ples like Giles and Phineas Fletcher, the
pastoral poet William Browne, and Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist,
but in the verse of Jonson, Fletcher, Milton, and many others. Milton
confessed to Dryden that Spenser was his "poetical father." Dryden
himself and Cowley, whose practice is so remote from Spenser's,
acknowledged their debt to him. The passage from Cowley's essay "On
Myself" is familiar: "I remember when I began to read, and to take some
pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not
by what accident, for she herself never read any book but of
devotion--but there was wont to lie) Spenser's works. This I happened to
fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights
and giants and monsters and brave houses which I found everywhere there
(thought my understanding had little to do with all this), and, by
degrees, with the tinkling of the rime and dance of the numbers; so that
I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was
thus made a poet as irremediably as a child is made an eunuch." It is a
commonplace that Spenser has made more poets than any other one writer.
Even Pope, whose empire he came back from Fairyland to overthrow, assured
Spence that he had read the "Faerie Queene" with delight when he was a
boy, and re-read it with equal pleasure in his last years. Indeed, it is
too readily assumed that writers are insensible to the beauties of an
opposite school. Pope was quite incapable of appreciating it. He took a
great liking to Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd"; he admired "The
Seasons," and did Thomson the honor to insert a few lines of his own in
"Summer." Among his youthful parodies of old English poets is one piece
entitled "The Alley," a not over clever burlesque of the famous
description of the Bower of Bliss.[18]

As for Dryden, his reverence for Spenser is qualified by the same sort of
critical disapprobation which we noticed in his eulogies of Shakspere.
He says that the "Faerie Queene" has no uniformity: the language is not
so obsolete as is commonly supposed, and is intelligible after some
practice; but the choice of stanza is unfortunate, though in spite of it,
Spenser's verse is more melodious than any other English poet's except
Mr. Waller's.[19] Ambrose Philips--Namby Pamby Philips--whom Thackeray
calls "a dreary idyllic cockney," appealed to "The Shepherd's Calendar"
as his model, in the introduction to his insipi