When Izaak Walton published ‘Thealma and Clearchus,’ a pastoral history written long since in smooth and easy verse by John Chalkhill, Esq., he described him in the Title page as “An Acquaintant and Friend of Edmund Spenser.” He says of him “that he was in his time a man generally known and as well beloved, for he was humble and obliging in his behaviour, a gentleman, a scholar, very innocent and prudent, and indeed his whole life was useful, quiet, and virtuous.” Yet to have been the friend of Edmund Spenser was considered by the biographer of Hooker and Donne and Bishop Sanderson and George Herbert, as an honourable designation for this good man, a testimonial of his worth to posterity, long after both Chalkhill and Spenser had been called to their reward. It was well that Mr. Murray gave up the project of a Family Faery Queen. Mr. Smedley when employed upon such a task ought to have felt that he was drawing upon himself something like Ham's malediction. With regard to another part of these projected emendations there is a fatal objection. There is no good reason why the capricious spelling of the early editions should be scrupulously and pedantically observed in Shakespeare, Milton, or any author of their respective times;—no reason why words which retain the same acceptation, and are still pronounced in the same manner should not now be spelt according to the received orthography. Spenser is the only author for whom an exception must be made from this obvious rule. Malone was wrong when he asserted that the language of the Faery Queen was that of the age in which Spenser lived; and Ben Jonson was not right when, saying that Spenser writ no language, he assigned as the cause for this, his ‘affecting the Ancients.’ The diction or rather dialect which Spenser constructed, was neither like that of his predecessors, nor of his contemporaries. Camoens also wrote a language of his own and thereby did for the Portugueze tongue the same service which was rendered to ours by the translators of the Bible. But the Portugueze Poet, who more than any other of his countrymen refined a language which was then in the process of refining, attempted to introduce nothing but what entirely accorded with its character, and with the spirit of that improvement which was gradually taking place: whereas both the innovations and renovations which Spenser introduced were against the grain. Yet such is the magic of his verse, that the Faery Queen if modernized, even though the structure of its stanza—(the best which has ever been constructed) were preserved, would lose as much as Homer loses in the best translation.