eties and
difficulties of thought, and were alive to the music of its cadences.
Some of these works, consecrated by the highest of all possible
associations, have remained, permanent monuments and standards of the
most majestic and most affecting English speech. But the verse of
Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville, and the prose of More and Ascham were but
noble and promising efforts. Perhaps the language was not ripe for their
success; perhaps the craftsmen's strength and experience were not equal
to the novelty of their attempt. But no one can compare the English
styles of the first half of the sixteenth century with the contemporary
styles of Italy, with Ariosto, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, without
feeling the immense gap in point of culture, practice, and skill--the
immense distance at which the Italians were ahead, in the finish and
reach of their instruments, in their power to handle them, in command
over their resources, and facility and ease in using them. The Italians
were more than a century older; the English could not yet, like the
Italians, say what they would; the strength of English was, doubtless,
there in germ, but it had still to reach its full growth and
development. Even the French prose of Rabelais and Montaigne was more
mature. But in Spenser, as in Hooker, all these tentative essays of
vigorous but unpractised minds have led up to great and lasting works.
We have forgotten all these preliminary attempts, crude and imperfect,
to speak with force and truth, or to sing with measure and grace. There
is no reason why they should be remembered, except by professed
inquirers into the antiquities of our literature; they were usually
clumsy and awkward, sometimes grotesque, often affected, always
hopelessly wanting in the finish, breadth, moderation, and order which
alone can give permanence to writing. They were the necessary exercises
by which Englishmen were recovering the suspended art of Chaucer, and
learning to write; and exercises, though indispensably necessary, are
not ordinarily in themselves interesting and admirable. But when the
exercises had been duly gone through, then arose the original and
powerful minds, to take full advantage of what had been gained by all
the practising, and to concentrate and bring to a focus all the hints
and lessons of art which had been gradually accumulating. Then the
sustained strength and richness of the _Faery Queen_ became possible;
contemporary with it, the grandeur an