he day (and I am not sure that any such
excuse is required) it is to be found at once. There was no actually spoken
or ordinarily written tongue in Spenser's day which could claim to be
"Queen's English." Chaucer was obsolete, and since Chaucer there was no
single person who could even pretend to authority. Every writer more or
less endowed with originality was engaged in beating out for himself, from
popular talk, and from classical or foreign analogy, an instrument of
speech. Spenser's verse language and Lyly's prose are the most remarkable
results of the process; but it was, in fact, not only a common but a
necessary one, and in no way to be blamed. As for the other criterion
hinted at above, no one is likely to condemn the diction according to that.
In its remoteness without grotesqueness, in its lavish colour, in its
abundance of matter for every kind of cadence and sound-effect, it is
exactly suited to the subject, the writer, and the verse.

It is this singular and complete adjustment of worker and implement which,
with other peculiarities noted or to be noted, gives _The Faerie Queene_
its unique unicity, if such a conceit may be pardoned. From some points of
view it might be called a very artificial poem, yet no poem runs with such
an entire absence of effort, with such an easy eloquence, with such an
effect, as has been said already, of flowing water. With all his learning,
and his archaisms, and his classicisms, and his Platonisms, and his isms
without end, hardly any poet smells of the lamp less disagreeably than
Spenser. Where Milton forges and smelts, his gold is native. The endless,
various, brightly-coloured, softly and yet distinctly outlined pictures
rise and pass before the eyes and vanish--the multiform, sweetly-linked,
softly-sounding harmonies swell and die and swell again on the ear--without
a break, without a jar, softer than sleep and as continuous, gayer than the
rainbow and as undiscoverably connected with any obvious cause. And this is
the more remarkable because the very last thing that can be said of Spenser
is that he is a poet of mere words. Milton himself, the severe Milton,
extolled his moral teaching; his philosophical idealism is evidently no
mere poet's plaything or parrot-lesson, but thoroughly thought out and
believed in. He is a determined, almost a savage partisan in politics and
religion, a steady patriot, something of a statesman, very much indeed of a
friend and a lover. And of