has never been forgotten cannot be revived. To Germany and France, at a
later date, Shakspere came with the shock of a discovery and begot
Schiller and Victor Hugo. In the England of the eighteenth century he
begot only Ireland's forgeries.

The name inscribed in large letters on the standard of the new school was
not Shakspere but Spenser. If there is any poet who is _par excellence_
the poet of romance, whose art is the antithesis of Pope's, it is the
poet of the "Faërie Queene." To ears that had heard from childhood the
tinkle of the couplet, with its monotonously recurring rhyme, its
inevitable caesura, its narrow imprisonment of the sense, it must have
been a relief to turn to the amplitude of Spencer's stanza, "the full
strong sail of his great verse." To a generation surfeited with Pope's
rhetorical devices--antithesis, climax, anticlimax--and fatigued with the
unrelaxing brilliancy and compression of his language; the escape from
epigrams and point (snap after snap, like a pack of fire-crackers), from
a style which has made his every other line a proverb or current
quotation--the escape from all this into Spenser's serene, leisurely
manner, copious Homeric similes, and lingering detail must have seemed
most restful. To go from Pope to Spenser was to exchange platitudes,
packed away with great verbal cunning in neat formulas readily portable
by the memory, for a wealth of concrete images: to exchange saws like,

"A little learning is a dangerous thing,"

for a succession of richly colored pictures by the greatest painter among
English poets. It was to exchange the most prosaic of our poets--a poet
about whom question has arisen whether he is a poet at all--for the most
purely poetic of our poets, "the poet's poet." And finally, it was to
exchange the world of everyday manners and artificial society for an