make him amusingly impatient of epical lengths, abrupt in his
transitions, and anxious, with an anxiety usually manifested by
readers rather than by writers, to come to the point, 'to the
great effect,' as he is wont to call it. 'Men,' he says, 'may
overlade a ship or barge, and therefore I will skip at once to
the effect, and let all the rest slip.' And he unconsciously
suggests a striking difference between himself and the great
Elizabethan epic poet who owes so much to him, when he declines
to make as long a tale of the chaff or of the straw as of the
corn, and to describe all the details of a marriage-feast
_seriatim_:

'The fruit of every tale is for to say:
They eat and drink, and dance and sing and play.'

This may be the fruit; but epic poets, from Homer downward, have
been generally in the habit of not neglecting the foliage.
Spenser in particular has that impartial copiousness which we
think it our duty to admire in the Ionic epos, but which, if
truth were told, has prevented generations of Englishmen from
acquiring an intimate personal acquaintance with the 'Fairy
Queen.' With Chaucer the danger certainly rather lay in the
opposite direction."

Now, if we are once interested in a story, small difficulties of
speech or spelling will not readily daunt us in the time-honored
pursuit of "what happens next"--certainly not if we know enough of our
author to feel sure he will come to the point and tell us what happens
next with the least possible palaver. We have a definite want and a
certainty of being satisfied promptly. But with Spenser this