e Scene with rudenes foule disguize.

All places they with follie have possest,
And with vaine toyes the vulgare entertaine;
But me have banished, with all the rest
That whilome wont to wait upon my traine,
Fine Counterfesaunce, and unhurtfull Sport,
Delight, and Laughter, deckt in seemly sort.

All these, and all that els the Comick Stage
With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced,
By which mans life in his likest image
Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced;
And those sweete wits, which wont the like to frame,
Are now despizd, and made a laughing game.

And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made
To mock her selfe, and truth to imitate,
With kindly counter under Mimick shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah! _is dead of late_;
With whom all joy and jolly merriment
Is also deaded, and in dolour drent.

* * * * *

But that same gentle Spirit, from whose pen
Large streames of honnie and sweete Nectar flowe,
Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men,
Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,
Doth rather choose to sit in idle Cell,
Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell.

But the most remarkable of these pieces is a satirical fable, _Mother
Hubberd's Tale of the Ape and Fox_, which may take rank with the
satirical writings of Chaucer and Dryden for keenness of touch, for
breadth of treatment, for swing and fiery scorn, and sustained strength
of sarcasm. By his visit to the Court, Spenser had increased his
knowledge of the realities of life. That brilliant Court, with a goddess
at its head, and full of charming swains and divine nymphs, had also
another side. It was still his poetical heaven. But with that odd
insensibility to anomaly and glaring contrasts, which is seen in his
time, and perhaps exists at all times, he passed from the celebration of
the dazzling glories of Cynthia's Court, into a fierce vein of invective
against its treacheries, its vain shows, its unceasing and mean
intrigues, its savage jealousies, its fatal rivalries, the scramble
there for preferment in Church and State. When it is considered what
great persons might easily and naturally have been identified at the
time with the _Ape and the Fox_, the confederate impostors, charlatans,
and bullying swindlers, who had stolen the lion's skin, and by it
mounted to the high places of the S