Yet he began his commentary with the stock denunciations of "Gothic
ignorance and barbarity." "At the renaissance it might have been
expected that, instead of the romantic manner of poetical
composition . . . a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have
succeeded. . . But it was a long time before such a change was effected.
We find Ariosto, many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth
for magic, and preferring the ridiculous and incoherent excursions of
Boiardo to the propriety and uniformity of the Grecian and Roman models.
Nor did the restoration of ancient learning produce any effectual or
immediate improvement in the state of criticism. Beni, one of the most
celebrated critics of the sixteenth century, was still so infatuated with
a fondness for the old Provencal vein, that he ventured to write a
regular dissertation, in which he compares Ariosto with Homer." Warton
says again, of Ariosto and the Italian renaissance poets whom Spenser
followed, "I have found no fault in general with their use of magical
machinery; notwithstanding I have so far conformed to the reigning maxims
of modern criticism as to recommend classical propriety."
Notwithstanding this prudent determination to conform, the author takes
heart in his second volume to speak out as follows about the
pseudo-classic poetry of his own age: "A poetry succeeded in which
imagination gave way to correctness, sublimity of description to delicacy
of sentiment, and majestic imagery to conceit and epigram. Poets began
now to be more attentive to words than to things and objects. The nicer
beauties of happy expression were preferred to the daring strokes of
great conception. Satire, that bane of the sublime, was imported from
France. The muses were debauched at court; and polite life and familiar
manners became their only themes."

By the time these words were written Spenser had done his work. Color,
music, fragrance were stealing back again into English song, and
"golden-tongued romance with serene lute" stood at the door of the new
age, waiting for it to open.

[1] A small portion of "The Canterbury Tales." Edited by Morell.

[2] The sixteenth [_sic. Quaere_, seventeenth?] century had an instinctive
repugnance for the crude literature of the Middle Ages, the product of so
strange and incoherent a civilization. Here classicism finds nothing but
grossness and barbarism, never suspecting that it might contain germs,
which, with