What has been said is only in partial illustration of the plan and manner of Spenser’s great poem:  the student is invited and encouraged to make an analysis of the other portions himself.  To the careless reader the poem is harmonious, the pictures beautiful, and the imagery gorgeous; to the careful student it is equally charming, and also discloses historic pictures of great value.

It is so attractive that the critic lingers unconsciously upon it.  Spenser’s tributes to the character of woman are original, beautiful, and just, and the fame of his great work, originally popular and designed for a contemporary purpose only, has steadily increased.  Next to Milton, he is the most learned of the British poets.  Warton calls him the serious Spenser.  Thomson says he formed himself upon Spenser.  He took the ottava rima, or eight-lined stanza of the Italian poets, and by adding an Alexandrine line, formed it into what has since been called the Spenserian stanza, which has been imitated by many great poets since, and by Byron, the greatest of them, in his Childe Harold.  Of his language it has already been said that he designedly uses the archaic, or that of Chaucer; or, as Pope has said,

   Spenser himself affects the obsolete.

The plan of the poem, neglecting the unities of an epic, is like that of a general history, rambling and desultory, or like the transformations of a fairy tale, as it is:  his descriptions are gorgeous, his verse exceedingly melodious, and his management of it very graceful.  The Gerusalemme Liberata of Tasso appeared while he was writing the Faery Queene, and he imitated portions of that great epic in his own, but his imitations are finer than the original.

HIS OTHER WORKS.—­His other works need not detain us:  Hymns in honor of Love and Beauty, Prothalamion, and Epithalamion, Mother Hubbard’s Tale, Amoretti or Sonnets, The Tears of the Muses or Brittain’s Ida, are little read at the present day.  His Astrophel is a tender “pastoral elegie” upon the death of the most noble and valorous knight, Sir Philip Sidney; and is better known for its subject than for itself.  This was a favorite theme of the friendly and sensitive poet; he has also written several elegies and aeglogues in honor of Sidney.

SPENSER’S FATE.—­The fate of Spenser is a commentary upon courtiership, even in the reign of Elizabeth, the Faery Queene.  Her requital of his adoration was an annual pension of fifty pounds, and the ruined castle and unprofitable estate of Kilcolman in Ireland, among a half-savage population, in a period of insurrections and massacres, with the requirement that he should reside upon his grant.  An occasional visit from Raleigh, then a captain in the army, a rambler along the banks of the picturesque Mulla, and the composition and arrangement of the great poem with the suggestions of his friend, were at once his labors and his only recreations.  He sighed after the court, and considered himself as hardly used by the queen.