For the few who possess the poetic faculty it has great beauties, but I observe, from the extracts that appear in Poetic Selections and the like, that the most tedious and even the most monstrous passages are those which are generally offered for admiration.  The case of Spenser in this respect—­which does not stand alone in ancient English literature—­has a curious parallel in art, where people are positively found to go into ecstasies over a distorted limb or a ludicrous inversion of perspective, simply because it is the work of an old master, who knew no better, or followed the fashion of his time.

Leigh Hunt read the ‘Faery Queen,’ by-the-bye, as almost everything else that has been written in the English tongue, and even Macaulay alludes with rare commendation to his ‘catholic taste.’  Of all authors indeed, and probably of all readers, Leigh Hunt had the keenest eye for merit and the warmest appreciation of it wherever found.  He was actively engaged in politics, yet was never blind to the genius of an adversary; blameless himself in morals, he could admire the wit of Wycherley; and a freethinker in religion, he could see both wisdom and beauty in the divines.  Moreover, it is immensely to his credit that this universal knowledge, instead of puffing him up, only moved him to impart it, and that next to the pleasure he took in books was that he derived from teaching others to take pleasure in them.  Witness his ’Wit and Humour’ and his ‘Imagination and Fancy,’ to my mind the greatest treasures in the way of handbooks that have ever been offered to students of English literature, and the completest antidotes to pretence in it.  How many a time, as a boy, have I pondered over this or that passage in the originals, from Shakespeare to Suckling, and then compared it with the italicised lines in his two volumes, to see whether I had hit upon the beauties; and how often, alas!  I hit upon the blots![2]

[2] I remember (when ‘I was but a little tiny boy’) I thought that ‘the fringed curtains of thine eye advance,’ addressed by Prospero to Miranda, must needs be a very fine line; imagine then my confusion, on referring for corroboration to my ’guide, philosopher, and friend,’ as he truly was, to find this passage:  ’Why Shakespeare should have condescended to the elaborate nothingness, not to say nonsense, of this metaphor (for what is meant by “advancing curtains"?) I cannot conceive.  That is to say, if he did condescend:  for it looks very like the interpolation of some pompous declamatory player.  Pope has put it into his Treatise on the Bathos.’

It is curious that Leigh Hunt, whose style has been so severely handled (and, it must be owned, not without some justice) for its affectations, should have been so genuine (although always generous) in his criticisms.  It was nothing to him whether an author was old or new; nor did he shrink from any literary comparison between two writers when he thought it appropriate