and Beauty, Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty, are also stately and noble poems, but by reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned.  Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser’s genius.  He was a seer of visions, of images full, brilliant, and distinct; and not, like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into bodily shapes of ideas, typical and emblematic; the shadows which haunt the conscience and the mind.

* * * * *

1.  English Writers.  Henry Morley.  Cassell & Co., 1887. 4 vols.

2.  Skeat’s Specimens of English Literature, 1394-1579 (Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford.

3.  Morte Darthur.  London:  Macmillan & Co., 1868.  (Globe Edition.)

4.  English and Scottish Ballads.  Edited by Francis J. Child.  Boston:  Little, Brown & Co., 1859. 8 vols.

5.  Spenser’s Poetical Works.  Edited by Richard Morris.  London:  Macmillan & Co., 1877. (Globe Edition.)

6.  “A Royal Poet.”  In Washington Irving’s Sketch Book.  New York:  G.P.  Putnam’s Sons, 1864.

CHAPTER III.

THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE.

1564-1616.

The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calendar, in 1579, and closed with the printing of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, in 1671.  Within this period of little less than a century English thought passed through many changes, and there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature.  Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who was a boy of eight years at Shakspere’s death, lived long enough to witness the establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the persons of Dryden and his contemporaries.  But, roughly speaking, the dates above given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not improperly be called the Elizabethan.  In strictness the Elizabethan age ended with the queen’s death, in 1603.  But the poets of the succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked the diction of their forerunners; and “the spacious times of great Elizabeth” have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the Restoration (1660).  There is a certain likeness in the intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamp them all alike with the queen’s seal.

Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of the reigns succeeding hers.  The expression “Victorian poetry” has a rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in the literature of her time.  But in Elizabethan poetry the maiden queen is really the central figure.  She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser’s Gloriana, and even Shakspere, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in Henry VIII., and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the little allegory introduced into Midsummer Night’s Dream.