his own authority,
he cuts down, or he alters a word, or he adopts a mere corrupt
pronunciation, to suit a place in his metre, or because he wants a rime.
Precedents, as Mr. Guest has said, may no doubt be found for each one of
these sacrifices to the necessities of metre or rime, in some one or
other living dialectic usage, or even in printed books--"_blend_" for
"_blind_," "_misleeke_" for "_mislike_," "_kest_" for "_cast_,"
"_cherry_" for "_cherish_," "_vilde_" for "_vile_," or even "_wawes_"
for "_waves_," because it has to rime to "_jaws_." But when they are
profusely used as they are in Spenser, they argue, as critics of his own
age such as Puttenham, remarked,--either want of trouble, or want of
resource. In his impatience he is reckless in making a word which he
wants--"fortunize," "mercified," "unblindfold," "relive"--he is reckless
in making one word do the duty of another, interchanging actives and
passives, transferring epithets from their proper subjects. The "humbled
grass," is the grass on which a man lies humbled: the "lamentable eye,"
is the eye which laments. "His treatment of words," says Mr. Craik, "on
such occasions"--occasions of difficulty to his verse--"is like nothing
that ever was seen, unless it might be Hercules breaking the back of the
Nemean lion. He gives them any sense and any shape that the case may
demand. Sometimes he merely alters a letter or two; sometimes he twists
off the head or the tail of the unfortunate vocable altogether. But this
fearless, lordly, truly royal style makes one only feel the more how
easily, if he chose, he could avoid the necessity of having recourse to
such outrages."

His own generation felt his licence to be extreme. "In affecting the
ancients," said Ben Jonson, "he writ no language." Daniel writes
sarcastically, soon after the _Faery Queen_ appeared, of those who

Sing of knights and Palladines,
In aged accents and untimely words.

And to us, though students of the language must always find interest in
the storehouse of ancient or invented language to be found in Spenser,
this mixture of what is obsolete or capriciously new is a bar, and not
an unreasonable one, to a frank welcome at first acquaintance. Fuller
remarks with some slyness, that "the many Chaucerisms used (for I will
not say, affected) by him, are thought by the ignorant to be blemishes,
known by the learned to be beauties, in his book; which notwithstanding
had been more saleable