and so on, by dozens, by scores, by hundreds--delicate, mellifluous stanzas--fair ladies and brazen-scaled dragons, lions and fleecy lambs, sweet purling brooks and horrors of Pandemonium, story grafted upon story, and dreams grafted upon these, and still flowing on--canto after canto--until the worldlings are tempted to exclaim, “When will he stop?” It is an exclamation that a good many lesser men than Spenser have tempted--in class-rooms, in lecture-rooms, and in pulpits. And I am wicked enough to think that if a third had been shorn away by the poet from that over-full and over-epitheted poem of the _Faery Queen_, it would have reached farther, and come nearer to more minds and hearts. But who--save the master--shall ever put the shears into that dainty broidery where gorgeous flowers lie enmeshed in page-long tangles, and where wanton tendrils of words enlace and tie together whole platoons of verse? In brief, the Poem is a great, cumbrous, beautiful, bewildering, meandering Allegory, in which he assigns to every Virtue a Knight to be ensampler and defender of the same, and puts these Knights to battle with all the vices represented by elfin hags, or scaled dragons, or beautiful women; and so the battles rage and the storms beat. But we lose sight of his moral in the smoke of the conflict. The skeleton of his ethics is overlaid with the wallets of fair flesh, and with splendid trappings; his abounding figures gallop away with the logic; his roses cumber all his corn-ground. There are no passages of condensed meaning, or of wondrous intuition that give one pause, and that stick by us like a burr. There is a symphonious clatter of hammers upon golden-headed tacks, but no such pounding blow as drives a big nail home. All this is the criticism of a matter-of-fact man, who perhaps has no right of utterance--as if one without knowledge of music should criticise its cumulated triumphs. Many a man can enjoy a burst of balladry--of little vagrant songs--who is crushed and bored by the pretty tangles and symphonies of an opera. Spenser was poets’ poet--not people’s poet; hardly can be till people are steeped in that refinement, that poetic sensibility, which only poets are supposed to possess. And I am rather unpleasantly conscious that I may offend intense lovers of this great singer by such mention of him: painfully conscious, too, that it may have its source (as Saintsbury assures us must be the case) in a poetic inaptitude to give largest and adequate relish to the tender harmonies and the mythical reaches of his sweetly burdened song. But shall I not be honest? Yet Spenser is never ribald, never vulgar, rarely indelicate, even measured by modern standards: He always has a welcoming word for honesty, and for bravery, and, I think, the welcomest word of all for Love, which he counts, as so many young people do, the chiefest duty of man.