But in the main, and much more than the poet with whom his name is generally coupled, it is perhaps not too much to say that Gray was content to handle the device in the same manner as the uninspired imitators of the “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Not that he was unaware of the danger of such a tendency in himself and others. “I had rather,” he wrote to Mason[226] when criticizing the latter’s “Caractacus,” “some of the personages—‘Resignation,’ ‘Peace,’ ‘Revenge,’ ‘Slaughter,’ ‘Ambition’—were stripped of their allegorical garb. A little simplicity here and there in the expression would better prepare the high and fantastic harpings that follow.” In the light of this most salutary remark, Gray’s own procedure is only the more astonishing. His innumerable personifications may not have been regarded by Johnson as contributory to “the kind of cumbrous splendour” he wished away from the odes, but the fact that they are scarce in the “Elegy” is not without significance. The romantic feeling which asserts itself clearly in the odes, the new imaginative conceptions which these stock figures were called upon to convey, the perfection of the workmanship—these qualities were more than sufficient to counterweigh Gray’s licence of indulgence in a mere rhetorical device. Yet Coleridge was right in calling attention to this defect of Gray’s style, especially as his censure is no mere diatribe against the use of personified abstraction: it is firmly and justly based on the undeniable fact that Gray’s personifications are for the most part cold and lifeless, that they are mere verbal abstractions, utterly devoid of the redeeming vitality, which Collins gives to his figures.[227] It is for this reason perhaps that his poetry in the mass has never been really popular, and that the average reader, with his impatience of abstractions, has been content, with Dr. Johnson, to pronounce boldly for “The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Before proceeding to examine the works of the other great poets who announce or exemplify the Romantic revival, it will be convenient at this point to look at some of the Spenserian imitations, which helped to inspire and vitalize the revival. Spenser was the poet of mediaeval allegory. In the “Faerie Queene,” for the first time a real poet, endowed with the highest powers of imagination and expression, was able to present the old traditional abstractions wonderfully decked up in a new and captivating guise. The personages that move like dream figures through the cantos of the poem are thus no mere personified abstractions: they are rather pictorial emblems, many of which are limned for us with such grandeur of conception and beauty of execution as to secure for the allegorical picture a “willing suspension of disbelief,” whilst the essentially romantic atmosphere more than atones for the cumbrous and obsolete machinery adopted by Spenser to inculcate the lessons of “virtuous and gentle discipline.”