and Howard of Effingham and Richard Grenville, or by families like those of Vere and Norreys and Carew.
As a work of art The Faery Queen at once astonishes us by the wonderful fertility and richness of the writers invention and imagination, by the facility with which he finds or makes language for his needs, and above all, by the singular music and sweetness of his verse. The main theme seldom varies: it is a noble knight, fighting, overcoming, tempted, delivered; or a beautiful lady, plotted against, distressed, in danger, rescued. The poets affluence of fancy and speech gives a new turn and colour to each adventure. But besides that under these conditions there must be monotony, the poets art, admirable as it is, gives room for objections. Spensers style is an imitation of the antique; and an imitation, however good, must want the master charm of naturalness, reality, simple truth. And in his system of work, with his brightness and quickness and fluency, he wanted self-restraintthe power of holding himself in, and of judging soundly of fitness and proportion. There was a looseness and carelessness, partly belonging to his age, partly his own. In the use of materials, nothing comes amiss to him. He had no scruples as a copyist. He took without ceremony any piece of old metal,word, or story, or imagewhich came to his hand, and threw it into the melting-pot of his imagination, to come out fused with his own materials, often transformed, but often unchanged. The effect was sometimes happy, but not always so.
With respect to his diction, it must ever be remembered that the language was still in such an uncertain and unfixed state as naturally to invite attempts to extend its powers, and to enrich, supple, and colour it. Spenser avowedly set himself to do this. The editor of his first work, The Shepherds Calendar, takes credit on his behalf for attempting to restore, as to their rightful heritage, such good and natural English words, as have been long time out of use, and almost clean disherited. Spenser draws largely 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 waywa