Thompson’s experiments, on the contrary, were quite serious.  He had genuine poetic feeling, but little talent.  In trying to reproduce Spenser’s richness of imagery and the soft modulation of his verse, he succeeds only in becoming tediously ornate.  His stanzas are nerveless, though not unmusical.  His college exercise, “The Nativity,” 1736, is a Christmas vision which comes to the shepherd boy Thomalin, as he is piping on the banks of Isis.  It employs the pastoral machinery, includes a masque of virtues,—­Faith, Hope, Mercy, etc.,—­and closes with a compliment to Pope’s “Messiah.”  The preface to his “Hymn to May,” has some bearing upon our inquiries:  “As Spenser is the most descriptive and florid of all our English writers, I attempted to imitate his manner in the following vernal poem.  I have been very sparing of the antiquated words which are too frequent in most of the imitations of this author. . .  His lines are most musically sweet, and his descriptions most delicately abundant, even to a wantonness of painting, but still it is the music and painting of nature.  We find no ambitious ornaments or epigrammatical turns in his writings, but a beautiful simplicity which pleases far above the glitter of pointed wit.”  The “Hymn to May” is in the seven-lined stanza of Phineas Fletcher’s “Purple Island”; a poem, says Thompson, “scarce heard of in this age, yet the best in the allegorical way (next to ‘The Fairy Queen’) in the English language.”

William Wilkie, a Scotch minister and professor, of eccentric habits and untidy appearance, published, in 1759, “A Dream:  in the Manner of Spenser,” which may be mentioned here not for its own sake, but for the evidence that it affords of a growing impatience of classical restraints.  The piece was a pendant to Wilkie’s epic, the “Epigoniad.”  Walking by the Tweed, the poet falls asleep and has a vision of Homer, who reproaches him with the bareness of style in his “Epigoniad.”  The dreamer puts the blame upon the critics,

    “Who tie the muses to such rigid laws
    That all their songs are frivolous and poor.”

Shakspere, indeed,

    “Broke all the cobweb limits fixed by fools”;

but the only reward of his boldness

    “Is that our dull, degenerate age of lead
    Says that he wrote by chance, and that he scare could read.”

One of the earlier Spenserians was Gilbert West, the translator of Pindar, who published, in 1739, “On the Abuse of Travelling:  A Canto in Imitation of Spenser."[27] Another imitation, “Education,” appeared in 1751.  West was a very tame poet, and the only quality of Spenser’s which he succeeded in catching was his prolixity.  He used the allegorical machinery of the “Faerie Queene” for moral and mildly satirical ends.  Thus, in “The Abuse of Traveling,” the Red Cross Knight is induced by Archimago to embark in a painted boat steered by Curiosity, which wafts him over to a foreign shore