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Elizabeth's reign. Here we meet with her again, under the name of Mercilla; we see her sending relief to Belge, or the Netherlands, and reducing the tyrannical power of Geryoneo, or Spain. Her court and attendants are drawn with a majesty suitable to her character. The reader will easily perceive that the Trial of the Queen of Scots is shadowed in Canto IX.; but the Poet has avoided the catastrophe of her death, and has artfully touched on the Queen's reluctance and tenderness in that affair, by which he has turned the compliment on her justice into another on her mercy.

Talus with his iron flail, who attends Artegall, is a bold allegorical figure, to signify the execution of justice.

The next Book, which is the Sixth, is on the subject of Courtesy. I shall not prolong this Discourse to trace out particular passages in it, but only mention that remarkable one in Canto X. where the Author has introduced himself under the person of Colin Clout. That vein o of pastoral, which runs through this part of the "Work, is indeed different from the rest of the Poem: but Tasso, in a more regular plan, has mingled the Pastoral taste with the Heroick, in his representation of Erminia among the shepherds. The picture, which Spenser has here given us of his mistress dancing among the Graces, is a very agreeable one, and discovers all

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the skill of the painter, assisted by the passion of the lover.

Though the remaining six Books, which were to have completed this beautiful and moral Poem, are lost, we have a noble fragment of them preserved in the Two Cantos of Mutability, This is, in my opinion, the most sublime and best invented allegory in the whole Work. The Fable of Arlo-Hill, and of the river Molanna, which is a digression on this occasion, has all the beauty we admire in the Metamorphoses of Ovid: but the pedigree of Mutability, who is represented as a giantess; her progress from the earth to the circle of the moon; the commotion she raises there, by endeavouring to remove that planet from the sky; and the shadow which is cast, during the attempt, on the inhabitants of the earth, are greatly imagined. We find several strains of invention in this Fable, which might appear not unworthy even of Homer himself. Jupiter is alarmed, and sends Mercury to know the reason of this strife, and to bring the offender before him. How Homer-like are those lines, after he has concluded his speech among the gods

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So having said, he ceast; and with his brow
(His black eye-brow, whose doomefull dreaded
beck

Is wont to wield the world unto his vow,

And even the highest powers of heaven to check,)
Made signe to them in their degrees to speake.

VOL. IX.

And afterwards;

With that he shooke

"His nectar-deawed locks, with which the skyes And all the world beneath for terror quooke, • And eft his burning levin-brond in hand he tooke.'

The simile, likewise, in which the gods are repre→ sented looking on Mutability with surprise,

Like a sort of steeres,

'Mongst whom some beast of strange and forraine

ráce

< Unwares is chaunc't, far straying from his peeres, &c.'

is very much in the simplicy of that old father of heroick poetry. Mutability appeals from Jupiter to Nature, before whom she obtains a hearing, The Poet on this occasion has, with a most abundant fancy, drawn out to a review the four Seasons, the Months, Day and Night, the Hours, Life and Death; Change asserts her dominion over them all, and over the heavens themselves: all creatures are represented looking up in the face of Nature, in expectation of the sentence. The conclusion is great, and contains a noble moral; that though all things are varied, and shift their forms, they do not perish, but retura' to their first beings; and that Mutability only shall be at last entirely destroyed, and the ține shall come in which Change shall be no more.

I have not yet said any thing concerning Spenser's Versification, in which, though he is not always equal to himself, it may be affirmed that he is superiour to all his contemporaries, and even to those that followed him for some time, except Fairfax, the applauded translator of Tasso. In this he commendably studied the Italians, and must be allowed to have been a great improver of our English numbers: before his time musick seems to have been so much a stranger to our poetry, that, excepting the Earl of Surry's Lyricks, we have very few examples of verses that had any tolerable cadence. In Chaucer there is so little of this, that many of his lines are not even restrained to a certain number of syllables. Instances of this loose verse are like wise to be found in our Author, but it is only in such places where he has purposely imitated Chaucer, as in the Second Eclogue, and some others. This great defect of harmony put the Wits in Queen Elizabeth's reign upon a design of totally changing our numbers, not only by banishing rhyme, but by new-moulding our language into the feet and measures of the Latin poetry. Sir Philip Sidney was at the head of this project, and has accordingly given us some Hexameter and Pentameter verses in his Arcadia : but the experiment soon failed; and though our Author, by some passages in his Letters to Mr. Harvey, seems not to have disapproved it, yet it

does not appear, by those poems of his which are preserved, that he gave it any authority by his example.

As to the Stanza in which the Faerie Queene is written, though the Author cannot be commended for his choice of it, yet it is much more harmonious in its kind than the heroick verse of that age: it is almost the same with what the Italians call their Ottave Rime, which is used both by Ariosto and Tasso, but improved by Spenser, with the addition of a line more in the close, of the length of our Alexandrines. The defect of it in long or narrative poems is apparent: the same measure, closed always by a full stop, in the same place, by which every stanza is made as it were a distinct paragraph, grows tiresome by continual repetition, and frequently breaks the sense, when it ought to be carried on without interruption. With this exception the reader will, however, find it harmonious, full of well-sounding epithets, and of such elegant turns on the thought and words, that Dryden* himself owns he learned these graces of verse chiefly from our Author, and does not scruple to say, that, in this particular, only Virgil surpassed him among the Romans, and only Mr. Waller among the English.'— HUGHES.

* Dedication to Juvenal. HUGHES.

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