are apt to try every composition by those laws which we have been taught
to think the sole criterion of excellence. Critical taste is universally
diffused, and we require the same order and design which every modern
performance is expected to have, in poems where they never were regarded
or intended. . . If there be any poem whose graces please because they
are situated beyond the reach of art[37] . . . it is this. In reading
Spenser, if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported."
"In analyzing the plan and conduct of this poem, I have so far tried it
by epic rules, as to demonstrate the inconveniences and incongruities
which the poet might have avoided, had he been more studious of design
and uniformity. It is true that his romantic materials claim great
liberties; but no materials exclude order and perspicacity." Warton
assures the reader that Spenser's language is not "so difficult and
obsolete as it is generally supposed to be;" and defends him against
Hume's censure,[38] that "Homer copied true natural manners . . . but the
pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations and
conceits and fopperies of chivalry."

Yet he began his commentary with the stock denunciations of "Gothic
ignorance and barbarity." "At the renaissance it might have been
expected that, instead of the romantic manner of poetical
composition . . . a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have
succeeded. . . But it was a long time before such a change was effected.
We find Ariosto, many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth
for magic, and preferring the ridiculous and incoherent excursions of
Boiardo to the propriety and uniformity of the Grecian and Roman models.
Nor did the restoration of ancient learning produce any effectual or
immediate improvement in the state of criticism. Beni, one of the most
celebrated critics of the sixteenth century, was still so infatuated with
a fondness for the old Provençal vein, that he ventured to write a