y on Chaucer, both for his vocabulary and his grammar: and his authority and popularity have probably saved us a good many words which we could ill afford to lose. And some of his words we certainly have forgotten to our losssuch words as ingate (like insight,) glooming, fool-happy, overgone, and his many combinations with en-empeopled, engrieved, enrace. But it is not to enrich a language but to confuse and spoil it, when a writer forces on it words which are not in keeping with its existing usages and spirit, and much more when he arbitrarily deals with words to make them suit the necessities of metre and rime: and there is much of this in Spenser. He overdoes, especially in his earlier books, the old English expedient of alliteration, or hunting the letter, as it was called, which properly belongs to a much earlier method of versification, and which the ear of his own generation had already learned to shrink from in excess. He not only revives old words, but he is licentiousas far as we are able to trace the usages of the timein inventing new ones. He is unscrupulous in using inferior forms for better and more natural ones, not for the sake of the word, but for the convenience of the verse. The transfer of wordsadjectives and verbsfrom their strict use to a looser one,the passage from an active to a neuter sense,the investing a word with new associations,the interchange of attributes between two objects, with the feelings or phrase which really belong to one reflected back upon the otherare, within limits, part of the recognised means by which language, and especially poetical language, extends its range. But Spenser was inclined to make all limits give way to his convenience, and the rapidity of his work. It is not only to us that his language is both strange and affectedly antique; it looked the same to the men of his own time. It is a drawback to the value of Spenser as a monument of the English of his day, that it is often uncertain whether a form or a meaning of word may not be due simply to his own wayward and arbitrary use of it.
The Faery Queen has eclipsed all Spensers other writings: but his other writings alone would be enough to place him, as his contemporaries placed him, at the head of all who had yet attempted English poetry. The Shepherds Calendar, as has been said, with all its defects and affectations, showed force, skill, command of language and music as yet unknown. In it were shown the beginnings of two powers characteristic of Spenser: the power of telling a story, as in the fables of The Oak and Briar, and The Fox and Kid; and the power of satire, a power which he used both there and afterwards in Mother Hubberds Tale, to lash the Church abuses of the time and the manners of the Court, and in using which he is in strong contrast, in his sobriety and self-restraint, to the coarse extravagance of such writing in his time. The Fox and Ape of Mother Hubberds Tale is much nearer to the satire of Dryden and Pope, than it is to such writers as Donne and Hall. He did his necessary share of work in writing poems of salutation or congratulation for the great, or of lamentation for their misfortunes and sorrows. The Prothalamion celebrates the marriage of two ladies of the Worcester family; and he bewailed the death of Sir Philip Sidney and the Earl of Leicester. Much of this poetry was conventional. But in it appear fine and beautiful passages. The Prothalamion has great sweetness and grace. The Dirges never fail to show his deep and characteristic feeling for the vicissitudes of our human state. Finally, his own love and courtship inspired a series of Sonnets, and a Wedding Hymn. The Sonnets on the whole are disappointing. There is warmth and sincerity in them; but they want the individual stamp which makes such things precious. On the other hand, the Wedding Hymn, the Epithalamion, is one of the richest and most magnificent compositions of the kind in any language.