where he is entertained by a bevy of light damsels whose leader “hight Politessa,” and whose blandishments the knight resists.  Thence he is conducted to a stately castle (the court of Louis XV. whose minister—­perhaps Cardinal Fleury?—­is “an old and rankled mage"); and finally to Rome, where a lady yclept Vertu holds court in the ruins of the Colosseum, among mimes, fiddlers, pipers, eunuchs, painters, and ciceroni.

Similarly the canto on “Education” narrates how a fairy knight, while conducting his young son to the house of Paidia, encounters the giant Custom and worsts him in single combat.  There is some humor in the description of the stream of science into which the crowd of infant learners are unwillingly plunged, and upon whose margin stands

    “A birchen grove that, waving from the shore,
    Aye cast upon the tide its falling bud
    And with its bitter juice empoisoned all the flood.”

The piece is a tedious arraignment of the pedantic methods of instruction in English schools and colleges.  A passage satirizing the artificial style of gardening will be cited later.  West had a country-house at Wickham, in Kent, where, says Johnson,[28] “he was very often visited by Lyttelton and Pitt; who, when they were weary of faction and debates, used at Wickham to find books and quiet, a decent table and literary conversation.  There is at Wickham, a walk made by Pitt.”  Like many contemporary poets, West interested himself in landscape gardening, and some of his shorter pieces belong to that literature of inscriptions to which Lyttelton, Akenside, Shenstone, Mason, and others contributed so profusely.  It may be said for his Spenserian imitations that their archaisms are unusually correct[29]—­if that be any praise—­a feature which perhaps recommended them to Gray, whose scholarship in this, as in all points, was nicely accurate.  The obligation to be properly “obsolete” in vocabulary was one that rested heavily on the consciences of most of these Spenserian imitators.  “The Squire of Dames,” for instance, by the wealthy Jew, Moses Mendez, fairly bristles with seld-seen costly words, like benty, frannion, etc., which it would have puzzled Spenser himself to explain.

One of the pleasantest outcomes of this literary fashion was William Shenstone’s “Schoolmistress,” published in an unfinished shape in 1737 and, as finally completed, in 1742.  This is an affectionate half-humorous description of the little dame-school of Shenstone’s—­and of everybody’s—­native village, and has the true idyllic touch.  Goldsmith evidently had it in memory when he drew the picture of the school in his “Deserted Village."[30] The application to so humble a theme of Spenser’s stately verse and grave, ancient words gives a very quaint effect.  The humor of “The Schoolmistress” is genuine, not dependent on the more burlesque, as in Pope’s and Cambridge’s experiments; and it is warmed with a certain tenderness, as in the incident of the hen with her brood of chickens, entering the open door of the schoolhouse in search of crumbs, and of the grief of the little sister who witnesses her brother’s flogging, and of the tremors of the urchins who have been playing in the dame’s absence: