Spenser uses it not unfrequently "Perdie, Sir Knight," said then the enchanter b'live, "That shall I shortly purchase to your bond.

To blin is to cease, and in this sense it is met with in Spenser and other poets.

" Spenser's "Faerie Queene," b. vi. c. x.

The introduction of Malbecco and Paridell into it, from Spenser's "Faerie Queene," may be some guide as to the period when the comedy was first produced.

" Spenser uses the word, "Faerie Queene," b. i. c. iv.

[Old copy and former edits., Dunston's.] See the story of Malbecco in Spenser's "Faerie Queene," b. iii.

It is used by Skelton, and sometimes by Spenser.

In the "Monk's Tale" there is a melodious measure which may have furnished the model for Spenser's famous stanza.

A long stride carries us to the latter years of Queen Elizabeth, where, and in the ensuing reign of James, we find the names of Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and Michael Drayton interwoven with the bays.

Spenser's possession of the laurel rests upon no better evidence than that, when he presented the earlier books of the "Faery Queen" to Elizabeth, a pension of fifty pounds a year was conferred upon him, and that the praises of Gloriana ring through his realm of Faëry in unceasing panegyric.

Southey, pardonably anxious to magnify an office belittled by some of its occupants, does not scruple to rank Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton among the Laurelled: "That wreath, which, in Eliza's golden days, My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore, That which rewarded Drayton's learned lays, Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel bore," etc.

Southey, pardonably anxious to magnify an office belittled by some of its occupants, does not scruple to rank Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton among the Laurelled: "That wreath, which, in Eliza's golden days, My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore, That which rewarded Drayton's learned lays, Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel bore," etc.

But in sober prose Southey knew, and later in life taught, that not one of the three named ever wore the authentic laurel.[10] That Drayton deserved it, even as a successor of the divinest Spenser, who shall deny?

Footnote 1: SPENSER: Faery Queen.

He drew his first inspiration from Grecian mythology and the romantic world of Spenser, not from the French Revolution or the social unrest of his own day.

Spenser has imitated this sublime piece of pleasantry; for, by a curious intermixture of all which the mind can experience from such a fiction, pleasant it is in the midst of its sublimity,laughable with satirical archness, as well as grand and terrible in the climax.

The transformation in Spenser is from a jealous man into Jealousy.

" Spenser's picture is more subtly wrought and imaginative than Ariosto's; but it removes the man farther from ourselves, except under very special circumstances.

Homer's poem is that of action; Dante's, of passion; Virgil's, of judgment; Milton's, of religion; Spenser's, of poetry itself; Ariosto's, of animal spirits (I do not mean as respects gaiety only, but in strength and readiness of accord with the whole play of nature); Tasso looked round with an ultra-sensitive temperament, and an ambition which required encouragement, and his poem is that of tenderness.

The French have forgiven the author his conceits for the sake of his gallantry: he is the poet of the gondoliers; and Spenser, the most luxurious of his brethren, plundered his bowers of bliss.

It gives him the honour of having been the first to suggest the picturesque principle of modern gardening; as I ought to have remembered, when assigning it to Spenser in a late publication (Imagination and Fancy, p. 109).

I should have noticed also, in the same work, the obligations of Spenser to the Italian poet for the passage before quoted about the nymph in the water.]

Honorabilis admodum THOMAS HANMER, Baronnettus, Augustus still survives in Maro's strain, And Spenser's verse prolongs Eliza's reign; Great George's acts let tuneful Gibber sing; For nature formed the poet for the king.

[a] These lines are a translation of part of a song in the Complete Angler of Isaac Walton, written by John Chalkhill, a friend of Spenser, and a good poet in his time.

Where is deeper philosophic thought, true or false, expressed in verse, than in Dante, or in Spenser's two cantos of "Mutabilities"?