“Eke should he, freed from fous enchanter’s spell,
    Escape his false Duessa’s magic charms,
    And folly quaid, yclept an hydra fell
    Receive a beauteous lady to his arms;
    While bards and minstrels chaunt the soft alarms
    Of gentle love, unlike his former thrall: 
    Eke should I sing, in courtly cunning terms,
    The gallant feast, served up by seneschal,
    To knights and ladies gent in painted bower or hall.”

And this is how he writes when he drops his pattern: 

    “Awake, ye west winds, through the lonely dale,
    And, Fancy, to thy faerie bower betake! 
    Even now, with balmy freshness, breathes the gale,
    Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake;
    Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake,
    And evening comes with locks bedropt with dew;
    On Desmond’s moldering turrets slowly shake
    The trembling rye-grass and the harebell blue,
    And ever and anon fair Mulla’s plaints renew.”

A reader would be guilty of no very bad guess who should assign this stanza—­which Scott greatly admired—­to one of he Spenserian passages that prelude the “Lady of the Lake.”

But it is needless to extend this catalogue any farther.  By the middle of the century Spenserian had become so much the fashion as to provoke a rebuke from Dr. Johnson, who prowled up and down before the temple of the British Muses like a sort of classical watch-dog.  “The imitation of Spenser,” said the Rambler of May 14, 1751, “by the influence of some men of learning and genius, seems likely to gain upon the age. . .  To imitate the fictions and sentiments of Spenser can incur no reproach, for allegory is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of instruction.  But I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction or his stanza.  His style was, in his own words and peculiarities of phrase, and so remote from common use that Jonson boldly pronounces him to have written no language.  His stanza is at once difficult and unpleasing:  tiresome to the ear by its uniformity, and to the attention by its length. . .  Life is surely given us for other purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten."[35] In his “Life of West,” Johnson says of West’s imitations of Spenser, “Such compositions are not to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their effect is local and temporary:  they appeal not to reason or passion, but to memory, and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind.  An imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom Spenser has never been perused.”