writers: aghast, baleful, behest, bootless, carol, craven, dreary,
forlorn, foray, guerdon, plight, welkin, yore. If words like these, and
like many which Warton annotates in his "Observations," really needed
explanation, it is a striking proof, not only of the degree in which our
older poets had been forgotten, but also of the poverty to which the
vocabulary of English poetry had been reduced by 1700.

In his prefatory remarks to the "Faërie Queene," the editor expresses the
customary regrets that the poet should have chosen so defective a stanza,
"so romantick a story," and a model, or framework for the whole, which
appears so monstrous when "examined by the rules of epick poetry"; makes
the hackneyed comparison between Spenser's work and Gothic architecture,
and apologizes for his author, on the ground that, at the time when he
wrote, "the remains of the old Gothick chivalry were not quite
abolished." "He did not much revive the curiosity of the public," says
Johnson, in his life of Hughes; "for near thirty years elapsed before his
edition was reprinted." Editions of the "Faërie Queene" came thick and
fast about the middle of the century. One (by Birch) was issued in 1751,
and three in 1758; including the important edition by Upton, who, of all
Spenser's commentators, has entered most elaborately into the
interpretation of the allegory.

In the interval had appeared, in gradually increasing numbers, that
series of Spenserian imitations which forms an interesting department of
eighteenth-century verse. The series was begun by a most unlikely
person, Matthew Prior, whose "Ode to the Queen," 1706, was in a ten-lined
modification of Spenser's stanza and employed a few archaisms like _weet_
and _ween_, but was very unspenserian in manner. As early as the second
decade of the century, the horns of Elfland may be heard faintly blowing
in the poems of the Rev. Samuel Croxall, the translator of Aesop's