English poets.  The tradition of his supremacy lasted certainly to the middle of the seventeenth century, if not beyond.  His influence is visible not only in the work of professed disciples like Giles and Phineas Fletcher, the pastoral poet William Browne, and Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, but in the verse of Jonson, Fletcher, Milton, and many others.  Milton confessed to Dryden that Spenser was his “poetical father.”  Dryden himself and Cowley, whose practice is so remote from Spenser’s, acknowledged their debt to him.  The passage from Cowley’s essay “On Myself” is familiar:  “I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother’s parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never read any book but of devotion—­but there was wont to lie) Spenser’s works.  This I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights and giants and monsters and brave houses which I found everywhere there (thought my understanding had little to do with all this), and, by degrees, with the tinkling of the rime and dance of the numbers; so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as irremediably as a child is made an eunuch.”  It is a commonplace that Spenser has made more poets than any other one writer.  Even Pope, whose empire he came back from Fairyland to overthrow, assured Spence that he had read the “Faerie Queene” with delight when he was a boy, and re-read it with equal pleasure in his last years.  Indeed, it is too readily assumed that writers are insensible to the beauties of an opposite school.  Pope was quite incapable of appreciating it.  He took a great liking to Allan Ramsay’s “Gentle Shepherd”; he admired “The Seasons,” and did Thomson the honor to insert a few lines of his own in “Summer.”  Among his youthful parodies of old English poets is one piece entitled “The Alley,” a not over clever burlesque of the famous description of the Bower of Bliss.[18]

As for Dryden, his reverence for Spenser is qualified by the same sort of critical disapprobation which we noticed in his eulogies of Shakspere.  He says that the “Faerie Queene” has no uniformity:  the language is not so obsolete as is commonly supposed, and is intelligible after some practice; but the choice of stanza is unfortunate, though in spite of it, Spenser’s verse is more melodious than any other English poet’s except Mr. Waller’s.[19] Ambrose Philips—­Namby Pamby Philips—­whom Thackeray calls “a dreary idyllic cockney,” appealed to “The Shepherd’s Calendar” as his model, in the introduction to his insipid “Pastorals,” 1709.  Steele, in No. 540 of the Spectator (November 19, 1712), printed some mildly commendatory remarks about Spenser.  Altogether it is clear that Spenser’s greatness was accepted, rather upon trust, throughout the classical period, but that this belief was coupled with a general indifference to his writings.  Addison’s lines in his “Epistle to Sacheverel; an Account of the Greatest English Poets,” 1694, probably represent accurately enough the opinion of the majority of readers: