and softly closes the book in gentle weariness.  Even the best of his longer poems, while of exquisite workmanship and delightfully melodious, generally fail to hold the reader’s attention.  The movement is languid; there is little dramatic interest, and only a suggestion of humor.  The very melody of his verses sometimes grows monotonous, like a Strauss waltz too long continued.  We shall best appreciate Spenser by reading at first only a few well-chosen selections from the Faery Queen and the Shepherd’s Calendar, and a few of the minor poems which exemplify his wonderful melody.

COMPARISON BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER.  At the outset it is well to remember that, though Spenser regarded Chaucer as his master, two centuries intervene between them, and that their writings have almost nothing in common.  We shall appreciate this better by a brief comparison between our first two modern poets.

Chaucer was a combined poet and man of affairs, with the latter predominating.  Though dealing largely with ancient or mediaeval material, he has a curiously modern way of looking at life.  Indeed, he is our only author preceding Shakespeare with whom we feel thoroughly at home.  He threw aside the outgrown metrical romance, which was practically the only form of narrative in his day, invented the art of story-telling in verse, and brought it to a degree of perfection which has probably never since been equaled.  Though a student of the classics, he lived wholly in the present, studied the men and women of his own time, painted them as they were, but added always a touch of kindly humor or romance to make them more interesting.  So his mission appears to be simply to amuse himself and his readers.  His mastery of various and melodious verse was marvelous and has never been surpassed in our language; but the English of his day was changing rapidly, and in a very few years men were unable to appreciate his art, so that even to Spenser and Dryden, for example, he seemed deficient in metrical skill.  On this account his influence on our literature has been much less than we should expect from the quality of his work and from his position as one of the greatest of English poets.

Like Chaucer, Spenser was a busy man of affairs, but in him the poet and the scholar always predominates.  He writes as the idealist, describing men not as they are but as he thinks they should be; he has no humor, and his mission is not to amuse but to reform.  Like Chaucer he studies the classics and contemporary French and Italian writers; but instead of adapting his material to present-day conditions, he makes poetry, as in his Eclogues for instance, more artificial even than his foreign models.  Where Chaucer looks about him and describes life as he sees it, Spenser always looks backward for his inspiration; he lives dreamily in the past, in a realm of purely imaginary emotions and adventures.  His first quality is imagination, not observation, and he is the first