courting a languorous enjoyment of flavors rather than the satisfaction of a keen appetite.  There are in this book some passages in which the thought is so attenuated in the process of elaboration and figurative adornment that we are tempted to regard the whole as a mere effort of fancy, not as the expression of a serious conviction.  It might have been appropriate and suggestive to characterize the poetry of Spenser by some allusions to the splendors and bizarreries of Venetian art; but when it is asserted as a proposition logically formulated and supported that “he makes one think always of Venice; for not only is his style Venetian, but as the gallery there is housed in the shell of an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory; and again, as at Venice you swim in a gondola from Gian Bellini to Titian, and from Titian to Tintoret, so in him, where other cheer is wanting, the gentle sway of his measure, like the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats you lullingly along from picture to picture,”—­we are rather reminded of Venetian filigree than struck by the force and truth of the analogy.  The statement that Spenser’s style is Venetian is a puzzling one, and we are not much helped by the explanation given in a foot note, where Mr. Lowell, citing from the Muiopotmos a description of the rape of Europa, asks, “Was not this picture painted by Paul Veronese, for example?” and then adds, “Spenser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the ’Commonwealth and Government of Venice’ (1599) with this beautiful verse,

  Fair Venice, flower of the last world’s delight.

Perhaps we should read ‘lost.’”

We fail to get any light from these quotations, and we should be glad to have been spared the doubt as to Mr. Lowell’s accuracy and authority as a verbal critic suggested by his off-hand emendation of a phrase which he has remembered for its alliterative sweetness while he has missed its sense and forgotten the context.  In the line “Fayre Venice,” etc., which occurs not at the beginning, but near the end, of the sonnet, “lost” would be so contradictory to the sense that any editor who had found the word thus printed and had failed to substitute “last” would have betrayed inexcusable negligence.  Spenser, writing while Venice, though declined from the height of her greatness, was still flourishing as well as fair, considers her as the marvel of his own age—­the “last,” i.e., latest, world—­as Babylon and Rome, with which he compares her, had been the marvels of antiquity, of worlds that were indeed lost.[6] Slips of this kind are probably rare, but a prevailing tendency to put forward loose or fanciful conjectures as ex-cathedra rulings detracts from the pleasure and instruction to be derived from these essays.

[Footnote 6:  Here is the sonnet, that the reader may judge for himself: