great beauties, but I observe, from the extracts that appear in Poetic
Selections and the like, that the most tedious and even the most
monstrous passages are those which are generally offered for admiration.
The case of Spenser in this respect--which does not stand alone in
ancient English literature--has a curious parallel in art, where people
are positively found to go into ecstasies over a distorted limb or a
ludicrous inversion of perspective, simply because it is the work of an
old master, who knew no better, or followed the fashion of his time.

Leigh Hunt read the 'Faery Queen,' by-the-bye, as almost everything
else that has been written in the English tongue, and even Macaulay
alludes with rare commendation to his 'catholic taste.' Of all authors
indeed, and probably of all readers, Leigh Hunt had the keenest eye for
merit and the warmest appreciation of it wherever found. He was
actively engaged in politics, yet was never blind to the genius of an
adversary; blameless himself in morals, he could admire the wit of
Wycherley; and a freethinker in religion, he could see both wisdom and
beauty in the divines. Moreover, it is immensely to his credit that
this universal knowledge, instead of puffing him up, only moved him to
impart it, and that next to the pleasure he took in books was that he
derived from teaching others to take pleasure in them. Witness his 'Wit
and Humour' and his 'Imagination and Fancy,' to my mind the greatest
treasures in the way of handbooks that have ever been offered to
students of English literature, and the completest antidotes to
pretence in it. How many a time, as a boy, have I pondered over this or
that passage in the originals, from Shakespeare to Suckling, and then
compared it with the italicised lines in his two volumes, to see
whether I had hit upon the beauties; and how often, alas! I hit upon
the blots![2]