regular dissertation, in which he compares Ariosto with Homer." Warton
says again, of Ariosto and the Italian renaissance poets whom Spenser
followed, "I have found no fault in general with their use of magical
machinery; notwithstanding I have so far conformed to the reigning maxims
of modern criticism as to recommend classical propriety."
Notwithstanding this prudent determination to conform, the author takes
heart in his second volume to speak out as follows about the
pseudo-classic poetry of his own age: "A poetry succeeded in which
imagination gave way to correctness, sublimity of description to delicacy
of sentiment, and majestic imagery to conceit and epigram. Poets began
now to be more attentive to words than to things and objects. The nicer
beauties of happy expression were preferred to the daring strokes of
great conception. Satire, that bane of the sublime, was imported from
France. The muses were debauched at court; and polite life and familiar
manners became their only themes."

By the time these words were written Spenser had done his work. Color,
music, fragrance were stealing back again into English song, and
"golden-tongued romance with serene lute" stood at the door of the new
age, waiting for it to open.


[1] A small portion of "The Canterbury Tales." Edited by Morell.

[2] The sixteenth [_sic. Quaere_, seventeenth?] century had an instinctive
repugnance for the crude literature of the Middle Ages, the product of so
strange and incoherent a civilization. Here classicism finds nothing but
grossness and barbarism, never suspecting that it might contain germs,
which, with time and genius, might develop into a poetical growth,
doubtless less pure, but certainly more complex in its harmonies, and of