James Russell Lowell, Among my books

[148] If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of nightingales' tongues as the ‘Faery Queen,’ he is very much more to be pitied than Spenser. The sensitive purity of the poet might indeed well be wounded when a poem in which he proposed to himself ‘to discourse at large’ of ‘the ethick part of Moral Philosophy’¹ could be so misinterpreted. But Spenser speaks in the same strain and without any other than a general application in his ‘Tears of the Muses,’ and his friend Sidney undertakes the defence of poesy because it was undervalued. But undervalued by whom? By the only persons about whom he knew or cared anything, those whom we should now call Society and who were then called the Court. The inference I would draw is that, among the causes which contributed to the marvellous efflorescence of genius in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the influence of direct patronage from above is to be reckoned at almost nothing.² Then, as when the same phenomenon has happened elsewhere, there must have been a sympathetic public. Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of