en taught themselves
to speak in character, and prided themselves on keeping it up by
substituting for the ordinary language of life and emotion a cumbrous
and involved indirectness of speech.

And yet that quaint stateliness is not without its attractions. We have
indeed to fit ourselves for it. But when we have submitted to its
demands on our imagination, it carries us along as much as the fictions
of the stage. The splendours of the artificial are not the splendours of
the natural; yet the artificial has its splendours, which impress and
captivate and repay. The grandeur of Spenser's poem is a grandeur like
that of a great spectacle, a great array of the forces of a nation, a
great series of military effects, a great ceremonial assemblage of all
that is highest and most eminent in a country, a coronation, a royal
marriage, a triumph, a funeral. So, though Spenser's knights and ladies
do what no men ever could do, and speak what no man ever spoke, the
procession rolls forward with a pomp which never forgets itself, and
with an inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and incident.
Nor is it always solemn and high-pitched. Its gravity is relieved from
time to time with the ridiculous figure or character, the ludicrous
incident, the jests and antics of the buffoon. It has been said that
Spenser never smiles. He not only smiles, with amusement or sly irony;
he wrote what he must have laughed at as he wrote, and meant us to laugh
at. He did not describe with a grave face the terrors and misadventures
of the boaster Braggadochio and his Squire, whether or not a caricature
of the Duke of Alencon and his "gentleman," the "petit singe," Simier.
He did not write with a grave face the Irish row about the false
Florimel (IV. 5),--

Then unto Satyran she was adjudged,
Who was right glad to gaine so goodly meed:
But Blandamour thereat full greatly grudged,
And litle prays'd his labours evill speed,
That for to winne the saddle lost the steed.
Ne lesse thereat did Paridell complaine,
And thought t'appeale from that which was decreed
To single combat with Sir Satyrane:
Thereto him Ate stird, new discord to maintaine.

And eke, with these, full many other Knights
She through her wicked working did incense
Her to demaund and chalenge as their rights,
Deserved for their perils recompense.
Amongst the rest, with boastfull vaine pretense,
Step