frannion_, etc., which it would
have puzzled Spenser himself to explain.

One of the pleasantest outcomes of this literary fashion was William
Shenstone's "Schoolmistress," published in an unfinished shape in 1737
and, as finally completed, in 1742. This is an affectionate
half-humorous description of the little dame-school of Shenstone's--and
of everybody's--native village, and has the true idyllic touch.
Goldsmith evidently had it in memory when he drew the picture of the
school in his "Deserted Village."[30] The application to so humble a
theme of Spenser's stately verse and grave, ancient words gives a very
quaint effect. The humor of "The Schoolmistress" is genuine, not
dependent on the more burlesque, as in Pope's and Cambridge's
experiments; and it is warmed with a certain tenderness, as in the
incident of the hen with her brood of chickens, entering the open door of
the schoolhouse in search of crumbs, and of the grief of the little
sister who witnesses her brother's flogging, and of the tremors of the
urchins who have been playing in the dame's absence:

"Forewarned, if little bird their pranks behold,
'Twill whisper in her ear and all the scene unfold."

But the only one among the professed scholars of Spenser who caught the
glow and splendor of the master was James Thomson. It is the privilege
of genius to be original even in its imitations. Thomson took shape and
hue from Spenser, but added something of his own, and the result has a
value quite independent of its success as a reproduction. "The Castle of
Indolence," 1748,[31] is a fine poem; at least the first part of it is,
for the second book is tiresomely allegorical, and somewhat involved in
plot. There is a magic art in the description of the "land of
drowsy-head," with its "listless climate" always "atween June and
May,"[32] its "stockdove's plaint amid the forest deep," its hillside
woods of solemn pines, its gay castles in the summer clouds, and its
murmur of the distance main. The nucleus of Thomson's conception is to
be found in Spenser's House of Morpheus ("Faerie Queene," book i. canto
i. 41), and his Country of Idlesse is itself an anticipation of
Tennyson's Lotus Land, but verse like this was something new in the
poetry of the eighteenth century:

"Was nought around but images of rest:
Sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns between;
And flowery beds that slumberous influence kest,
From poppies breathed; and b