We now come to Hughes's most significant contribution to 
 
 Spenserian criticism. He argues that the whole frame of The 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 147 
 
 Faerie Queene would appear monstrous if it were examined by 
 rules of epic poetry drawn from the practice of Homer and 
 Virgil. 
 
 "But as it is plain the Author never designed it by those rules, I 
 think it ought rather to be considered as a poem of a particular kind, 
 describing, in a series of Allegorical adventures or episodes, the most 
 noted virtues and vices. To compare it ... . with the models of An- 
 tiquity would, be like drawing a parallel between the Roman and the 
 Gothick architecture. In the first there is, doubtless, a more natural 
 grandeur and simplicity; in the latter we find great mixtures of beauty 
 and barbarism, yet assisted by the invention of inferior ornaments; and 
 though the former is more majestick in the whole, the latter may be 
 very surprising, and agreeable in its parts. ' ' 
 
 This looks as though it might lead us by degrees to romanticism. 
 But in a moment we are brought stoutly back within the Augus- 
 tan enclosure. The Orlando Furioso of Ariosto was frequently 
 compared with The Faerie Queene, by the neo-classicists, much 
 to the reproach of the former. Like a true Augustan, Hughes 
 insists that it is Spenser's moral allegory which exalts Ariosto 's 
 Romantic trash into heroic poetry. 
 
 "In the Orlando Furioso we everywhere meet with an exuberant 
 invention, joined with great liveliness and facility of description, yet 
 debased by frequent mixtures of the comick genius, as well as many 
 shocking indecorums. . . . On the other hand, Spenser's Fable, though 
 often wild, is, as I have observed, always emblematical; and this may 
 very much excuse likewise that air of romance in which he has followed 
 the Italian author. The perpetual stories of knights, giants, castles, and 
 enchantments, and all that train of legendary adventures, would indeed 
 appear very trifling, if Spenser had not found a way to turn them into 
 Allegory, or if a less masterly hand had filled up the draught; but it is 
 surprising to observe how much the strength of the painting is superior 
 to the design." 
 
 It is characteristic neo-classicism in Hughes to select, as one of 
 the great cantos of The Faerie Queene, the very unimpressive 
 episode of Duessa's visit to Hell, doubtless because it seems like 
 an "imitation" of Virgil.^^ But his taste is generally of a high 
 order. He takes delight in the first appearance of Prince Arthur, 
 the first description of Belphoebe, the Mammon episode, the 
 
 16 Faerie Queene, 1. 5. 
 
148 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Bower of Bliss, the Garden of Adonis, the Masque of Cupid, the 
 marriage of the Thames and the Medway, Colin Clout piping 
 to the Graces, the Mutability fragment. He names, indeed, prac- 
 tically all of the supreme passages as his chosen reading. There 
 was, perhaps, a tinge of romanticism in Hughes. Some interest- 
 ing lines in his Essay on Allegorical Poetry might be classed as 
 romantic with considerable plausibility. 
 
 ^'Allegory is indeed the Fairy Land of poetry, peopled by imagina- 
 tion; its inhabitants are so many apparitions; its woods, caves, wild 
 beasts, rivers, mountains, and palaces, are produced by a kind of magical 
 power, and are all visionary and typical; and it abounds in such licenses 
 as would be shocking and monstrous, if the mind did not attend to the 
 mystick sense contained under them. ' ' 
 
 But few romanticists would defend allegory with such warmth. 
 Romantic eloquence and neo-classical reasoning I should call this. 
 Doubtless Hughes, like all large men, was both romantic and 
 classical. But the essential feature to us is that, like the other 
 critics of his time, he found Spenser, judged by purely Augustan 
 standards, a great poet. We may dismiss him by citing what 
 seems to have been his most ambitious attempt to hit off Spen- 
 ser's qualities concisely and comprehensively. It is one of the 
 most acute and inclusive criticisms of Spenser ever made. 
 
 ^* [Spenser] was of the serious turn, had an exalted and elegant mind, 
 a warm and boundless fancy, and was an admirable imager of virtues and 
 vices, which was his particular talent. The embellishments of description 
 are rich and lavish in him beyond comparison; and as this is the most 
 striking part of poetry, especially to young readers, I take it to be the 
 reason that he has been the father of more poets among us than any 
 other of our writers." 
 
 Joseph Spence, the Boswell of Pope, was another important 
 Augustan admirer of Spenser who may be grouped among the 
 scholars with Hughes. In a Dissertation on the Defects of Spen- 
 ser's Allegory he found the fioet not fulfilling certain neo-classi- 
 cal requirements. Spenser, it seems, should not have mixed the 
 "fables of Heathendom with the truths of Christianity." 
 Boileau had damned this procedure. Spenser, too, was occasion- 
 ally guilty of misrepresenting the allegories of the ancients. This, 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 149 
 
 to be sure, is mere neo-classical pedantry. But concerning *'the 
 Allegories of his [Spenser's] own invention" the censor wrote 
 some shrewd criticisms that speak well for the soundness of neo- 
 classicism at its best. Though he considered the invention in 
 The Faerie Queene to be ''one of the richest and most beautiful 
 that perhaps ever was," he found good cause for complaint. 
 Spenser's allegories are sometimes too complicated, overdone. /\ r^ 
 
 Discord, who looks in two directions, whose tongue, even heart, 
 is split, is justly cited as an example of distorted fancy. Spenser 
 is fairly taken to task for his freedom in describing loathsome 
 figures with filthy detail. The poet is unfortunately sometimes 
 merely extravagant rather than great. So it is when he describes 
 the Dragon's tail as three furlongs in length. These and similar 
 sensible complaints are made. The usual regret that Spenser fol- 
 lowed Ariosto too closely and the ancients too little is retailed. 
 There is the orthodox lament at the need of rules. 
 
 ''The reason of my reproducing these instances, is only to show what 
 faults the greatest Allegorist may commit; whilst the manner of allegor- 
 izing is left upon so unfixed and irregular a footing as it was in his time, 
 and is still among us. ' ' 
 
 And Spence goes on to apologize profusely for his strictures and 
 shows unmistakable enthusiasm for The Faerie Queene. 
 
 **If they [the faults noted] should prejudice a reader at all against 
 so fine a writer; let him read almost any one of his entire Cantos, and it 
 will reconcile him to him again." 
 
 Mr. Phelps and Mr. Beers, in asserting that the Augustans 
 looked with dull eyes on Spenser, write of the apologetic tone of 
 his defenders. But here, at least, is a solid Augustan who apolo- 
 gizes to Augustans for presuming to take Spenser to task. 
 
 John Upton, the editor of Spenser, passed far beyond any 
 other neo-classicist in his reconcilement of The Faerie Queene 
 and augustanism. His Remarks on the Action and History of 
 the Faerie Queene strove zealously but somewhat speciously to 
 defend Spenser's unity on purely classical grounds. 
 
 ''How readily has every one acquiesced in Dryden's opinion? 'That 
 the action of this Poem is not one'." 
 
150 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Critics, we are told, attacked old Homer once in the same way. 
 So Upton sets out to vindicate Homer and Spenser in one breath 
 '*as they have both fallen under one common censure." Spen- 
 ser's action centres around Arthur as Homer's around Achilles. 
 
 "Nor can it be fairly objected to the unity of the Iliad, that, when 
 Achilles is removed from the scene of action, you scarcely hear him 
 mentioned in several books.'' 
 
 Agammemnon, Diomed, Hector become the heroes of successive 
 books. 
 
 "For his extensive plan required his different heroes to be shown in 
 their different characters and attitudes. What, therefore, you allow to 
 the old Grecian, be not so ungracious as to deny your own countryman.'' 
 
 "Again 'tis observable that Homer's poem though he sings the anger 
 of Achilles, is not called the Achilleid, but the Iliad; because the action 
 was at Troy. So Spenser does not call his Poem by the name of his chief 
 hero: but because his chief hero sought for the Faerie Queene in Fairy 
 Land, and therein performed his various adventures, therefore he entitled 
 his Poem The Faerie Queene. ' ' 
 
 Homer's device of keeping Achilles away from the field until he 
 outshines all is compared with the purposed holding oif of Arthur 
 till the end where he was to accomplish all that the other knights 
 had failed to do. 
 
 Upton is unique in so stoutly maintaining Spenser's absolute 
 agreement with Homer. But it is obvious that he did not strike 
 at the roots of the matter. His glittering palace of argument 
 was erected on sand like the House of Pride : 
 
 ' ' A stately Pallace built of squared bricke. 
 Which cunningly was without mortar laid. 
 Whose wals were high, but nothing strong nor thick, 
 And golden foile all over them displaid. " 
 
 These more authoritative voices were swelled by many less 
 elaborate but equally laudatory utterances. The good Wesley 
 family left tributes. Samuel Wesley, the elder, laid down poetic 
 precepts in his Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry (1700) and 
 exhorted him that he might "Some new Milton or a Spenser 
 grow." Samuel Wesley, the younger, versified Addison's Spen- 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 151 
 
 serian allegory of The Battle of the Sexes already mentioned.^^ 
 John Wesley among other works, recommended to Methodists 
 Spenser's Faerie Queene in the second year of a course in aca- 
 demic learning. An essay Of the Old English Poets and Poetry 
 in The Muses' Mercury for June, 1707, praised The Faerie 
 Queene which "Surpriz'd and charmed everybody, and still has 
 the same Effect. ' ' Giles Jacob, in An Historical Account of the 
 Lives and Writings of Our most Considerable English Poets 
 (1720) and in the Poetical Register (1723), praised Spenser in 
 the manner of Dryden and Hughes. 
 
 **He was the first of our English Poets that ever brought Heroick 
 Poesy to any Perfection; and Dryden says the English have only to 
 boast of Spenser and Milton in Heroick Poetry. 
 
 **His Fairy Queen, for great Invention and Poetick Height, is judged 
 little inferiour, if not equal to the chief of the antient Greeks and Latins. 
 He had a large Spirit, a sharp Judgement, and a Genius beyond any that 
 have writ since Virgil; his Flights of Fancy are noble and his Execution 
 excellent; but sometimes his Judgement is overborne by the Torrent of 
 his Imagination,i8 and he seem'd to want a true Idea and Uniformity; 
 though whatever Fault this may be, he endows all his Heroes with some 
 moral Virtue (though in a romantick Story) and makes Instruction the 
 Subject of his Epick Poem, which is very much to his Praise." 
 
 Elizabeth Cooper's Historical and Poetical Medley or Muses 
 Library (1737) shows considerable knowledge of Spenser's con- 
 temporaries and some novelty of critical opinion. In praise of 
 Buckhurst 's combination of ' ' allegory and fable ' ' she adds : 
 
 ' ' Spencer made a Noble Use of so fine a model, overflowing with 
 Tenderness, Courtesy, and Benevolence, reconciling Magnificence with 
 Decorum, Love, Fidelity; and, together with Fairfax, opening to us a new 
 World of Ornament, Elegance, and Taste. 
 
 She voices a sentiment that grows clamorous with men like the 
 
 Wartons : 
 
 * ' Though Chaucer and Spenser are ever nam 'd with much Eespect, not 
 many are intimately acquainted with their beauties. ' ^ 
 
 But this assertion cannot be taken as an argument for any 
 notable unpopularity of Spenser in the eighteenth century when 
 
 17 Poems on Several Occasions, second edition, 1763. Wesley says the 
 first edition was printed without his knowledge. 
 
 18 This clause is almost verbatim from Hughes. 
 
152 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 we consider how narrow is his audience today. Like all good 
 Augustans, she bemoans the fact that Spenser ** debauch 't his 
 taste with the extravagancies of Ariosto." She observes, like 
 the other critics, that his influence has been great. And she 
 chooses for her selection the Masque of Cupid, not because it is 
 the best passage possible but because she thinks it is less known. 
 Of greater importance is Mr. Cihher's Lives of the Foets^^ 
 because it is a patchwork of critical dicta from Dryden, Hughes 
 and others, and represents the consensus of opinions among the 
 cultivated Augustans of the first half of the century. It shows, 
 moreover, some learning and a real knowledge of Spenser 's minor 
 works. 
 
 **No writer ever found a nearer way to the heart than he,2o and his 
 verses have a peculiar happiness of recommending the author to our 
 friendship as well as raising our admiration; one cannot read without 
 fancying oneself transported into Fairy Land, and there conversing with 
 the Graces, in that enchanted region.21 In elegance of thinking and fer- 
 tility of imagination, few of our English authors have approached him 
 and no writers have such power as he to awake the spirit of poetry in 
 others. Cowley owns that he derived his inspiration from him; and I 
 have heard the celebrated Mr. James Thomson, the author of the Seasons, 
 and justly esteemed one of our best descriptive poets, say, that he formed 
 himself upon Spenser: and how closely he pursued the model, and how 
 nobly he has imitated him, whoever reads his Castle of Indolence with 
 taste will readily confess. ' ' 
 
 The critic announces emphatically: 
 
 ^'To produce authorities in favour of Spenser, as a poet, I should 
 reckon an affront to his memory." 
 
 He thinks that ''the works of Spenser will never perish." He 
 attacks the obsolete words. He criticizes the unity of The Faerie 
 Queene exactly as Dryden, Hughes, and Thomas Warton criti- 
 cized it. But there is enough enthusiasm and enough that is new 
 to convince us. 
 
 19 The exact authorship of this work is, I believe, still a matter of dis- 
 pute. Nor do I know the date of the first edition. I have used the edition 
 of 1758. 
 
 20 Verbatim in Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper. 
 
 21 This clause is substantially from Hughes. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Speriser. 153 
 
 A reference in William Whitehead's A Charge to the Poets 
 (1762), a plea for catholic taste, has something of the interest of 
 Cihher's Lives in that it gives us a suggestion of the opinions of 
 the cultivated many. 
 
 **Some hate all rhyme; some seriously deplore 
 That Milton wants that one enchantment more. 
 Tir 'd with th ' ambiguous tale or antique phrase, 
 O'er Spenser's happiest paintings, loveliest lays, 
 Some heedless pass: while some with transport view 
 Each quaint old word, which scarce Eliza knew. 
 And, eager as the fancied knights, prepare 
 The lance, and combat in ideal war 
 Dragons of lust, and giants of despair 
 Why be it so; and what each thinks the best 
 Let each enjoy: but not condemn the rest." 
 
 We now turn to the great dictator. It is unfortunate that 
 Samuel Johnson left us no rounded estimate of Spenser. His 
 allusions to him are frequent, but they are mainly due to a vigor- 
 ous and wholesome crusade which Johnson was making against 
 two hollow literary fashions: the insipid pastoral and the arti- 
 ficial ** Imitation. " In his Life of West Dr. Johnson laid his 
 heavy hand on ' * Imitation. " 
 
 **His Imitations of Spenser are very successfully performed, both 
 with respect to the metre, the language, and the fiction; and being 
 engaged at once by the excellence of the sentiments, and the artifice of 
 the copy, the mind has two amusements to-gether. But such composi- 
 tions are not to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, 
 because their effect is local and temporary, they appeal not to reason or 
 passion, but to memory, and pre-suppose an accidental or artificial State 
 of mind. An imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, 
 by whom Spenser has never been perused. Works of this kind may de- 
 serve praise, as proofs of great industry, and great nicety of observa- 
 tion; but the highest praise, the praise of genius, they cannot claim. 
 The noblest beauties of art are those of which the effect is co-extended 
 with rational nature, or at least with the whole circle of polished life; 
 what is less than this can be only pretty, the plaything of fashion and 
 the amusement of a day. ' ' 
 
 It is absurd, of course tQ quote this admirable criticism as evi- 
 dence that Johnson thought meanly of Spenser. The impressive 
 fact is that the doctor had hit upon one of the greatest causes 
 of the insignificance of eighteenth century poetry. The Augus- 
 
154 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 tan ideal of imitation has its good points. The more romantic 
 poets have imitated too, but with a noble independence as well. 
 As practised by the Augustans it became mere languid academic 
 exercise. Except for Thomson's Castle of Indolence and Shen- 
 stone's School-Mistress f which transcend the mere exercise in 
 versification, the Spenserian imitation of the eighteenth century 
 deserved the doctor's censure. In the Rambler for May 14, 1751, 
 Johnson proved that imitation, not Spenser, was his aversion bj^ 
 a well-directed attack on the ideal of imitation in general. In a 
 spirit far from Augustan he strikes at the very roots of the 
 matter. 
 
 *'In the boundless regions of possibility, which fiction claims for her 
 dominion, there are a thousand flowers unplucked, a thousand fountains 
 unexhausted, combinations of imagery yet unobserved, and races of ideal 
 inhabitants not hitherto described. ' ' 
 
 Imitation, he thinks, is ruinous to the imagination. Even Virgil 
 is shown to have been often seduced into blemishes in his imita- 
 tions of Homer because he was too eager to use all of Homer's 
 material. The doctor then turns to the pestiferous Spenserian 
 imitation. 
 
 "To imitate the fictions and sentiments of Spenser can incur no 
 reproach, for allegory is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of 
 instruction. But I am far from extending the same respect to his diction 
 or his stanza. His style was in his own time allowed to be vicious, so 
 darkened with old words, peculiarities of phrase, and so remote from 
 common use, that Jonson boldly pronounces him to have written no 
 language. ' '22 
 
 Outside of the attack on imitation, Johnson is here purely neo- 
 classical. He praises the moral allegory and damns the stanza 
 and diction. Yet in the Preface to his Dictionary, compiled at 
 the same time he was at work upon the Rambler, he cites Spen- 
 ser's language as standard for its time.^^ 
 
 The burly doctor smote the pastoral, another curse of Augus- 
 tan poetry, in the Rambler for July 24, 1750. He was plainly 
 
 22 Johnson doubtless knew only the criticisms of Sidney, Jonson, Daven- 
 ant, none of the host of admiring sixteenth and seventeenth century refer- 
 ences to Spenser before Dryden 's. 
 
 23 Preface, edition 1825, p. 48. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 155 
 
 infuriated by the languid eclogues of his day and was hardly in 
 the mood to sing the praises of the masters who were indirectly 
 responsible for their existence. Johnson gives some praise to 
 Virgil but has much to blame. His only reference to The Shep- 
 heards Calender is a just and severe attack upon the crabbed 
 archaisms of November. His general animadversions are per- 
 fectly sound. He points out the inconsistency between the homely 
 dialect and the learned thought that many pastorals affect. 
 
 Yet praise of Spenser is not lacking in Johnson's works. In 
 his Life of Ambrose Philips he retails the high praise of Spen- 
 ser's pastoral poetry in the Guardian which we have already 
 seen, though he says nothing at first hand. That he could appre- 
 ciate a good Spenserian imitation is proved by his admiration 
 for Shenstone's School-Mistress. Two passages in the Preface 
 to Shakespeare (1765) imply some praise of Spenser. Of Shake- 
 speare 's diction and versification he writes : 
 
 ' * To him we must ascribe the praise, unless Spenser may divide it with 
 him, of having first discovered to how much smoothness and harmony the 
 English language could be softened. ' ' 
 
 A propos of A Midsummer-Night 's Dream we read : 
 
 "Fairies in his time were much in fashion; common tradition had 
 made them familiar, and Spenser's poem had made them great." 
 
 It is greatly to be regretted that Johnson never wrote defin- 
 itely on Spenser. His sane criticism, his clear-eyed kindliness 
 would have made a great contribution. Reports concerning the 
 omission of Spenser in The Lives of the Poets are conflicting. 
 A Life of Johnson by Thomas Tyson in The Gentleman's Maga- 
 zine for December, 1784^* states that : 
 
 ''His [Johnson's] employers wanted him to undertake the life of 
 Spenser. But he said Warton had left little or nothing for him to do." 
 
 In Hannah More 's Anecdotes she relates : 
 
 ''Johnson told me he had been with the king that morning, who en- 
 joined him to add Spenser to his Lives of the Poets. I seconded the 
 motion; he promised to think of it but said the booksellers had not 
 included him in their list of poets. ' '25 
 
 2-1 Boswell {Life, ed. Hill, 3, 308) says Tyson's statements are unre- 
 liable. 
 
 25 Hill 's note says the Lives were not directed by Johnson but ' ' he was 
 to furnish a Preface to any poet the booksellers pleased." {Life, 3, 137.) 
 
156 University of California Publications in Modern Philology, [Vol. 2 
 
 Johnson's letters to Warton are full of a kindly interest in the 
 forthcoming Observations on the Faerie Queene. He offers 
 assistance. But a critique on Spenser never came. 
 
 It seems to me fair to assume that Johnson's admiration for 
 Spenser was genuine and considerable. His most harsh animad- 
 versions appear only where he is heated in the act of striking 
 some contemporary affectation, imtation or the pastoral, and they 
 were probably exaggerated for his main purpose. Johnson was 
 a truer classicist than the earlier Augustans and pointed to 
 some of their most serious faults with unerring skill. 
 
 Johnson's Phillipics against imitation were echoed by many 
 who saw their justice. Robert Lloyd, wayward debauchee and 
 light-hearted imitator of Mat Prior's Familiar Verse, wrote a 
 Spenserian poem, before he damned the genre, which demands 
 attention because of its literary criticism. In 1751 he published 
 The Progress of Envy, a Spenserian imitation, in which he 
 abused poor Lauder, the Scotch tutor who spent his learning in 
 the endeavour to convict Milton of plagiarism. The poem is cast 
 in a form perhaps a compromise of the Spenserian stanza and 
 Prior's adaptation in his Ode to the Queen.^^ The poem opens 
 with the favorite Augustan imitation of Spenser's moralistic 
 overtures — here a lament at the power of Envy. Mount Par- 
 nassus is described. On either side of Phoebus sat "a peerless 
 wight," Spenser and Milton. Not far from these Dan Chaucer, 
 with reverend locks silvered with eld, was seated in lofty emi- 
 nence. Next was Shakespeare, "irregularly great." Nearby 
 stood the beautiful maids Fancy and Nature. But Envy, leav- 
 ing Acheron, went to the gloomy cave of her deformed sister 
 Malice and exhorted her to attack Milton. In a serpent-drawn 
 chariot they went to Caledonian plains, where dwelt the eldest 
 son of Malice (Lauder). Together they attacked Parnassus and 
 the son of Malice overcame Milton by his venom. But the poet 
 recovered when "Douglas and Truth" appeared. 
 
 In 1755 Lloyd raised his voice, with Johnson and other dis- 
 
 ss ababbcbcC and ababcdcdeE. Lloyd used a stanza 
 rhyming ababcdcdD. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 157 
 
 senters, against this very modish passion of imitation. In To 
 .... about to Publish a Volume he attacked even those who 
 strove to imitate ''Mat Prior's unaffected ease," a thing which 
 he himself never ceased doing throughout his career. Equally- 
 cursed are those who imitate Swift, Milton, or Pope. 
 
 "Others, who aim at fancy, choose 
 To woo the gentle Spenser's Muse. 
 The poet fixes for his theme 
 An allegory or a dream: 
 Fiction and truth to-gether joins 
 Through a long waste of flimsy lines: 
 Fondly believes his fancy glows 
 And image upon image grows: 
 Thinks his strong Muse takes wondrous flights, 
 Whene'er she sings of peerless wights, 
 Of dens, of palfreys, spells and knights, 
 Till allegory, Spenser's veil 
 T ' instruct and please in moral tale, 
 With him's no veil the truth to shroud, 
 But one impenetrable cloud." 
 
 All this is very true, but the outcries of Johnson and his fol- 
 lowers were of no avail. With Oliver Goldsmith, Johnson's 
 gentle admirer, we must cease our examination of the bootless 
 complaints against imitation and of the long role of Augustan 
 critics, though their opinions were still voiced by many sur- 
 vivers for some time after the Romantic Triumph.^^ Goldsmith 
 followed Johnson in his admiration for Shenstone but general 
 opposition to Spenserian imitation.^* But he showed a warm 
 appreciation of Spenser himself in a review of Church's edition 
 of The Faerie Queene in Smollett's Critical Review (February, 
 1759 ) . Thanks to Church : 
 
 "We can now tread the regions of fancy without interruption, and 
 expatiate on fairy wilds such as our great magician has been pleased to 
 represent them." 
 
 Unlike Johnson, Goldsmith shared the romanticists' distaste for 
 the allegory. 
 
 27 Among the many protests against Spenserian imitation is one which 
 should not be completely passed over. This is by Hume (History of Eng- 
 land, ed. 1773, V, 492, VI, 195). 
 
 28 The Beauties of English Poesy, 1767, vol. 1, introductory remarks to 
 Shenstone 's School-mistress. 
 
158 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 ''There is a pleasing tranquillity of mind which ever attends the 
 reading of this ancient poet. We leave the ways of the present world, 
 and all the ages of primeval innocence and happiness rise to our view. 
 . . . The imagination of his reader leaves reason behind, pursues the 
 tale without considering the allegory, and upon the whole, is charmed 
 without instruction." 
 
 But there are plenty of fashionable Augustan dicta. ' * No poet, ' ' 
 he states, '* enlarges the imagination more than Spenser." He 
 cites Cowley, Gray, Akenside, and others as examples. He warns 
 poets to imitate ''his beauties" not ''his words" which are 
 "justly fallen into disuse." He makes the usual complaint that 
 Spenser followed Virgil too little and vicious mediaeval and 
 Italian models too much. But the essay shows clearly how native 
 to Goldsmith's gentle irresponsible spirit were the lovely dreams 
 of The Faerie Queens. 
 
 I believe that we have evidence a plenty, probably ad nauseam^ 
 for my contentions. But my conception of the August ans is 
 worth establishing at the expense of much dry-as-dust catalogu- 
 ing. We are gradually outgrowing the ill-considered contempt 
 with which our romantic grandfathers estimated the Augustans. 
 Let us now give over that somewhat supercilious or even false 
 spirit of toleration with which we try to justify the Augustans in 
 so far as they show symptoms, real or chimerical, of romanticism. 
 Take them for what they were and what do we find? We find 
 that they could at least accord a poet like Spenser warm appre- 
 ciation from a purely neo-classical point of view and that interest 
 in Spenser did not necessarily have anything whatever to do 
 with romanticism. We find that the term ' ' Spenserian Revival, ' ' 
 which has long decked the chapters of many a text-book, is a 
 misnomer. We find that the Augustans, like ourselves, occas- 
 ionally said asinine things about Spenser but that they had an 
 appreciation of his high seriousness much sounder than that 
 which has gone current since the Triumph of Romanticism. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 159 
 
 VI ; 
 
 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 In the foregoing pages it has been maintained that a thorough- 
 going neo-elassicist could admire Spenser discerningly and 
 imitate him with perfect consistency. Yet the influence of Spen- 
 ser has been considered by Professor Phelps and Professor Beers 
 as one of the great causes of the romantic revival. With this 
 idea I cannot agree. It is rather that, once romanticism had 
 gained a foothold, Spenser was imitated in a romantic way. The 
 Augustans had admired Spenser for his moral earnestness — as 
 Milton had admired him. They appreciated the beauties of his 
 allegory which we often mock hastily and inconsistently. Despite 
 their occasional disapproval of his stanza and diction, they were 
 naturally always impressed by his highly wrought technique. 
 It was in no spirit of romantic revolt, then, that an Augustan 
 penned his mechanical "Imitation of Spenser." But once the 
 romantic seeds were sown there was infinite suggestion to be 
 found in Spenser for an Apostle of Wonder. 
 
 The earliest exponents of what they vaguely termed Gothic 
 or romantic were often not strong men with a new faith, but 
 decadents weary of the old. It was the passion of jaded, bookish 
 minds for novelty in no exalted sense rather than that spirit 
 of idealised aspiration by which Professor W. A. Neilson has 
 finely characterized the force which stirred the great poets of 
 the early nineteenth century. The tinsel trappings of a Walpole, 
 surely, are not romanticism according to our exalted ideas. The 
 eighteenth century men often connected romanticism with a com- 
 fortable melancholy and crocodile tears. Even in our o\\ti day 
 Edgar Allan Poe has argued for the indispensability of melan- 
 choly (much more sincere, to be sure), in poetry. The jaded 
 writers of the latter half of the eighteenth century cultivated 
 graveyards, gloomy abbeys, thunderstorms, all comfortably con- 
 
160 University of California Fublications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 jured up in the warm and snug seclusion of the study. It was 
 as artificial as Pope's pastorals. And we must be cautious about 
 linking this romantic pose too closely witli the various types of 
 romanticism represented by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, 
 Byron, Shelley, and Keats. With this warning in mind we may 
 turn to the men who are often named as the forerunners of 
 romanticism. 
 
 The name of William Thompson, a minor poet of talents ill 
 rewarded by posterity, should be mentioned as that of the earliest 
 romanticist who has any proper connection with our study. 
 Thompson had a very catholic taste. He admired Elizabethan, 
 Marinist, and Augustan alike. But he is only a romanticist in 
 so far as he is a belated Elizabethan, and he sounds none of the 
 new notes that we shall find in the later romanticism. 
 
 The preface to Thompson's An Hymn to May, a luxuriant 
 imitation of Spenser, contains, however, some rather remarkable 
 doctrine for the first decades of the eighteenth century.^ It is 
 a defence of his Elizabethan sensuousness. 
 
 ''As Spenser is the most descriptive and florid of all our English 
 writers, I attempted to imitate his manner in the following vernal poem. I 
 have been very sparing of the antiquated words which are too frequent 
 in most of the imitations of this author; however I have introduced a few 
 here and there which are explain 'd at the bottom of each page where they 
 occur. ... I followed Fletcher's measure in his Purple Island; a poem 
 printed at Cambridge in twelve cantos, in quarto, scarce heard of in this 
 age, yet the best in the allegorical way (next to the Fairy Queen), in the 
 English language. I hope I have no apology to make for describing the 
 the beauties, the pleasures, and the loves of the season in too tender or 
 too florid a manner. The nature of the subject required a luxuriousness 
 of versification, and a softness of sentiment; but they are pure and chaste 
 at the same time: otherwise this canto had neither ever been written or 
 offered to the public." 
 
 Here is romanticism of a kind. Thompson is certainly one of the 
 first of the eighteenth century poets to seek Spenser rather as a 
 poet of ardent emotion and sensuous glow than as a poet of vast 
 moral visions. But Thompson uses many neo-classical authori- 
 
 1 An Hymn to May was not published until 1757, but Thompson was 
 writing poetry with this same romantic richness of colour at least as early 
 as 1736. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 161 
 
 ties, including Prior, Davenant, and Scaliger. He made a wide 
 but short-lived reputation and certainly could not have had any- 
 appreciable influence on the rise of romanticism. 
 
 Perhaps no men among the early romanticists have loomed 
 larger and larger in the eyes of recent critics than the brothers 
 Joseph and Thomas Warton. Both must occupy a considerable 
 position in any history of Spenser's influence. Their passion for 
 The Faerie Queene was doubtless learned from their father, 
 Thomas Warton, senior, who wrote a very Augustan Spenserian 
 imitation in the stanza adopted by William Whitehead and a 
 group of the most barren followers of Spenser that fill the dull 
 pages of a history of eighteenth century poetry. The elder War- 
 ton's poem. Philander, An Imitation of Spencer: Occasioned hy 
 the Death of Mr. William Jening, Nov., 1706, is only a typical 
 pastoral elegy of the time. Two stanzas may be resurrected to 
 show from what loins sprang the great Wartons. 
 
 **When rural Spencer sung, the listening Swains 
 
 Wou'd oft' forget to feed the fleecy Throng; 
 
 The fleecy Throng, charm 'd with the melting Strains, 
 
 Fed not — ^but on the Musick of his Song 
 
 His MuUa would in lingering Bubbles play. 
 Till his pleas 'd waters stole unwillingly away. 
 
 **And cou'd my Verse but with its Theme compare, 
 Moving as Spencer I my Grief wou'd tell; 
 The ravish 'd Bard shou'd to Elysium hear 
 A second Colin mourn a second Astrophel. 
 My lays shou'd more than equal glory boast 
 And the fam'd Mulla be in smoother Channel lost. "2 
 
 The good man's two sons, though to be ranked among the great- 
 est students of Spenser, did not improve upon their father on 
 the matter of Spenserian imitations. In The Pleasures of the 
 Melancholy Thomas Warton alludes to Spenser in a somewhat 
 romantic spirt. 
 
 2 A reference, of course, to Spenser 's Astrophel, an elegy to Sidney, in 
 the same stanza as Warton 's elegy, though Spenser did not here employ 
 his final alexandrine. Joseph Warton, in an Ode on his brother's death has 
 a similar desireful allusion to Spenser's Astrophel and this stanza was 
 almost exclusively employed by the Wartons in their imitations of Spenser. 
 
162 University of California Puhlications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 "Such mystic visions send as Spenser saw 
 When through bewildering Fancy's magic maze, 
 To the fell house of Busyrane, he led 
 Th ' unshaken Britomart. ..." 
 
 But his own imitations are so frigid and remote from their model 
 that were they our only evidence we should suspect that Warton 
 had no first-hand knowledge of Spenser. 
 
 It is practically as critics only that the Wartons have achieved 
 any permanence. Here they have been scarcely awarded the high 
 position they should occupy. Joseph Warton 's magnum opus 
 is the famous Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756). 
 To call it, as Lowell does, ' * The earliest public official declaration 
 of war against the reigning mode" is to tempt the reader into a 
 rather too exalted notion of Warton 's spirit of revolt. To be sure, 
 there is much talk about things that are ' ' Romantic ' ' and about 
 things which have ' ' a pleasing wildness. ' ' But the reverence for 
 things ''elegant" and "decorous" and the horror of "impro- 
 priety" is even more frequently expressed. Certainly, at all 
 events, Joseph Warton had an acute appreciation of Spenser. 
 Apropos of an attack on Pope 's Alley, he wrote a sustained pane- 
 gyric on The Faerie Queene. Like the Augustans, he praised 
 the allegorical "living figures whose attitudes and behaviour 
 Spenser has minutely drawn with so much clearness and truth, 
 that we behold them with our eyes, as plainly as we do on the 
 ceiling of the banqueting-house. " He quotes several examples, 
 concluding with the picture of Jealousy, and cries^ out with con- 
 tagious enthusiasm: 
 
 ''Here all is in life and motion; here we behold the true Poet or 
 Maker; this is creation; it is here, might we cry out to Spenser, it is here 
 that you display to us, that you make us feel the sure effects of genuine 
 poetry. ' ' 
 
 For those who have any temptation to suspect that the criticisms 
 of Johnson and others on Spenserian imitations implied any 
 hostility to Spenser, it may be well to note that Warton looked 
 askance at the practice. 
 
 *'It has been fashionable of late to imitate Spenser; but the likeness 
 of most of these copies hath consisted rather in using a few of his ancient 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 163 
 
 expressions than in catching his real manner. Some, however, have been 
 executed with happiness, and with attention to that simplicity, that ten- 
 derness of sentiment, and those little touches of nature, that constitute 
 Spenser's character." 
 
 It is to be observed that this is only the usual Augustan criticism 
 of Spenser and that these are the very points which have too 
 often been culpably forgotten by romantic critics to our own 
 day. Warton's ranking of English poets, at the close of the 
 Essay, is the most famous passage. 
 
 *' Where, then, . . . shall we with justice be authorized to place our 
 admired Pope? Not, assuredly, in the same rank with Spenser, Shake- 
 speare, and Milton. ' ' 
 
 The whole passage is a remarkably acute bit of criticism. It is 
 not because the three great poets were exalted. That was unnec- 
 essary. They were praised by all. But the placing of Pope was 
 the great stroke. The age was close to a great man, in the same 
 situation as certain sonneteers who sang, a few years ago, to 
 * * Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson. " It is not a limitation peculiar 
 to the eighteenth century to overestimate their own poet. War- 
 ton's prophetic view is certainly striking in an age of smug self- 
 sufficiency. He seems to me to be an almost thoroughgoing 
 Augustan. But the Augustans produced some great critics. It 
 was perhaps romantic but not remarkably romantic to write : 
 
 "Where are the lays of artful Addison, 
 Coldly correct to Shakspear's warblings wild.'' 
 
 Occasionally he adopted the romantic pose. But when he was 
 true to his best instincts he was solid Augustan. 
 
 Thomas Warton's temperament was larger, more mellow than 
 that of his brother. It is not that he was more of a romanticist. 
 His attitudes toward romanticism and Spenser may be best inter- 
 preted through two lines of his verse : 
 
 *'As oft, reclin'd on CherwelPs shelving shore, 
 I trac'd romantick Spenser's moral page." 
 
 The word "romantick" here is in a precisely opposite situation 
 of that of today. Then it was vague because it had little or no 
 
164 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 meaning. Now it is vague because it has a thousand meanings. 
 It is significant, too, that Spenser was to Warton the pleasant 
 "moral" Spenser of the Augustans. But Warton was rich- 
 spirited enough to be the first English critic to apply the his- 
 torical method with any skill. All centuries of literature swam 
 into his learned ken. His Observations on the Faerie Queene 
 still remains the best book ever written about Spenser. But 
 Thomas Warton must not be considered as a very serious roman- 
 tic revolter and therefore forced, as an ardent admirer of Spenser, 
 to be apologetic in an unsympathetic age. His complaint that 
 Spenser was "admired" but "neglected" is not to be taken as 
 true in the sense of being a peculiar and widespread limitation 
 of his age. We have examined a considerable body of evidence 
 that Spenser was widely appreciated in the first half of the eigh- 
 teenth century by those who were ordained then, as in all ages, 
 to love him. And any scholar of our own day might very 
 accurately refer to Spenser as "this admired but neglected poet." 
 We shall presently see, too, how much Warton owed to his Augus- 
 tan predecessors in Spenserian criticism. 
 
 The Observations begins^ with a brief review of romantic 
 poetry, from Provencal to that of Ariosto and Tasso, in which 
 we at once perceive, however inadequate the account from the 
 point of view of modern investigators, the wide vision and schol- 
 arly solidity of the man. He turns a calm brow from grovelling 
 pedants and he is equally exalted above the slap-dash trifler in 
 letters who is bound in by his own age. Warton insists that in 
 order to appreciate a poet we must study the times in which 
 he lived. He finds that "Ariosto — rejecting truth for magic 
 and preferring the ridiculous excursions of Boyardo, to the pro- 
 priety and uniformity of the Grecian and the Roman models ' ' — 
 wrote a very heterodox poem. Beni is scored for comparing 
 Ariosto and Homer. Trissino is praised for having "taste and 
 boldness enough to publish an epic poem written in professed 
 imitation of the Iliad. ' ' 
 
 3 Chapter I, On the Plan and Conduct of the Faerie Queene. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 165 
 
 **Tasso took the ancients for his guides but was still too sensible of 
 the popular prejudice in favour of ideal beings, and romantic adventures 
 to neglect or omit them entirely. 
 
 '*Such was the prevailing taste when Spenser projected the Faerie 
 Queene. ' ' 
 
 This is Augustan criticism — the regret that Spenser was misled 
 by the damnable Ariosto — pure and simple. Warton does not 
 attempt to praise Ariosto and to approve Spenser's choice of 
 models as we shall find the early romanticists doing. He only 
 attempts an ample explanation by the use of the historical 
 method. 
 
 The plan of the Faerie Queene is now examined and criticized 
 just as Dryden, Hughes, and many more had analysed it and 
 found it wanting. Nay, Warton thinks Dryden is too mild in his 
 condemnation of the unity of the poem. Augustanism is ram- 
 pant. Warton says it is "inartificial" to introduce the hero of 
 one book on a less dangerous exploit later. It sullies the hero's 
 lustre and does little for the unity. 
 
 *'The poet might have established twelVe knights without an Arthur 
 or an Arthur without twelve knights." 
 
 Hughes had already made this suggestion. It is all neo-classi- 
 cal and it is all perfectly just. But Warton abruptly strikes a 
 blow for the defence. Again he is indebted to Hughes for the 
 idea. 
 
 ''But it is absurd to think of judging Ariosto or Spenser by precepts 
 which they did not attend to. We who live in the days of writing by rule, 
 are apt to try every composition by those laws which we have been taught 
 to think the whole criterion of excellence. ' ' 
 
 Spenser's poetry is "the careless exuberance of a warm imagina- 
 tion and a strong sensibility. ' ' He * * wrote rapidly from his own 
 feelings which at the same time were naturally noble." "We 
 scarcely regret the loss" of "that arrangement and economy 
 which Epic severity required" in the appeal of "feelings of the 
 heart rather than the cold approbation of the head. " "In read- 
 ing Spenser ; if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is trans- 
 
 iir.^ 
 
166 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 ported." Here, at last, was a critic large enough to appreciate 
 Augustan sanity, yet able, at the same time, to look beyond the 
 rules if so required. Now w^e stand on the brink of romanticism. 
 Warton now leads us through a pleasant maze of facts and 
 speculations concerning Spenser's sources in the romances, Greek 
 legends, Ariosto, and Chaucer.* Here, indeed, is a romantic 
 spirit of childlike wonder as, like Spenser himself, he pores over 
 the immense treasures of the past. He writes a charming and 
 unanswerable apologia for source-hunting. 
 
 "We feel a sort of malicious triumph in detecting the latent and 
 obscure source from which an original author has drawn some celebrated 
 description: yet this .... soon gives way to the rapture that naturally 
 results from contemplating the chymical energy of true genius, which can 
 produce so noble a transmutation." 
 
 With Spenser's stanza Warton is almost as unsympathetic as 
 Jonson, Davenant, and an occasional Augustan who happened to 
 dislike it. Its "constraint led our author into many absurdi- 
 ties," 'Ho dilate with trifling and tedious circumlocutions," to 
 run "into a ridiculous redundancy and repetition of words." 
 Warton was plainly blind to some of Spenser's most graceful 
 artifices. Yet he realizes certain advantages. The stanza, for 
 instance, causes fullness of details. "Some images," he writes, 
 "perhaps were produced by a multiplicity of rhymes." Dry den 
 is quoted as saying that a rhyme often helped him to a thought. 
 Spenser's extraordinary virtuosity is praised, but he is described 
 as "laden with .... many shackles." Spenser's archaisms 
 receive sensible and sympathetic treatment. But with an Augus- 
 tan worship of decorous monotony, Warton could not see why 
 Spenser did not place the caesura of his alexandrines invariably 
 in the middle. 
 
 The tenth section. Of Spenser's Allegorical Character, is of 
 particular interest. Warton borrows Hughes's theory that it 
 was a product of Spenser's age, of the pageants and spectacles 
 which he considers more like Spenser's peculiar mode of allegor- 
 
 4 Chapters II, III, V, and VI. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 167 
 
 izing ''than any other possible sources." Spenser's allegoristic 
 method is compared with Ariosto's to the discredit of the latter. 
 
 much more serious moralist than he really is). Warton follows / 1 'J 
 
 Spence in condemning justly the meaningless confusions of allei ) j/ ti 
 gory and reality, like the House of Alma. Warton, after Spencel \ 
 
 like a good student of Boileau, attacks Spenser for minglinJ . / 
 
 ** divine mystery" with human allegory. He gives the sam^ ^ 
 example as Spence, that the Mount of Olives and Parnassus are ly^ 
 ''impertinently linked together." But our critic decides "that 
 allegorical poetry, through many gradations, at last received its 
 ultimate consummation in the Fairy Queen." He concludes 
 tamely by quoting "the just and pertinent sentiments" of Abbe 
 du Bos : »». 
 
 **It is impossible for a piece, whose subject is of an allegorical action 
 to interest us very much. . . . Our heart requires truth even in fiction 
 itself; and when it is presented with an allegorical fiction, it cannot 
 determine itself, if I may be allowed the expression, to enter into the 
 sentiments of those chimerical personages.'' 
 
 Warton, poring too long by a fatal minute over this stupid 
 Frenchman, was made as Midas when he heard Marsyas. He could 
 not see in Spenser's allegory the magic that Gray saw with his 
 poet's eye when he wrote beautifully of The Faerie Queene, of 
 
 'Tierce war and faithful love. 
 And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest. ' ' 
 
 Thomas Warton has been described as apologetic in champion- 
 ing The Faerie Queene. On the contrary, he apologizes in the 
 Postscipt, like Spence, for having been ' ' more diligent in remark- 
 ing the faults than the beauties of Spenser." There was no 
 necessity for a defence of The Faerie Queene. Wliarton was 
 enabled to take many excellent ideas from Augustan critics of 
 Spenser. He did not often fall into their absurdities. But he 
 united their soundest principles to the historical method and 
 to something of the romantic spirit. It was this jast, this spirit 
 of childlike wonder, that led him to close his book with an enthus- 
 iastic and delightful quotation from Spenser. 
 
168 University of California Pudlications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 **The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde 
 In this delightful land of Faery, 
 Are so exceeding spacious and wyde, 
 And sprinckled with such sweet variety 
 Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye, 
 That I, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts delight, 
 My tedious travell doe forget thereby; 
 And when I gin to f eele decay of might. 
 It strength to me supplies, and chears my dulled spright. ' ' 
 
 With Richard Hurd (1720-1808) we come to the first import- 
 ant critic of the rebellious school who concerns us. His remarks 
 on the "Plan and Conduct" of The Faerie Queene open with a 
 fine romantic swagger. 
 
 *' Spenser, though he had long been nourished with the spirit and sub- 
 stance of Homer and Virgil, chose the times of chivalry for his Theme, 
 and Fairy Land for the Scene of his fictions. He could have planned, no 
 jjj^ubt, an heroick design on the exact classic model: Or, he might have 
 ^mmmed between the Gothick and Classick as his contemporary Tasso did. 
 But the charms of Fairy prevailed. And if any think he was seduced by 
 Ariosto into his choice, they should consider that it could be only for the 
 sake of his subject; for the genius and character of these poets was widely 
 different. 
 
 ''Under this idea then of a Gothick, not classical. Poem, the Faerie 
 Queene is to be read and criticised. And on these principles, it would not 
 be difficult to unfold its merit in another way than has been hitherto 
 attempted. ' ' 
 
 Hurd now becomes apologetic. 
 
 * ' I have taken the fancy to try my hand on this curious subject. ' ' 
 
 Here the apology of the Spenserian critics really begins. And it 
 is not due to any unpopularity of Spenser but to the fact that 
 they were advancing a somewhat new conception of him. We 
 have seen that the neo-classicists apologized only when they were 
 censuring Spenser. The romanticists apologized because they 
 wished to link Spenser more closely with their brotherhood. Hurd 
 draws the usual parallel between classical and Gothic architec- 
 ture, which had some vogue since Hughes ventured upon it as 
 throwing some light on Spenser, and adds : 
 
 ''The question is not which of the two is conducted in the simplest or 
 truest taste; but, whether there be not sense and design in both, when 
 scrutinized by the laws on which each is projected. ... It was as 
 
1911] 
 
 Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 
 
 169 
 
 requisite for the Faerie Queen to consist of the adventures of twelve 
 knights, as for the Odyssey to be confined to the adventures of one Hero: 
 justice had otherwise not been done to his subject. 
 
 "If it be asked then, what is this Unity of Spenser's Poem? I say, 
 it consists in the relation of its several adventures to one common origin, 
 the appointment of the Faerie Queene; and to one common end, the com- 
 pletion of the Faerie Queene 's injunctions. ' ' 
 
 This is not urged as classical unity but unity of another sort. 
 Hurd thinks that the introduction of Arthur was a mere after- 
 thought, an expedient from classical models which narrated only 
 one action. 
 
 "The truth was, the violence of classick prejudices forced the poet to 
 affect this appearance of Unity, though in contradiction to his Gothick 
 system. ' ' 
 
 Spenser, according to Hurd, never should have attempted to ally 
 the Gothic and the classical unities. It is interesting to compare 
 Hurd and the Augustans at this point. The Augustans, includ- 
 ing Warton, lamented that Spenser was compelled by the roman- 
 tic prejudices of his time to follow the vicious example of Ariosto. 
 Hurd lamented that Spenser was compelled by the prejudices of 
 his time to allow classical ideals to play havoc with his natural 
 Gothic inclinations. 
 
 Hurd now turns to an entirely different defence of The Faerie 
 Queene, based on its allegorical character. 
 
 "His twelve knights are to exemplify as many virtues, out of which 
 one illustrious character is to be composed. And in this view, the part 
 of Prince Arthur in each Book becomes essential not principal, exactly as 
 the poet has contrived it." \ » * 
 
 Hurd thinks the objection to Prince Arthur and the unity of the 
 poem is unanswerable on any other grounds. 
 
 "But how faulty soever this conduct be in the literal story, it is per- 
 fectly right in the moral: and that for an obvious reason, though his 
 criticks seem not to have been aware of it. His chief hero was not to 
 have the twelve virtues in the degree in which the knights had each of 
 them, their own; (such a character would be a monster;) but he was to 
 have so much of each as were requisite to form his superior character. 
 Each virtue, in its perfection, is exemplified in its own knight: they 
 are all, in a due degree concentered on Prince Arthur. 
 
 "The conclusion is, that, as an allegorical Poem the method of the 
 Faerie Queene is governed by the justness of the moral: as a narrative 
 
170 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Poem, it is conducted on the ideas and usages of chivalry. In either 
 view, if taken by itself, the plan is defensible. But from the union of the 
 two designs there arises a perplexity, and confusion, which is the proper, 
 and only considerable defect of this extraordinary Poem. ' ' 
 
 Hurd now launches forth in breezy defence of the Gothic 
 method. Tasso is sneered at because ''he thought fit to trim 
 between Gothic and classical models. ' ' The French depreciation 
 of Ariosto is roundly abused. We must remember that the Augus- 
 tans had patted Tasso on the back and girded at Ariosto. And 
 Hurd scores * * our obsequious and over modest critics ' ' for allow- 
 ing themselves to be overridden by French authority. 
 
 ''It grew into a sort of cant, with which Kymer, and the rest of that 
 School, filled their flimsy essays, and rambling prefaces. ... A lucky 
 word in a verse which sounds well and everybody gets by heart, goes 
 further than a volume of just criticism. In short, the exact but cold 
 Boileau happened to say something of the clinquant of Tasso; and the 
 magick of this word, like the report of Astolfo's horn in Ariosto, over- 
 turned at once the solid and well-built reputation of Italian poetry." 
 
 Hurd closes with an utterance of even more glowing roman- 
 ticism that lifts him safely above the jaded connoisseurs of 
 "Gothick" of his time. He defends the ''tales of the Faery" 
 and the fantastic exploits of the unfettered imagination as the 
 greatest material for epic poetry. Bad criticism, which had 
 relegated such matters to children, is blamed as the result of the 
 abuse of terms. 
 
 "A poet, they say, must follow Nature; and by Nature we are 
 to suppose can only be meant the known and experienced course of 
 affairs in this world. Whereas the poet has a world of his own where 
 experience has less to do than consistent imagination. . . . Without ad- 
 miration (which cannot be affected but by the marvellous of celestial 
 intervention, I mean, the agency of superior natures really existing, or 
 by the illusion of fancy taken to be so) no epick poem can be long-lived. 
 I am not afraid to instance the Henriade itself; which, notwithstanding 
 the elegance of the composition, will in a short time be no more read 
 than the Gondibert of Sir William Davenant, and for the same reason." 
 
 The "pomp of verse, the energy of description" and even "the 
 finest moral paintings ' ' will not produce a great epic without the 
 quality of "admiration." By "admiration," I take it, Hurd 
 means, in a slightly more restricted sense, what Mr. Theodore 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 171 
 
 Watts-Dunton means when he characterizes romanticism as the 
 spirit of "Wonder" which revolted against the Augustan *'Age 
 of Acceptance. ' ' 
 
 Hurd's last words on Spenser explain what I have been fre- 
 quently asserting — that the romanticists, though they discovered 
 new beauties in Spenser, became blind to certain of the qualities 
 of The Faerie Queene that had long been wisely cherished by 
 Milton and by the Augustans. From the ridicule of chivalry 
 and magic, thinks Hurd, Spenser was forced to give ."an air 
 of mystery to his subject" and to pretend "that his stories of 
 knights and giants" were but the mantle "of an abundance of 
 profound wisdom." 
 
 *'In short, to keep off the eyes of the prophane from prying too nearly 
 into his subject he threw about it the mist of allegory. 
 
 ** Fancy that had wantoned it so long in the world of fiction was now 
 constrained, against her will, to ally herself with strict Truth if she 
 would gain admittance into reasonable company. 
 
 "What we have gotten by this revolution, it will be said, is a great 
 deal of good sense. What we have lost, is a world of fine fabling; the 
 illusion of which is so grateful to the charmed spirit; that, in spite of 
 philosophy and fashion. Faery Spenser still ranks highest among the 
 Poets. I mean with all those that either come of that house, or have any 
 kindness for it. Earth-born criticks may blaspheme: 
 
 'But all the gods are ravish 'd with delight 
 Of his celestial song, and musick's wondrous might.' " 
 
 Hurd merits the highest praise for his spirited defence of 
 the romantic side of Spenser. But, for all his eloquence, his 
 depreciation of Spenser's allegory deserves reproach. Anyone 
 who reads Spenser's contemporaries in Italy, France and Eng- 
 land can see that, despite the rapid growth of Augustan criticism 
 on the continent. Fancy could easily wanton it at her own sweet 
 will without feeling constained to go masked in moral allegory. 
 Spenser was not forced to constrain his copious visions within 
 bounds, but the beautiful high seriousness that always dwells 
 with the? greatest poets made him choose allegory uncommanded. 
 Hurd and most succeeding romanticists have forgotten that 
 there is much rich beauty in Spenser of which the moral alle- 
 gory is the direct cause, that many of the passages which they 
 
\ 
 
 172 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 admire cannot be cherished consistently unless the allegory be 
 accepted as artistic. Enthusiasm for the canto on Despair, to 
 which the coldest reader of Spenser accords high praise, implies 
 enthusiasm for the episode as allegory no matter what fine- 
 spun theories the reader chooses to flaunt. The restraining 
 power and architectonic value of Spenser's allegory, despite its 
 incomplete working-out, will be apparent to any man who reads 
 the Poly-Olhion of Drayton and the Britannia's Pastorals of 
 Browne, huge poems by men who had much of Spenser 's heaped 
 treasures of fancy and glimmering lore but none of the deeper 
 dream that strove to pour the riches into the vast, the too vast, 
 mould of the allegory that strove to erect that gorgeous Utopia 
 which would have shaped and perfected even the spacious court 
 of Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 Among other beauties of Spenser which the romanticists 
 taught all England to appreciate fully for the first time was 
 the Spenserian stanza. It is strange that it remained for Beattie, 
 the gentle poetaster who was once lionized for his Minstrel, to 
 write the first elaborate and thoroughly appreciative comments 
 on the marvellous stanza which Spenser fashioned subtly for his 
 Faerie Queene. A letter to Dr. Blacklock (September 22, 1766), 
 reveals the placid Beattie in the process of composition. 
 
 **Not long ago I began a poem in the style and stanza of Spenser, in 
 which I propose to give full scope to my inclination, and to be either 
 droll or pathetic, descriptive or sentimental, tender or satirical, as the 
 humour strikes me; for, if I mistake not, the manner which I have adopted 
 admits equally of all these kinds of composition. I have written one 
 hundred and fifty lines, and am surprised to find the structure of that 
 complicated stanza so little troublesome. . I was always fond of it, for I 
 think it the most harmonious that ever was contrived. It admits of more 
 variety of pauses than either the couplet or the alternate rhyme; and it 
 concludes with a pomp and majesty of sound, which, to my ear, is won- 
 derfully delightful. It seems also very well adapted to the genius of our 
 language, which, from its irregularity of inflexion and number of mono- 
 syllables, abounds in diversified terminations, and consequently renders 
 our poetry susceptible of an endless variety of legitimate rhymes. Bnt I 
 am so far from intending this performance for the press, that I am 
 morally certain it will never be finished. I shall add a stanza now and 
 then, when I am at leisure, and when I have no humour for other amuse- 
 ment; but I am resolved to write no more poetry with a view to publica- 
 
1911 J Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 173 
 
 tion, till I see some dawnings of a poetical taste among the generality of 
 readers, of which, however, there is not at present anything like an 
 appearance. ' ' 
 
 Beattie shows the bookish man 's ignorance of his times. The 
 public was waiting to devour stuff like The Minstrel. And when 
 he did publish the first book, in 1771, there was a thunder of 
 applause. 
 
 These opinions have brought us well into the camp of the 
 romanticists, where fewer citations and explanations are neces- 
 sary for the reader of today. The Augustan attitude lingered on 
 with certain critics, but most men followed in the wake of Hurd. 
 We are near enough oulTown time to conclude this long survey 
 of Spenserian criticism with the opinions of three of the most 
 delightful romantic admirers of Spenser — Sir Walter Scott 
 (1771-1832), William Hazlitt (1778-1830), and Leigh Hunt 
 (1784-1859). 
 
 In order thoroughly to appreciate Scott's attitude toward 
 Spenser we must glance at his poetry along with his prose. Like 
 many poets he has left evidence of his early delight in Spenser, 
 to whose works he was introduced by Dr. Blacklock. 
 
 ''Spenser I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself 
 about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies and dragons 
 and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and God only knows how 
 delighted I was to find myself in such society." 
 
 And in the days of his maturity Scott's boyish appreciation of 
 Spenser remained essentially the same. For Scott was always 
 a boy. Beyond a certain interest as a man of affairs and an 
 antiquarian, in Spenser 's political allegory,^ he rather abandoned 
 himself, like all the full-fledged romanticists, to the delights of 
 the rich succession of pictures that was stirred by Spenser's 
 lofty purposes. Scott's romanticism, with its love of antiquar- 
 ianism, was not a strong spirit of rebellion, nor even a very 
 strong spirit of wonder. Allowing for its immensely superior 
 
 5 See his essay on Todd's edition of Spenser (Edinburgh Beview, 1805). 
 ''But although everything belonging to the reign of the Virgin Queen 
 carries with it a secret charm to Englishmen, no commentator of the Faery 
 Queen has taken the trouble to go very deep into those annals, for the pur- 
 pose of illustrating the secret, and as it were, esoteric allusions of Spen- 
 ser 's poems. ' ' 
 
174 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 vigor and its wholesome scorn of introspection, it has something 
 in common with the pretty trifling of Beattie. Scott's roman- 
 ticism involved little more than a change in what the Augustans 
 called ''machinery." Take out your pagan divinities; put in 
 your knights. Add to this a change of landscape. Describe a 
 mountain or forest scene. Put in an indispensable moon and a 
 castle. This was the setting, not for the sentimental reflections 
 of Beattie, but for the stirring narrative and ring so like the old 
 ballad that Matthew Arnold has well called it the only English 
 equivalent of Homer. 
 
 What Scott found in Spenser was the dim forest, the furtive 
 flash of armor as the sun stole through at intervals, silent maidens 
 who were to Scott mere vague flowers of mediaeval landscape, 
 and ever and anon a great castle upleaping unexpectedly in the 
 silver winding path. Even in the breathless flow of his narra- 
 tive Scott delighted to pause and to consider these lovely scenes. 
 So he hit upon the happy device of using Spenser in a rather 
 novel way. In almost all his narrative poems he introduced 
 Spenserian stanzas, generally at the opening of his cantos, to 
 make a setting before the quick beat of the free tetrameters 
 called to arms. He showed a relic of Augustan- Spenser ianism 
 by occasionally employing the stanza of The Faerie Queene for a 
 moralistic prelude or interlude, as the master himself did. Fin- 
 ally he strewed his narrative with allusions to the beautiful pic- 
 tures in The Faerie Queene. In some of his later poems the 
 influence of Byron 's Childe Harold tinged his introductory Spen- 
 serian stanzas. But, in general, the landscapes thus introduced 
 are not disturbed by the more personal, stormier note of Byron. 
 Almost any of these stanzas taken at random will illustrate. The 
 idyllic scenes on the island in the second canto of The Lady of 
 the Lake are introduced by a charming setting. 
 "At morn the black-cock trims his jetty wing , 
 
 'Tis morning prompts the linnet's blithest lay. 
 
 All Nature's children feel the matin spring 
 
 Of life reviving, with reviving day; 
 
 And while yon little bark glides down the bay, 
 
 Wafting the stranger on his way again. 
 
 And sweetly o'er the lake was heard thy strain, 
 Mix'd with the sounding harp, O white-hair 'd Allan-Bane." 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 175 
 
 The Spenserian allusions, with which the Ariosto of the 
 North, ever haunted by visions of The Faerie Queene, strewed 
 richly his poems, may be illustrated by a passage from Marmion 
 which conjures up scenes with the delight of a child rocking him- 
 self into ecstasy by a fire-place and recalling his store of fairy- 
 tales. 
 
 ''Not she, the championess of old, 
 
 In Spenser's magic tale enroll 'd, 
 
 She, for the charmed spear renown 'd. 
 
 Which forced each knight to kiss the ground, — 
 
 Not she more changed, when, placed at rest, 
 
 What time she was Malbecco's guest, 
 
 She gave to flow her maiden vest; 
 
 When from the corslet's grasp relieved, 
 
 Free to the sight her bosom heaved; 
 
 Sweet was her blue eye's honest smile, 
 
 Erst hidden by the aventayle; 
 
 And down her shoulders gracefull roU'd, 
 
 Her locks profuse, of paly gold. 
 
 They who whilom, in midnight fight. 
 
 Had marvell'd at her matchless might, ^ 
 
 No less her maiden charms approved. 
 
 But looking liked, and liking loved. 
 
 The sight could jealous pangs beguile. 
 
 And charm Malbecco's cares a while; 
 
 And he^he wandering Squire of Dames, 
 
 Forgot his Columbella 's claims. 
 
 And passion, erst unknown, could gain 
 
 The breast of blunt Sir Satyrane; 
 
 Nor durst light Paridel advance. 
 
 Bold as he was, a looser glance. 
 
 She charmed at once, and tamed the heart, 
 
 Incomparable Britomarte! " 
 
 Thus, too, The Vision of Don Roderick closes with Spenser's 
 
 favorite figurative method of saying adieu. 
 
 "But all too long, through seas unknown and dark, 
 (With Spenser's parable I close my tale,) 
 By shoal and rocks hath steer 'd my venturous bark, 
 And landward now I drive before the gale. 
 And now the blue and distant shore I hail. 
 And nearer now I see the port expand. 
 And now I gladly furl my weary sail. 
 And as the prow light touches on the strand, 
 I strike my red-cross flag and bind my skiff to land. ' ' 
 
176 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 Scott was always a hearty, delighted boy and this lovable 
 trait is no better illustrated than in his Spenser-worship. 
 
 The beautiful things in Spenser were ever straying in some 
 convenient corner of Hazlitt's mind. Hazlitt shares with Byron 
 in Don Juan the supreme honors in English literature for the 
 mastery of the fine art of quoting. So adroitly does Hazlitt slip 
 a fine phrase or verse from a beloved writer into the rich tex- 
 ture of his own prose that he becomes a second creator, as great 
 as the first, and we forget that it was merely quoted. This is 
 one of the most effective and difficult of stylistic tricks. Hazlitt 
 quoted Spenser a propos of things in general, often very quaintly. 
 * ' We felt as much disconcerted, ' ' he writes, ' ' by the uncalled for 
 phrensy of this theatrical Amazon, as the Squire of Dames in 
 Spenser did, when he was carried off by the giantess Orgygia." 
 Coleridge's Lay Sermon reminded him of "A gentle husher 
 Vanitie by name.^' 
 
 Hazlitt certainly penned the most brilliant detached com- 
 ments on Spenser ever written. ''The essence of Spenser's 
 poetry," he tells us, ''was a continuous, endless flow of inde- 
 scribable beauties like the galaxy or milky way. ' ' He says pene- 
 trating things about the vexed question of Spenser 's passion. 
 
 ''But he has been unjustly charged with a want of passion and of 
 strength. He has both in an immense degree. He has not indeed the 
 pathos of immediate action or suffering, which is more properly the 
 dramatic; but he has all the pathos of sentiment and romance — all that 
 belongs to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. ' ' 
 
 After all the endless talk about Ariosto and Spenser, Hazlitt 
 makes the best comparison ever written. 
 
 ''If Ariosto transports us into regions of romance, Spenser's poetry is 
 all fairy-land. In Ariosto we walk upon the ground, in a company, gay, 
 fantastic, and adventurous enough. In Spenser, we wander in another 
 world, among ideal beings. The poet takes us and lays us in the lap of 
 a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among greener hills and 
 fairer valleys. He paints nature, not as we find it, but as we expected to 
 find it, and fulfills the delightful promise of our youth. ' ' 
 
 Hazlitt is quaintly non-committal on the problem of Spenser's 
 allegory. 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 177 
 
 ' ' But some people will say that all this may be very fine, but that they 
 cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the 
 allegory, as if they thought it would bite them: they look at it as a child 
 looks at a painted dragon, and think it will strangle them in its shining 
 folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the 
 allegory will not meddle with them. Without minding it at all, the whole 
 is as plain as a pike-staff." 
 
 Hazlitt was a literary epicurean, the product of the romantic 
 attitude toward Spenser, who has done incalculable good for the 
 master and yet has encouraged men to take The Faerie Queene as 
 an intellectual anesthetic (if they are not unfortunate enough 
 to have taken it as a soporific). If we tempered our Hazlitt and 
 all the romanticists with Milton, Dryden, and Addison for an 
 antidote, then we should get the perfect conception of Spenser. 
 But I must leave the reader with a relish of Hazlitt rather than 
 of my polemics. 
 
 *'In reading the Faery Queene, you see a little withered old man by a 
 wood-side opening a wicket, a giant and a dwarf lagging far behind, a 
 damsel in a boat upon an enchanted lake, wood-nymphs, and satyrs; and 
 all of a sudden you are transported into a lofty palace, with tapers burn- 
 ing, amid knights and ladies, with dance and revelry and song, ' and mask, 
 and antique pageantry. ' ' ' 
 
 From boyhood to the days of his sunny maturity, when he 
 poured out his graceful garrulous essays, Spenser haunted Leigh 
 Hunt like a passion. He tells us, in his Autobiography, that he 
 secured an odd volume of Spenser at Christ's Hospital and com- 
 completed about a hundred stanzas called The Fairy King which 
 **was to be in emulation of Spenser." From that time Spenser 
 was his favorite among all poets. In 1801 he published his 
 Juvenilia, or a Collection of Poems, Written between the Ages of 
 Twelve and Sixteen. The most ambitious poem is The Palace of 
 Pleasure; An Allegorical Poem in Two Cantos. Written in Imita- 
 tion of Spenser. His epicurean Story of Bimini (1816), so im- 
 portant in the history of nineteenth century romanticism, 
 shows the influence of Spenser, the sensuous builder of the Bower 
 of Bliss, both for better and for worse. But in his beautiful 
 essay, Imagination and Fancy, we find the key-note of Hunt's 
 
\ 
 
 178 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 attitude toward Spenser. Here he furnishes a wonderful pic- 
 ture-gallery. He compares scene after scene of concentrated 
 loveliness with some appropriate picture which hangs in the 
 great galleries of Europe. No book could be more perfect to 
 teach both youth and crabbed age to love Spenser. Yet I must 
 be ungracious enough to charge Hunt with a good deal of respon- 
 sibility for the common conception current today of Spenser as 
 a pictorial poet and nothing more. Spenser 's pictures have been 
 admired till he is given absolutely no credit as a writer of narra- 
 tive. This is absurd extreme. Had Hunt appreciated some of 
 Spenser's larger qualities, his own verse would doubtless have 
 been less saccharine and spineless. But it seems almost sacri- 
 legious to quarrel with this charming old literary epicurean. 
 How eloquently he could write of Spenser may be seen in one 
 short apostrophe. 
 
 ** Around us are the woods; in our distant ear is the sea; the glimmer- 
 ing forms that we behold are those of nymphs and deities; or a hermit 
 makes the loneliness onore lonely; or we hear a horn blow, and the 
 ground trembling with the coming of a giant; and our boyhood is again 
 existing, full of belief, though its hair be turning grey; because thou, a 
 man, hast written its books, and proved the surpassing riches of its 
 wisdom. ' ' 
 
 A catalogue of later opinions is unnecessary. We all know 
 the current notions about Spenser. Endless are the pale com- 
 ments of writers of text-books who have bolted The Faerie Queene 
 with all the terrifying velocity with which the ghastly Americans 
 in Martin Chuzzleivit devoured their dinner — ''in huge wedges." 
 A few words about Spenser's worship of beauty, a fling at his 
 allegory, and the necessary paragraphs in any proper history of 
 English literature are complete. Such is the baneful influence 
 of the literary epicureanism of Hurd, Scott, Leigh Hunt, and 
 other brilliant writers whose utterances culminate in Lowell's 
 glowing but dangerous essay on Spenser, which, with all its real 
 appreciation of one side of the master's genius, has had a blight- 
 ing influence on many. Professor Dowden, whose perfect essay 
 on Spenser will be mentioned presently, has conveniently com- 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 179 
 
 pressed the splendid Luciferian assertions of Lowell into a para- 
 graph. 
 
 '*A teacher, — what is the import of this? 'The true use of Spenser,' 
 says a poet of our own day, Mr. J. E. Lowell, '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.' And again: 'Whenever in the Faery Queen you come sud- 
 denly on the moral, it gives you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind 
 of grit, as when one's teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of straw- 
 berries and cream.' This, then, is the Faery Queen — a dish of straw- 
 berries and cream mixed up unfortunately with a good deal of grit. ' And 
 as for the allegory, we may 'fairly leave it on one side; ' Spenser employed 
 it to '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.' Shall we accept this view, or that of Milton— 
 'a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas?' Was Spenser such a teacher 
 'sage and serious' to his own age? If so, does he remain such a teacher 
 for this age of ours?" 
 
 This age of ours, about which Professor Dowden has his fears, 
 is too much devoted to the doctrine of Art for Art 's sake to be in 
 harmony with the ideals of Spenser and ]\Iilton. Poets who are 
 ineffectually concerned with pale, anaemic Isoldes gazing sadly 
 into the solitary West cannot understand the full beauty of fig- 
 ures like Una, who symbolizes Truth. They onl^ admir^the 
 colors, not the exquisite lines of the picture. Had they Spenser's 
 richer view, their poetry would not so often confuse the white- 
 ness of beauty with the preternatural whiteness of leprosy. They 
 are for all the world like the exclusive and selfish people in Boc- 
 caccio who assembled in rural sequestration to divert each other 
 with stories while their comrades in the city groaned with the 
 plague and stretched out imploring hands for help. If you make 
 poetry the gilded plaything of an exclusive and esoteric cult, you 
 are doing as did Boccaccio 's fine lords and ladies. You will have 
 none of the humanity of the Man of Law and the Prioress, you 
 will have none of the high poetry of the Knight and the Squire. 
 Spenser studied Plato and knew Sidney. Therefore he had a 
 profound understanding of the function of poetry. 
 
 Our present-day romanticists sometimes look upon Spenser 
 askance because of his idealism and sum it up with the accusa- 
 
180 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 tion that he has no human interest. They think this because 
 present-day romanticism often means the reverse of idealism. 
 Many people who would be realistic, yet who have romantic 
 tastes, gratify their love of mystery and sensation by realistic 
 studies of pathological cases. Sentimentalism so intimately con- 
 nected with the first years of romanticism as it rose in its glori- 
 ous youth and smote the dead ideals of Acceptance is now held in 
 disrepute not only by the commercialists, with their rule-of- 
 thumb realism, but by the most adventurous romanticists. The 
 later-day romanticists, with a false sense of shame, have hard- 
 ened themselves against it. Nowadays, for instance, an orthodox 
 musician does not dare to admire the sweet, wholesome roman- 
 ticism of Mendelssohn. The lover of poetry who prefers the 
 gentle pensiveness of Longfellow to Poe's inarticulate Ulalume 
 is considered senile. It is certainly true that contemporary 
 romanticists need a revival of sentimentalism as badly as the 
 eighteenth century, though for a different reason. The Augus- 
 tans were hard because they believed in repression and glittering 
 reason. Present-day romanticists are hard because they are 
 jaded and do not respond to normal emotions. 
 
 And better for us than sentimentalism would be the beautiful 
 idealism of Edmund Spenser. His sweet leisureliness would 
 cure us of our literary dyspepsia induced by our breathless short- 
 story technique which we admire with such blind exclusiveness. 
 His profound moral consciousness would impress us again with 
 the high function of poetry and make us laugh at Art for Art's 
 sake. 
 
 But I would close in a major key. As it has always been so, , 
 we can boast of a few critics who have written great essays on 
 Spenser. I should like space to dilate on the rare essays of that 
 fine-souled poet Aubrey de Vere with their sober and profound 
 adoration of the qualities that run deep in Spenser. I should 
 like to plunder from the many fervid passages that Professor 
 Saintsbury, one of the truest of Spenser's champions, has drawn 
 from his perennial contagious enthusiasm. But I must confine 
 myself to what I believe to be the greatest essay on Spenser ever 
 
1911] Cory: The Critics of Edmund Spenser. 181 
 
 written, to Professor Edward Dowden's Spenser, the Poet and } 
 Teacher. Since Warton's Observations on the Faery Queene, I 
 know of nothing so many-sided and so near the ideal method 
 which I have advocated at the cost of so much dull pedantry and 
 raucous polemic. Now, at last, I will gladly disappear and leave 
 the rostrum to Professor Dowden. 
 
 "In England of the age of Elizabeth what place is filled by the 
 poetry of Spenser? What blank would be made by its disappearance? 
 In what, for each of us who love that poetry resides its special virtue? 
 Shall we say in answer to these questions that Spenser is the weaver of 
 spells, the creator of illusions, the enchanter of the Elizabethan age; and 
 that his name is to us a word of magic by which we conjure away the 
 pain of actual life, and obtain entrance into a world of faery? Was 
 Spenser, as a poet of our own time names himself, 'the idle singer' of 
 his day — that day not indeed 'an empty day,' but one filled with heroic 
 daring and achievement? While Ealeigh was exploring strange streams 
 of the New World, while Drake was chasing the Spaniard, while Bacon 
 was seeking for the principles of a philosophy which should enrich man's 
 life, while Hooker, with the care of a wise master-builder, was laying the 
 foundation of polity in the National Church, where was Spenser? Was 
 he forgetful of England, forgetful of earth, lulled and lying in some 
 bower of fantasy, or moving in a dream among imaginary champions of 
 chivalry, distressed damsels, giants and dragons and satyrs and savage 
 men, or shepherds who pipe and shepherdesses who dance forever in a 
 serene Arcady? 
 
 ''Assuredly it was not thus that a great Englishman of a later age 
 thought of Spenser. When Milton entered upon his manhood, he entered 
 upon a warfare; the peaceful days, days of happy ingathering of varied 
 culture, days of sweet repose amid rural beauty, were past and gone; and 
 he stood with loins girt, prepared for battle in behalf of liberty. And 
 then, in London, when London was a vast arsenal in which weapons were 
 forging for the defence of truth and freedom, Milton in his moment of 
 highest and most masculine ardour, as he wrote his speech on behalf of 
 unlicensed printing, thought of Spenser. It was not as a dreamer that 
 Milton thought of him. Spenser had been a power with himself in youth, 
 when he, 'the lady of his college,' but such a lady as we read of in 
 'Comus,' grew in virginal beauty and virginal strength. He had listened 
 to Spenser's 'sage and solemn tunes,' 
 
 'Of turneys and of trophies hung; 
 Of forests and enchantments drear. 
 Where more is meant than meets the ear. ' 
 
 And now, in his manhood, when all of life had grown for him so grave, 
 so glorious with heroic effort, Milton looks back and remembers his 
 master, and he remembers him not as an idle singer, not as a dreamer of 
 
y^ 
 
 182 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 
 
 dreams, but as 'our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare to name a 
 better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas. ' 
 
 ** *A better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.' Yet we are told by the 
 Dean of St. Paul's, that in giving himself credit for a direct purpose to 
 instruct, Spenser 'only conformed to the utilitarian spirit which pervaded 
 ^ the literature of the time.' It is the heresy of modern art that only 
 useless things should be made beautiful. We want beauty only in play- 
 things. In elder days the armour of a knight was as beautiful as sunlight, 
 or as flowers. 'In unaffected, unconscious, artistic excellence of inven- 
 tion,' says one of our chief living painters, 'approaching more nearly to 
 the strange beauty of nature, especially in vegetation, mediaeval armour 
 perhaps surpasses any other effort of human ingenuity. ' i What if Spenser 
 wrought armour for the soul, and, because it was precious and of finest 
 temper, made it fair to look upon? That which gleams as bright as the 
 waters of a sunlit lake is perhaps a breastplate to protect the heart; that 
 which appears pliant as the blades of summer grass may prove at our need 
 to be a sword of steel. ' ' ") 
 
 Transmitted September 27, 1910. 
 
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