As Hephæstus, when he fashioned the arms of Achilles, melted bronze and gold and silver in his furnace, so Spenser combined the wealth of Greece and Italy, France, Rome, and England in the great crucible of his genius. In the "Epithalamium," for example, we find a translation of four lines from a sonnet of Ronsard, mingling with notes from Theocritus and the Song of Songs, with all the beautiful things of all the creeds. It would, perhaps, be unfair to call the style of Spenser, as it appears in the "Faery Queen," "Corinthian". Yet the metal in which he works is like that "Corinthian bronze" formed, at the conflagration of the city, from the molten gold and silver and copper of the sacred vessels and images of the gods. The spoils of all old poetry are mingled with his own. He has been called "the poets' poet"; his successors have taken from him his very tones. As has been said well, when Spenser writes-- Scarcely had Phœbus in the glowing East Yet harnessëd his fiery-footed team, that is Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of "Romeo and Juliet". And taking usury of time forepast Fit for such ladies and such lovely knights, that is Shakespeare again, the Shakespeare of the Sonnets. Many an Angel's voice Singing before the eternal Majesty For their triune triplicities on high: that is the younger voice of Milton. And ever and anon the rosy red Flasht thro' her face, one might fancy the unmistakable note and accent of Tennyson.[3] English poetry fell with the neglect of Spenser, who was buried and forgotten from the middle of the seventeenth century till Thomson revived his measures in the middle of the eighteenth, and English poetry came fully to her own again when the magic book of Spenser was opened by Keats. [1] A well-known diplomatist of Queen Elizabeth, Harry Killigrew, is said to have been "a Holbein in oils". [2] On this and on the more than mediaeval size of "The Faery Queen," see Mr. Mackail's "Springs of Helicon," pp. 132-28. [3] Mackail, "Springs of Helicon," pp. 90, 91. CHAPTER XIX. THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE AND PLAYWRIGHTS.