Spenser, whose best work is the Faerie Queen, though he wrote so near the time of Shakspere, seems decidedly more antiquated; yet, as compared with Chaucer, he is easy reading. The Faerie Queen is one long series of beautiful and sensuous images, a mingling of fair women, brave knights, and ugly dragons which in his hands attain a dreamy charm. Says Taine, “He was pre-eminently a creator and a dreamer, and that most naturally, instinctively, and unceasingly. We might go on forever describing this inward condition of all great artists.... A character appears to them, then an action, then a landscape, then a succession of actions, characters, landscapes, producing, completing, arranging themselves before our eyes. This fount of living and changing forms is inexhaustible in Spenser. He has but to close his eyes and apparitions arise; they abound in him, crowd, overflow; in vain he pours them forth; they continually float up, more copious and more dense.” And we may add that the language in which he describes these dreams is as musical as the fancy of his imagery is rich. If one likes that sort of thing one can soon learn to read Spenser with ease and enjoyment, and in the whole range of English literature we shall find nothing so sensuously sweet as his poetry, in his own musical “Spenserian” stanza. As we have said, for the ordinary reader English literature begins with Shakspere. He was the central figure of the brilliant era of Queen Elizabeth; but none of his fellow dramatists, not even “rare Ben Jonson” or Marlowe, are read today. For us they are dead, and Shakspere alone remains as the representative of the “Golden Age,” though perhaps we must include in it Bacon and Milton, writers who stand somewhat apart. ROBINSON CRUSOE--1719.