ugliness. This is the moral secret of _The Faery Queen_, in which
virtues are personified as noble knights or winsome women, while the vices
appear in the repulsive guise of hags, monsters and "loathy beasts."

[Sidenote: SENSE OF BEAUTY]

Spenser's sense of ideal beauty or, as Lanier expressed it, "the beauty of
holiness and the holiness of beauty," is perhaps his greatest poetic
quality. He is the poet-painter of the Renaissance; he fills his pages with
descriptions of airy loveliness, as Italian artists covered the high
ceilings of Venice with the reflected splendor of earth and heaven.
Moreover, his sense of beauty found expression in such harmonious lines
that one critic describes him as having set beautiful figures moving to
exquisite music.

In consequence of this beauty and melody, Spenser has been the inspiration
of nearly all later English singers. Milton was one of the first to call
him master, and then in a long succession such diverse poets as Dryden,
Burns, Wordsworth, Scott, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Tennyson and Swinburne.
The poet of "Faery" has influenced all these and more so deeply that he has
won the distinctive title of "the poets' poet."

* * * * *

THE DRAMATISTS

"Few events in our literary history are so startling as this sudden rise of
the Elizabethan drama," says Green in his _History of the English
People_, and his judgment is echoed by other writers who speak of the
"marvelous efflorescence" of the English drama as a matter beyond