Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/578

 574 Draper and, as one of the chief makers of English poetic diction, Spenser has become famous for his "pure wells of English undented." Some of his words passed in his own day into current speech perhaps they would have done so even without his use but the larger number of those that have found their way into the speech at all, have come in through the poetry of Keats, the Pre- Raphaelites and their fellows; and the glosses to The Shep- heardes Calender must be considered as a key, perhaps not to Spenser's early biography, but at least to the well-spring of nineteenth century poetic diction must be considered the instrument which rescued many quaint and suggestive phrases from Middle English and from dialect, and gave them a local habitation and a name in modern literary English. JOHN W. DRAPER. Harvard University.