ful messengers of heavy things.
Of death and dolour telling sad tidings;
While sad Celleno, sitting on a clift,
A song of bale and bitter sorrow sings,
That heart of flint asunder could have rift;
Which having ended, after him she flieth swift."

The Cave of Despair is described with equal gloominess and power of fancy;
and the fine moral declamation of the owner of it, on the evils of life,
almost makes one in love with death. In the story of Malbecco, who is
haunted by jealousy, and in vain strives to run away from his own
thoughts--

"High over hill and over dale he flies"--

the truth of human passion and the preternatural ending are equally
striking.--It is not fair to compare Spenser with Shakspeare, in point of
interest. A fairer comparison would be with Comus; and the result would
not be unfavourable to Spenser. There is only one work of the same
allegorical kind, which has more interest than Spenser (with scarcely less
imagination): and that is the Pilgrim's Progress. The three first books of
the Faery Queen are very superior to the three last. One would think that
Pope, who used to ask if any one had ever read the Faery Queen through,
had only dipped into these last. The only things in them equal to the
former, are the account of Talus, the Iron Man, and the delightful episode
of Pastorella.

The language of Spenser is full, and copious, to overflowing: it is less
pure and idiomatic than Chaucer's, and is enriched and adorned with
phrases borrowed from the different languages of Europe, both ancient and
modern. He was, probably, seduced into a certain license of expression by
the difficulty of filling up the moulds of his complicated rhymed stanza
from the limited resources of his native language. This stanza, with
alternate and repeatedly recurring rhymes, is borrowed from the Italians.
It is peculiarly fitted to their language, which abounds in similar vowel
terminations, and is as little adapted to ours, from the stubborn,
unaccommodating resistance which the consonant endings of the northern
languages make to this sort of endless sing-song.--Not that I would, on
that account, part with the stanza of Spenser. We are, perhaps, indebted
to this very necessity of finding out new forms of expression, and to the
occasional faults to which it led, for a poetical language rich and varied
and magnificent beyond all former, and almost all later example. His
versification is, at once, the