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fallacies exposed two centuries in advance.
Spenser was a conscious Englishman to his inmost fibre, and did not lack the sound judgment in politics which belongs to his race.
He was the more
English for living in
Ireland, and there is something that moves us deeply in the exile's passionate cry:—
Dear Country!
O how dearly dear
Ought thy remembrance and perpetual band
Be to thy foster—child that from thy hand
Did common breath and nouriture receive!
How brutish is it not to understand
How much to her we owe that all us gave,
That gave unto us all whatever good we have!
His race shows itself also where he tells us that
chiefly skill to ride seems a science
Proper to gentle blood,
which reminds one of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's saying that the finest sight God looked down on was a fine man on a fine horse.
Wordsworth, in the supplement to his preface, tells us that the ‘Faery
Queen’ ‘faded before’
Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas.
But
Wordsworth held a brief for himself in this case, and is no exception to the proverb about men who are their own attorneys.
His statement is wholly unfounded.
Both poems, no doubt, so far as popularity is concerned, yielded to the graver interests of the
Civil War. But there is an appreciation much weightier than any that is implied in mere popularity, and the vitality of a poem is to be measured by the kind as well as the amount of influence it exerts.
Spenser has
coached more poets and more eminent ones than any other writer of English verse.
I need say nothing of
Milton, nor of professed disciples like
Browne, the two Fletchers, and More.
Cowley tells us that he became ‘irrecoverably a poet’ by reading the ‘Faery
Queen’ when a boy.
Dryden, whose case is particularly
