“Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage,
    In ancient tales amused a barbarous age;
    An age that, yet uncultivated and rude,
    Wher’er the poet’s fancy led, pursued,
    Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods,
    To dens of dragons and enchanted woods. 
    But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore,
    Can charm an understanding age no more. 
    The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
    While the dull moral lies too plain below,
    We view well pleased at distance all the sights
    Of arms and palfreys, battles, fields and fights,
    And damsels in distress and courteous knights,
    But when we look too near, the shades decay
    And all the pleasing landscape fades away.”

Addison acknowledged to Spence that, when he wrote this passage, he had never read Spenser!  As late as 1754 Thomas Warton speaks of him as “this admired but neglected poet,"[20] and Mr. Kitchin asserts that “between 1650 and 1750 there are but few notices of him, and a very few editions of his works."[21] There was a reprint of Spenser’s works—­being the third folio of the “Faerie Queene”—­in 1679, but no critical edition till 1715.  Meanwhile the title of a book issued in 1687 shows that Spenser did not escape that process of “improvement” which we have seen applied to Shakspere:  “Spenser Redivivus; containing the First Book of the ’Faery Queene.’  His Essential Design Preserved, but his Obsolete Language and Manner of Verse totally laid aside.  Delivered in Heroic Numbers by a Person of Quality.”  The preface praises Spenser, but declares that “his style seems no less unintelligible at this day than the obsoletest of our English or Saxon dialect.”  One instance of this deliverance into heroic numbers must suffice: 

“By this the northern wagoner had set
His sevenfold team behind the steadfast star
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firm is fixed, and sendeth light from far
To all that in the wide deep wandering are.”

          
                    —­Spenser.[22]

In 1715 John Hughes published his edition of Spenser’s works in six volumes.  This was the first attempt at a critical text of the poet, and was accompanied with a biography, a glossary, an essay on allegorical poetry, and some remarks on the “Faerie Queene.”  It is curious to find in the engravings, from designs by Du Guernier, which illustrate Hughes’ volumes, that Spenser’s knights wore the helmets and body armor of the Roman legionaries, over which is occasionally thrown something that looks very much like a toga.  The lists in which they run a tilt have the facade of a Greek temple for a background.  The house of Busyrane is Louis Quatorze architecture, and Amoret is chained to a renaissance column with Corinthian capital and classical draperies.  Hughes’ glossary of obsolete terms includes words which are in daily use by modern writers:  aghast, baleful, behest, bootless, carol, craven, dreary, forlorn, foray, guerdon, plight, welkin, yore.  If words like these, and like many which Warton annotates in his “Observations,” really needed explanation, it is a striking proof, not only of the degree in which our older poets had been forgotten, but also of the poverty to which the vocabulary of English poetry had been reduced by 1700.