ople
now like to look upon in company--scenes and descriptions which may
perhaps from the habits of the time may have been playfully and
innocently produced, but which it is certainly not easy to dwell upon
innocently now. And apart from these serious faults, there is
continually haunting us, amid incontestable richness, vigour, and
beauty, a sense that the work is over-done. Spenser certainly did not
want for humour and an eye for the ridiculous. There is no want in him,
either, of that power of epigrammatic terseness, which, in spite of its
diffuseness, his age valued and cultivated. But when he gets on a story
or a scene, he never knows where to stop. His duels go on stanza after
stanza till there is no sound part left in either champion. His palaces,
landscapes, pageants, feasts, are taken to pieces in all their parts,
and all these parts are likened to some other things. "His abundance,"
says Mr. Craik, "is often oppressive; _it is like wading among unmown
grass_." And he drowns us in words. His abundant and incongruous
adjectives may sometimes, perhaps, startle us unfairly, because their
associations and suggestions have quite altered; but very often they are
the idle outpouring of an unrestrained affluence of language. The
impression remains that he wants a due perception of the absurd, the
unnatural, the unnecessary; that he does not care if he makes us smile,
or does not know how to help it, when he tries to make us admire or
sympathize.

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. There is really nothing like it in history. It is unique as a
phenomenon that proud, able, free-spoken men, with all their high
instincts of what was noble and true, with all their admiration of the
Queen's high qualities, should have offered it, even as an unmeaning
custom; and that a proud and free-spoken people should not, in the very
genuineness of their pride in her and their loyalty, have received it
with shouts of derision and disgust. The flattery of Roman emperors and
Roman Popes, if as extravagant, was not so personal. Even Louis XIV. was
not celebrated in his dreary old age, as a model of ideal beauty and a
paragon of romantic perfection. It was no worship of a secluded
and d