central years of the century.” When we are told that he was “the first Englishman who attempted to harmonize the beautiful with the true and the good,” we ask in amazement whether Mr. Gosse has ever inspected the _Hymns_ of Spenser and the writings of the Cambridge Platonists; and when he tells us that without a Shaftesbury there would hardly have been a Ruskin or a Pater, we would suggest to him that both Ruskin and Pater were perhaps not ignorant of the Platonic Dialogues. In the account given of Spenser, a poem is attributed to him which he never wrote. “In one of his early pieces, _The Oak and The Briar_, went far,” etc., the oak and the briar is simply an episode in the second eclogue of the _Shepherd’s Calendar_. Mr. Gosse, probably finding it quoted in some book of selections, has jumped to the conclusion that it is a separate poem. Of Mr. Gosse’s qualifications for dealing with Spenser, we have, by the way, an excellent example in the following remark: “Spenser, although he boasted of his classical acquirements, was singularly little affected by Greek or even Latin ideas.” Spenser’s _Hymns_ in honour of Love and in Honour of Beauty are simply saturated with Platonism, being indeed directly derived from the _Phædrus_ and the _Symposium_, numberless passages from which are interwoven with the poems. The whole scheme of the _Faerie Queene_ was suggested by, and based on, Aristotle’s _Ethics_ with elaborate particularity, Arthur, in his relation to the several knights, corresponding to the virtue μεγαλοψυχια in its relation to the other virtues. The conclusion of the tenth canto of the first book is simply an allegorical presentation of the relation of the βιος θεωρητικος to practical life. The “Castle of Medina” in the second book is a minutely technical exposition of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean, modified by the Platonic theory of morals: the three mothers being the λογιστικη, the επιθυμητικη, and θυμητικη, the three daughters, Elissa, Perissa, and Medina, being respectively the Aristotelian ελλειψις, the ὑπερβολη and the μεσοτης. In fact, the whole passage is simply an allegory of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean. The whole of the ninth canto of the second book is founded on the famous passage in the _Timæus_ describing the anatomy of man. In truth the poem teems with references to Plato and Aristotle, and with passages imitated from the Greek poets, as every scholar knows. And this is a poet “singularly little affected by Greek ideas!”