Page:Works of Edmund Spenser - 1857.djvu/29

Rh W. Peters, Esqrs., were also published in 1596. In the first are some spirited lines in honour of beauty; and the latter contains much poetical imagery, melodiously expressed.

Having thus cursorily enumerated the chief of what are generally called Spenser’s Minor Poems, we may here hazard a few words as to their general merit in relation to “The Faerie Queene.” Though possessed in the highest degree of poetical feelings and imagination, Spenser was evidently of an indolent turn of mind, and required a strong excitement to exhibit his intellect in all its force. In the production of these stray pieces, these waifs,—if they may be so denominated, no such inducement was offered. Enamoured of its “dark conceit,” he seems to have placed his whole hopes of fame on his Faerie Queene, and to have considered the labour bestowed on any other production, as so much stolen from his great work; and this may perhaps account for the vast abyss which in general separates it from the offspring of his less disciplined muse. But though thus dissenting from the judgment of those who assert that he has no faults, we reverentially concur in the dictum of Warton, that, “in reading Spenser, if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported.” Perhaps the most vigorous of the pieces now under consideration are the fables of “The Oake and the Brier,” and “The Kidde and the Foxe,” in “The Shepheard’s Calendar,” and “Mother Hubberds Tale,” “Muiopotmos,” and the “Epithalamion.”

During this period Spenser had not, notwithstanding the fecundity of his muse, neglected the Faerie Queene; and accordingly in 1596 appeared a new edition of the first three books, with the addition of a second part, containing the fourth, fifth, and sixth. These, with two imperfect cantos of “Mutabilitie,” first published in the folio of 1609, as a recovered portion of the lost “Legend of Constancie,” comprise all that now remains of “the XII. books fashioning the XII. morall vertues.” The opinions of his biographers have been at variance, as to whether the poem was ever finished, or whether it was purposely left in its present incomplete state. With these opinions, the arguments in support of which must almost all originate in conjecture, we will refrain from meddling; and while we admire the ingenious statements of Sir James Ware, Birch, and Farmer, and the no less sagacious retorts of their learned adversaries, Fenton, Dryden, and Todd, without staying to investigate their abstruse theories, we will proceed to the far more pleasing occupation of considering what remains of this immortal work.

There is no despot so absolute as fashion; and, in the days of Elizabeth, the fashion, whether in literature or manners, was derived from Italy, as now from France; and the glowing tales of knight-errantry and magic, which Ariosto had given to the world, had strongly imbued our ancestors with a taste for the chivalric and marvellous. To this passion we are certainly indebted for the structure of the Faerie Queene; and though Spenser has far outstripped the Italian in richness of imagery and fertility of conception, the plot of his poem, although inferior to the Orlando, from its want of uniformity, is evidently borrowed from Ariosto. In no other respect, however, can the two be considered as rivals: in delineation of character and lavish minuteness of description, our countryman stands alone. His creations partake not of the undisciplined and libertine genius of Ariosto: though perhaps too evanescent and shadow-like to retain a lasting hold on the attention,