Admitting the richness and fertility of Spenser’s fancy, I cannot find that he has depth, originality, or brilliancy of thought to compensate for a roughness, which is amazing by the side of Shakspeare’s exquisite versification, or to justify the high opinion expressed by Wordsworth. Compare Spenser’s Description of Lucifer’s Palace, commencing “A stately palace built of squared brick, “Which cunningly was without mortar laid” with Milton’s Pandemonium! Superadded to Spenser’s roughness, which the antique style affected by him in some degree palliates, are very frequent imperfect rhymes and slovenly repetitions of the same identical metrical sounds, as _plain_, _plane_, and _complain_, _see_ and _sea_, rhyming in the same stanza--liberties which now are utterly inadmissible. It is very true that the recurrence of four lines which rhyme together and of three lines which likewise rhyme with each other in each stanza makes the Spenserian stanza in a long poem extraordinarily difficult, without an occasional manifestation of these defects; but the exigencies of modern criticism, I think justly, require that the difficulty be overcome. And a portion, doubtless, of the superiority of modern English to modern French and Italian poetry arises from explosion of imperfect rhymes. If the poets of these days are degenerate in grasp of thought, they are at least superior to their predecessors and to their continental contemporaries in the mechanism of their art. Having said thus much of the stanza which I have chosen, I shall add that, rejecting classical conformity in all those matters wherein I conceive the advanced spirit of the age to demand modern treatment, I have availed myself largely of classical allusion, and to a certain extent of classical imagery, to impart interest to a subject which might otherwise smell too much of “villanous saltpetre,” and have in some cases adhered more closely to true classical nomenclature than has hitherto been the custom. I regard it as one of the advantages of the acuteness of modern scholarship to have cleared away much rubbish and removed many an excrescence. But the Grecian may unhappily descend into the Græculist, and by adopting too much spoil every thing. Thus I conceive no good effect to be produced by writing the name Pisistratus in a serious work “Peisistratus,” and I would not imitate in modern poetry Homer’s not at all ignobly meant comparison of Aias (Ajax) to an ass any more than I would adopt the word _hog_ as applied to Achilles: ὅγ’ ὣς εἰπὼν “he thus speaking”--“_Hog_ thus speaking” would be rather offensive to English ears. Neither would I write “Klutaimnestra” for Clytemnestra, “Loukas” for Luke, “Dabid” for David, or “Eua” for our first mother. In matters of taste, like these, above all things we must observe the _modus in rebus_. Quintilian, a master in all that relates to elegance of speech, explains very well that such things must be regulated by feeling. Speaking of the beauty