has humor too, but we seldom see him smile. There are, we may be
glad, few coarse lines in Spenser, but he is artificial. He took
the tone of his time--the tone of pretense. It was the fashion
to make-believe, yet, underneath all the make-believe, men were
still men, not wholly good nor wholly bad. But underneath the
brilliant trappings of Spenser's knights and ladies, shepherds
and shepherdesses, there seldom beats a human heart. He takes us
to dreamland, and when we lay down the book we wake up to real
life. Beauty first and last is what holds us in Spenser's poems-
-beauty of description, beauty of thought, beauty of sound. As
it has been said, "'A thing of beauty is a joy forever,' and that
is the secret of the enduring life of the Faery Queen."*

*Courthorpe, History of English Poetry.

Spenser invented for himself a new stanza of nine lines and made
it famous, so that we call it after him, the Spenserian Stanza.
It was like Chaucer's stanza of seven lines, called the Rhyme
Royal, with two lines more added.

Spenser admired Chaucer above all poets. He called him "The Well
of English undefiled,"* and after many hundred years we still
feel the truth of the description. He uses many of Chaucer's
words, which even then had grown old-fashioned and were little
used. So much is this so that a glossary written by a friend of
Spenser, in which old words were explained, was published with
the Shepherd's Calendar. But whether old or new, Spenser's power
of using words and of weaving them together was wonderful.

*Faery Queen, book VI, canto ii.