ity; and, by a profusion of obsolete and uncouth expressions, hinders the free movement of his fancy."-E. P. Whipple.

"He loved 'seldseen, costly' words perhaps too well, and did not always distinguish between mere strangeness and that novelty which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some charm of seeming association. He chooses his language for its rich canorousness rather than for intensity of meaning.

He forms English words out of French or Italian ones, sometimes, I think, on a misapprehension of their true meaning; nay, he sometimes makes new ones by unlawfully grafting a scion of Romance on a Teutonic root.. His archaisms often needed a glossary even in his own day, but he never endangers his finest passages by any experiments of this kind. Spenser was an epicure in language. His innovations were by no means always happy, as not always according with the genius of the language, and they have therefore not prevailed. His theory rescuing good archaisms from unwarranted oblivion was excellent, not so his practice of being archaic for the mere sake of escaping from the common and familiar. It may readily be granted that he sometimes hunted the letter,' as it was called, out of all cry."—Lowell.

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"A great deal has been written on this-comments, at least, of the unfavorable kind, generally resolving themselves into the undoubtedly true remarks that Spenser's dialect is not the dialect of any actual place or time, that it is an artificial poetic diction' made up of Chaucer and of Northern dialect, of classicisms and of foreign words and miscellaneous archaisms from no matter where. No doubt it is. But there was no actually spoken or ordinarily written tongue in Spenser's day which could claim to be 'Queen's English.' . In its remoteness without grotesqueness, in its lavish color, in its abundance of matter for every kind of cadence and sound-effect, it is exactly suited to the subject, the writer, and the verse."—George Saintsbury.

"He was probably seduced into a certain license of expression by the difficulty of filling up the moulds of his complicated rhymed stanza from the limited resources of his native language. Spenser is the poet of our waking dreams; and he has invented a language of his own for them."-William Hazlitt.

"Intentionally archaic in his diction, he heightened the stature of English as a poetic language, and raised it to a pitch of exaltation which had not previously been approached, and has hardly since been rivalled by the few noblest among his successors."-W. M. Rossetti.

"He is enamoured of it [the poetic land] even to its very language; he revives the old words, the expressions of the Middle Ages, the style of Chaucer."-Taine.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

HOBBINOL." Diggon Davie! I bidde her god day;
Or Diggon her is, or I missaye."

DIGGON.- "Her was her, while it was daye-light,
But now her is a most wretched wight;

For day that was, is wightly * past,

And now at earst the dirke night doth hast."

HOBBINOL." Diggon, areede, who has thee so dight?
Never I wist thee in so poore a plight.

Where is the fayre flock thou was wont to leade?
Or bene they chaffred,† or a mischiefe dead?"

DIGGON." Hobbin, ah Hobbin! I curse the stounde
That ever I cast to have lorne this grounde :
Wel-away the while I was so fonde

To leave the good that I had in hande,

In hope of better that was uncouth!

So lost the Dogge the flesh in his mouth.

My seely sheepe (ah, seely sheepe!)

That here by there I whilome used to keepe,
All were they lustye, as thou didst see,
Bene all sterved with pyne and penuree;
Hardly my selfe escaped thilke payne,
Driven for neede to come home agayne."

-The Shepheards Calendar.

"The soveraine weede betwixt two marbles playne, She pounded small, and did in pieces bruise; And then atween her lily handes twain

Into his wound the juice thereof did scruze.

And after having searched the intuse deep,

She with her scarf did bind the wound, from cold to keepe."

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Ensample of his wondrous faculty,

-The Faery Queene.

Behold the boyling bathes in Cairbadon,

Which seeth with secret fire eternally,

And in their entrailles, full of quick brimston,

Nourish the flames which they are warmed upon."

9. Flattery-Adulation.-"His disposition was soft and yielding; and, to honor a friend or propitiate a patron, he did not hesitate to make his verse a vehicle of flattery as well as of truth. . The flattery of Queen Elizabeth is so gross that the wonder is she did not behead him for irony instead of pensioning him for panegyric. The Queen's hair was red; and Spenser, like the other poets of his day, is too loyal to permit the ideal head of beauty to wear any locks but those which are golden."-E. P. Whipple.

"He had already too well caught the trick of flatteryflattery in a degree almost inconceivable to us-which the fashions of the time and the queen's strange self-deceit exacted from the loyalty and enthusiasm of Englishmen.

Under this head comes a feature which the charity of history' may lead us to treat as simple exaggeration, but which

often suggests something less pardonable, in the great characters, political or literary, of Elizabeth's reign. This was the gross, shameless, lying flattery paid to the Queen.

It was no worship of a secluded and distant object of loyalty; the men who thus flattered knew perfectly well, often by painful experience, what Elizabeth was; able, indeed, highspirited, successful, but ungrateful to her servants, capricious, vain, ill-tempered, unjust, and in her old age ugly. And yet the Gloriana of the Faery Queene,' the empress of all nobleness-Belphoebe, the Princess of all sweetness and beauty, Britomart, the armed votaress of all purity, Mercilla, the lady of all compassion and grace, were but the reflections of the language in which it was then agreed upon by some of the greatest of Englishmen to speak, and to be supposed to think, of the Queen."-R. W. Church.

"Thus [by the stipend bestowed on him by the Queen] he procured the leisure to exercise his pen- the vacant head which verse demands '—but he incurred at the same time the obligations of a court poet, which, though they may have sat lightly on the shoulders of a loyal subject and an humble off-shoot of the aristocracy, by nature prone to admiration, led him sometimes into servile compliances and into a habit of adulation. . . And, speaking more generally, we do not love to see our 'sage, serious Spenser' turn his great moral song into a venal eulogy of the great, committing, as it were, the ineffectual simony of selling riches in the Temple of Fame. But... flattery was a custom and almost a necessity among poets."-Professor Child.

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"The age of Elizabeth was, indeed, an age of adulation' -and Edmund Spenser Adulator-general to the Court. But blame him not too severely, we implore you, for following the custom of the time.'"-Professor Wilson [Christopher North].

ILLUSTRATIONS.

"And thou, O fayrest Princesse under sky!
In this fayre mirrhour maist behold thy face,
And thine own realmes in lond of Faery,
And in this antique ymage thy great auncestry.
The which, O! pardon me thus to enfold

In cover vele, and wrap in shadowes light,
That feeble eyes your glory may behold,

Which ells could not endure those beames bright,
But would bee dazled with exceeding light."
-The Faery Queene.

"The soverayne beauty which I doo admyre,
Witnesse the world how worthy to be prayzed !
The light whereof hath kindled heavenly fyre

In my fraile spirit, by her from basenesse raysed;
That, being now with her huge brightnesse dazed,
Base thing I can no more endure to view :

But, looking still on her I stand amazed

At wondrous sight of so celestiall hew.

So, when my toung would speak her praises dew,
It stopped is with thoughts astonishment;

And, when my pen would write her titles true,

It ravisht is with fancies wonderment;

Yet in my hart I then both speake and write
The wonder that my wit cannot endite."

-Amoretti, or Sonnets.

"In the highest place,

Urania [Countess of Pembroke], sister unto Astrofell,
In whose brave mynd, as in a golden cofer,

All heavenly gifts and riches lockèd are ;

More rich than pearles of Ynd, or gold of Opher,

And in her sex more wonderfull and rare.

Ne lesse praise worthie I Theana [Countess of Warwick] read, Whose goodly beames though they be overr-dight

With mourning stole of carefull wydowhead,

Yet through that darksome vale do glister bright;