noble courtiers who worshipped the Muse favoured by the queen and court, thoug most part utterly forgotten-but the of literature flowed in a direction contra impulses. His ideal of a refined and noble ing virtue by processes of delight, was pe rapid growth of a coarse popular literat both in substance and form, often c flourished chiefly on the public stage. years had elapsed since Sidney deplored dition of the drama. Much had been ad the time, but to Spenser this progress o tend towards barbarism. To us the deca be full of life and high hopes, for Shal decessors were then at work, and pr Shakespeare himself.

Yet, when Spenser reviews the sta literature in his Tears of the Muses, publ nothing finds grace in his eyes. Every forth with her private tale of grief It is true that their chief grievance i

encouragement and patronage from the great. But the consequence of it is the desecration of all culture. Euterpe deplores the decay of the pastorals to which Spenser had devoted his earliest efforts:

Our pleasant groves, which planted were with pains,
That with our music wont so oft to ring,

And arbours sweet, in which the Shepherds swains
Were wont so oft their Pastorals to sing,

They have cut down, and all their pleasance marred,
That now no Pastoral is to be hard.

Terpsichore and Erato complain that the pictures of pure Platonic love have given place to mere debauchery: the so-called poets of the day can only sing of lust:

Fair ladies' love they spot with thoughts impure . . . "their dunghill thoughts" dare not aspire to perfection. The very style of poetry has lost its purity. It is now mere bombast (so says Polyhymnia):

For the sweet numbers and melodious measures
With which I wont the wingèd words to tie,
And make a tuneful Diapase of pleasures,
Now being let to run at liberty

By those which have no skill to rule them right,
Have now quite lost their natural delight.

Heaps of huge words uphoarded hideously,
With horrid sound though having little sense,
They think to be chief praise of Poetry. . . .

But Spenser's chief attacks are directed against playwrights. Melpomene, the Tragic Muse, and Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, are equally pessimistic. Learning and decency have been banished from the stage. Thalia mourns over her state: has not she been made seryant of the many"? The dainty comic wit is gone:

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I

wit in Love's Labour's Lost, as far as h plays, only provoked his indignation or

Clearly, Spenser felt no sympathy with rising era. Towards 1591 English litera entering upon its glorious career, though was still concealed under a mountain of fa visible to sympathetic eyes. Generally sp an age impatient of restraints, free from tradition, boisterous and tumultuous, promise for the future. It was the age of a and conceits, now subtle, now coarse, a forms of expression. But Spenser's mar tained and simple-his only mannerism v archaisms, and this helped to make him ap Strange to say, the work of his friend S Sonnets and Arcadia, long kept secret, w published posthumously) found a readier own verse. For all the chivalry of his A had resolutely entered into modern avenue His bold metaphoric style, the strange c Arcadia, were the admired models of a ge

with the relatively mechanical affectation of euphuism. From the first Sidney had disapproved of Spenser's fondness for archaisms. In the years that followed, that same archaic style of his was to make Spenser's poetry seem still more remote from use, and Ben Jonson only expressed the prevalent impression of the early seventeenth century when he censured Spenser as one "who writ no language."

Now, we have already said that the archaic style was \ by no means an accident in Spenser's case. It testifies to his love and knowledge of the past, to the way his imagination was haunted by the Middle Ages. It is only the most visible mark of an influence at work in all his poetry-an influence which not only colours his language and style, but affects the structure of almost all his poems. His relish for allegory is only equalled by his love of the old Arthurian romances. And while his vocabulary does not take us back further than Chaucer, the general form of his poems may be traced to earlier authors yet. The realistic painter of the Canterbury pilgrims was indeed far too modern for Spenser. His real models were the Romaunt of the Rose and the old epics of chivalry.

Save in a few cases which we shall examine later on, Spenser was opposed to the modern practice of expressing thoughts and feelings directly. He seems to have felt that in poetry all thought and emotion should be presented under some veil or other-be it pastoral, mythology, fable, allegory or symbol. And if we except the pastoral, which was in the main a creation or recreation of the Renaissance, Spenser borrowed the other