"High over hill and over dale he flies"--

the truth of human passion and the preternatural ending are equally
striking.--It is not fair to compare Spenser with Shakspeare, in point
of interest. A fairer comparison would be with Comus; and the result
would not be unfavourable to Spenser. There is only one work of the same
allegorical kind, which has more interest than Spenser (with scarcely
less imagination): and that is the Pilgrim's Progress. The three first
books of the Faery Queen are very superior to the three last. One would
think that Pope, who used to ask if any one had ever read the Faery
Queen through, had only dipped into these last. The only things in them
equal to the former, are the account of Talus, the Iron Man, and the
delightful episode of Pastorella.

The language of Spenser is full, and copious, to overflowing; it is
less pure and idiomatic than Chaucer's, and is enriched and adorned with
phrases borrowed from the different languages of Europe, both ancient
and modern. He was, probably, seduced into a certain license of
expression by the difficulty of filling up the moulds of his complicated
rhymed stanza from the limited resources of his native language. This
stanza, with alternate and repeatedly recurring rhymes, is borrowed from
the Italians. It was peculiarly fitted to their language, which abounds
in similar vowel terminations, and is as little adapted to ours, from
the stubborn, unaccommodating resistance which the consonant endings of
the northern languages make to this sort of endless sing-song.--Not
that I would, on that account, part with the stanza of Spenser. We are,
perhaps, indebted to this very necessity of finding out new forms of
expression, and to the occasional faults to which it led, for a poetical
language rich and varied and magnificent beyond all former, and almost
all later example. His versification is, at once, the most smooth and