on of his language; the escape from
epigrams and point (snap after snap, like a pack of fire-crackers), from
a style which has made his every other line a proverb or current
quotation--the escape from all this into Spenser's serene, leisurely
manner, copious Homeric similes, and lingering detail must have seemed
most restful. To go from Pope to Spenser was to exchange platitudes,
packed away with great verbal cunning in neat formulas readily portable
by the memory, for a wealth of concrete images: to exchange saws like,

"A little learning is a dangerous thing,"

for a succession of richly colored pictures by the greatest painter among
English poets. It was to exchange the most prosaic of our poets--a poet
about whom question has arisen whether he is a poet at all--for the most
purely poetic of our poets, "the poet's poet." And finally, it was to
exchange the world of everyday manners and artificial society for an
imaginary kingdom of enchantment, "out of space, out of time."

English poetry has oscillated between the poles of Spenser and Pope. The
poets who have been accepted by the race as most truly national, poets
like Shakspere, Milton, and Byron, have stood midway. Neither Spenser
nor Pope satisfies long. We weary, in time, of the absence of passion
and intensity in Spenser, his lack of dramatic power, the want of
actuality in his picture of life, the want of brief energy and nerve in
his style; just as we weary of Pope's inadequate sense of beauty. But at
a time when English poetry had abandoned its true function--the
refreshment and elevation of the soul through the imagination--Spenser's
poetry, the poetry of ideal beauty, formed the most natural corrective.
Whatever its deficiencies, it was not, at any rate, "conceived and
composed in his wits."

Spenser had not fared so well as Shakspere under the change which came
over public taste after the Restoration. The age of Elizabeth had no
literary reviews or book notices, and its critical remains are of the
scantiest. But the complimentary verses by many hands published with the
"Faerie Queene" and the numerous references to Spenser in the whole
poetic literature of the time, leave no doubt as to the fact that his
contemporaries accorded him the foremost place among English poets. The
tradition of his supremacy lasted certainly to the middle of the
seventeenth century, if not beyond. His influence is visible not only in
the work of professed disci