-

"From out the lake a bridge ascends thereto,
Whereon in female shape a serpent stands.
Who eyes her eye, or views her blue-vein'd brow,
With sense-bereaving glozes she enchants,
And when she sees a worldling blind that haunts
The pleasure that doth seem there to be found,
She soothes with Leucrocutanized sound.

"Thence leads an entry to a shining hall
Bedecked with flowers of the fairest hue;
The Thrush, the Lark, and night's-joy Nightingale
There minulize their pleasing lays anew,
This welcome to the bitter bed of rue;
This little room will scarce two wights contain
T' enjoy their joy, and there in pleasure reign.

"But next thereto adjoins a spacious room,
More fairly fair adorned than the other:
(O woe to him at sin-awhaping doom,
That to these shadows hath his mind given over)
For (O) he never shall his soul recover:
If this sweet sin still feeds him with her smack
And his repentant hand him hales not back."[32]

[32] Mr. Churton Collins is "tolerably confident," and perhaps he might
have been quite certain, that Leucrocutanized refers to one of the Fauna of
fancy,--a monster that spoke like a man. "Minulise," from minurizo, "I
sing." "To awhape" = "to confound."

We could hardly end with anything farther removed from the clear philosophy
and the serene loveliness of _The Faerie Queene_.

CHAPTER V

THE SECOND DRAMATIC PERIOD--SHAKESPERE

The difficulty of writing about Shakespere is twofold; and though it is a
difficulty which, in both its aspects, presents itself when other great
writers are concerned, there is no other case in which it besets the critic
to quite the same extent. Almost everything that is worth saying has been
already said, more or less happily. A vast amount has been said which is
not in the least worth saying, which is for the most part demonstrably
foolish or wrong. As Shakespere is by far the greatest of all writers,
ancient or modern, so he has been the subject of commentatorial folly to an
extent which dwarfs the expense of that folly on any other single subject.
It is impossible to notice the results of this folly except at great
length; it is doubtful whether they are worth noticing at all; yet there is
always the danger either that some mischievous notions may be left
undisturbed by the neglect to notice them, or that the critic himself may
be presumed to be igno