Yet he began his commentary with the stock denunciations of “Gothic ignorance and barbarity.”  “At the renaissance it might have been expected that, instead of the romantic manner of poetical composition . . . a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have succeeded. . .  But it was a long time before such a change was effected.  We find Ariosto, many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth for magic, and preferring the ridiculous and incoherent excursions of Boiardo to the propriety and uniformity of the Grecian and Roman models.  Nor did the restoration of ancient learning produce any effectual or immediate improvement in the state of criticism.  Beni, one of the most celebrated critics of the sixteenth century, was still so infatuated with a fondness for the old Provencal vein, that he ventured to write a regular dissertation, in which he compares Ariosto with Homer.”  Warton says again, of Ariosto and the Italian renaissance poets whom Spenser followed, “I have found no fault in general with their use of magical machinery; notwithstanding I have so far conformed to the reigning maxims of modern criticism as to recommend classical propriety.”  Notwithstanding this prudent determination to conform, the author takes heart in his second volume to speak out as follows about the pseudo-classic poetry of his own age:  “A poetry succeeded in which imagination gave way to correctness, sublimity of description to delicacy of sentiment, and majestic imagery to conceit and epigram.  Poets began now to be more attentive to words than to things and objects.  The nicer beauties of happy expression were preferred to the daring strokes of great conception.  Satire, that bane of the sublime, was imported from France.  The muses were debauched at court; and polite life and familiar manners became their only themes.”

By the time these words were written Spenser had done his work.  Color, music, fragrance were stealing back again into English song, and “golden-tongued romance with serene lute” stood at the door of the new age, waiting for it to open.

[1] A small portion of “The Canterbury Tales.”  Edited by Morell.

[2] The sixteenth [sic.  Quaere, seventeenth?] century had an instinctive repugnance for the crude literature of the Middle Ages, the product of so strange and incoherent a civilization.  Here classicism finds nothing but grossness and barbarism, never suspecting that it might contain germs, which, with time and genius, might develop into a poetical growth, doubtless less pure, but certainly more complex in its harmonies, and of a more expressive form of beauty.  The history of our ancient poetry, traced in a few lines by Boileau, clearly shows to what degree he either ignored or misrepresented it.  The singular, confused architecture of Gothic cathedrals gave those who saw beauty in symmetry of line and purity of form but further evidence of the clumsiness and perverted taste