CIBBER, C., The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland. London, 1753. Dictionary of National Biography, London, 1885 ff. Graduati Cantab. 1659-1823. Cambridge, 1823. HENLEY, JOHN, Light in a Candlestick. London, 1730. JACOB, G., An Historical Account of the Lives and Writings of NICHOLLS, J., Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century. 6 vol. SOUTHEY, R., Specimens of the later English Poets, with preliminary notices. 3 vols. London, 1817. 'Assuredly it was not thus that a great Englishman of a later age thought of Spenser. When Milton entered upon his manhood, he entered upon a warfare; the peaceful days, days of happy ingathering of varied culture, days of sweet repose amid rural beauty, were past and gone; and he stood with loins girt, prepared for battle in behalf of liberty. And then, in London, when London was a vast arsenal in which weapons were forging for the defence of truth and freedom, Milton in his moment of highest and most masculine ardour, as he wrote his speech on behalf of unlicensed printing, thought of Spenser. It was not as a dreamer that Milton thought of him. Spenser had been a power with himself in youth, when he, "the lady of his college", but such a lady as we read of in "Comus", grew in virginal beauty and virginal strength. He had listened to Spenser's “sage and solemn tunes", "Of turneys and of trophies hung; Where more is meant than meets the ear". And now, in his manhood, when all of life had grown for him so grave, so glorious with heroic effort, Milton looks back and remembers his master, and he remembers him not as an idle singer, not as a dreamer of dreams, but as "our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare to name a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas". EDWARD DOWDEN in "Spenser, the Poet and Teacher". CHAPTER VII AUGUSTAN SPENSERIANS The first to give a list of eighteenth century Spenserian imitations was the Rev. Henry John Todd in his magnificent edition of Spenser in eight Volumes 1). It was published in 1805, was with "gracious permission" dedicated to the king and was reviewed by Sir Walter Scott in the Edinburgh Review (1805). Todd gives a list of thirty-eight Spenserian imitations by twenty-eight poets and seven anonymous writers. Of these, thirty-one poems by twenty-one known authors and seven anonymous writers were published in the eighteenth century. Todd includes the pastoral imitations, though it is very doubtful whether some of these are really imitations of Spenser. Examination of the poems shows that twenty are in the regular nine-line Spenserian stanza. In 1893 W. L. Phelps gave a list of eighteenth century Spenserian imitations. This list mentions the poems published from 1700 to 1775. An examination of the list shows it contains fifty-one poems by thirty-seven known poets and three anonymous writers. Phelps makes no distinction between poems written in regular Spenserian stanzas and those consisting of stanzas in the more or less modified forms so common in the century. A distinction between the 1) The works of Edmund Spenser in 8 vols. With the principal illustrations of various commentators. To which are added Notes, etc. by the Rev. Henry John Todd, London 1805. Vol. I,CI, CXXXII. 2) W. L. Phelps Boston, 1893. The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, Portrait of Spenser from "The Works of Spenser in Six Volumes. With a Glossary Explining the Old and Obscure Words. To which is prefix'd the Life of the Author, and an Essay on Allegorical Poetry, By Mr. Hughes." London, 1715, 1750. 90 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SPENSERIANS poems in the regular nine-line Spenserian stanza and other forms is, however, inevitable, since only the former were all truly Spenserian in stanza and diction and they alone exercised a lasting influence on nineteenth century poetry. Reference to the poems reveals that twenty-three poems are in the regular stanza, the rest being mostly in the tenline variation introduced by Prior 1) or in a variation of six, seven, eight or nine lines. Reuning 2) uses Phelps's list, remarking (p.1): "Die vollständigste Liste der Spensernachahmungen bietet uns Phelps, und diese wurde unseren Arbeit zu grunde gelegt". Reuning frequently does not state whether a poem is in the regular stanza or not, and, though he is mainly interested in Spenserian archaisms, he does not draw attention to the which fact that, whilst among the six-line variations can sometimes hardly be called Spenserian - there are few with any archaisms, the poems in the genuine stanza contain, without a single exception, an admixture of conscious archaisms. Morton 3) states that he has found fifty-seven Spenserian poems by thirty-eight poets and eight anonymous writers in the eighteenth century. Unfortunately Morton does not publish his list. In the course of his article he mentions nineteen poems in the regular Spenserian stanza by name. The list of eighteenth century poems in the genuine nineline Spenserian stanza (see Appendix III) has been compiled by examining the complete works of over a hundred eighteenth century poets as well as all the best-known "Collections" and "Miscellanies". As these works may safely be said to represent the bulk of eighteenth century poetry up 1) Matthew Prior - An Ode Humbly Inscribed of Her Majesty's Arms, 1706. Written in imitation of Spenser's style. 2) Karl Reuning — Das Altertümliche im Wortschatz der Spenser Nachahmungen des 18. Jahrhunderts. Quellen und Forschungen, 116. Strassburg, 1912. 3) E. P. Morton, The Spenserian stanza in the eighteenth century (Modern Philology X 365, January 1913). |