The critic is partly right.  The nice points of a parody are lost upon a reader unacquainted with the thing parodied.  And as for serious imitations, the more cleverly a copyist follows his copy, the less value his work will have.  The eighteenth-century Spenserians, like West, Cambridge, and Lloyd, who stuck most closely to their pattern, oblivion has covered.  Their real service was done in reviving a taste for a better kind of poetry than the kind in vogue, and particularly in restoring to English verse a stanza form, which became so noble an instrument in the hands of later poets, who used it with as much freedom and vigor as if they had never seen the “Faerie Queene.”  One is seldom reminded of Spenser while reading “Childe Harold"[36] or “Adonais” or “The Eve of Saint Agnes”; but in reading West or Cambridge, or even in reading Shenstone and Thomson, one is reminded of him at every turn.  Yet if it was necessary to imitate anyone, it might be answered to Dr. Johnson that it was better to imitate Spenser than Pope.  In the imitation of Spenser lay, at least, a future, a development; while the imitation of Pope was conducting steadily toward Darwin’s “Botanic Garden.”

It remains to notice one more document in the history of this Spenserian revival, Thomas Warton’s “Observations on the Faerie Queen,” 1754.  Warton wrote with a genuine delight in his subject.  His tastes were frankly romantic.  But the apologetic air which antiquarian scholars assumed, when venturing to recommend their favorite studies to the attention of a classically minded public, is not absent from Warton’s commentary.  He writes as if he felt the pressure of an unsympathetic atmosphere all about him.  “We who live in the days of writing by rule are apt to try every composition by those laws which we have been taught to think the sole criterion of excellence.  Critical taste is universally diffused, and we require the same order and design which every modern performance is expected to have, in poems where they never were regarded or intended. . .  If there be any poem whose graces please because they are situated beyond the reach of art[37] . . . it is this.  In reading Spenser, if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported.”  “In analyzing the plan and conduct of this poem, I have so far tried it by epic rules, as to demonstrate the inconveniences and incongruities which the poet might have avoided, had he been more studious of design and uniformity.  It is true that his romantic materials claim great liberties; but no materials exclude order and perspicacity.”  Warton assures the reader that Spenser’s language is not “so difficult and obsolete as it is generally supposed to be;” and defends him against Hume’s censure,[38] that “Homer copied true natural manners . . . but the pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations and conceits and fopperies of chivalry.”