In short, I can never read far in Spenser without taking a rest—­as we farmers lean upon our spades, when the digging is in unctuous fat soil that lifts heavily.

And so I leave the matter,—­with the “Faery Queene” in my thought, and leaning on my spade.

* * * * *

CIVIC BANQUETS.

It has often perplexed me to imagine how an Englishman will be able to reconcile himself to any future state of existence from which the earthly institution of dinner shall be excluded.  Even if he fail to take his appetite along with him, (which it seems to me hardly possible to believe, since this endowment is so essential to his composition,) the immortal day must still admit an interim of two or three hours during which he will be conscious of a slight distaste, at all events, if not an absolute repugnance, to merely spiritual nutriment.  The idea of dinner has so imbedded itself among his highest and deepest characteristics, so illuminated itself with intellect and softened itself with the kindest emotions of his heart, so linked itself with Church and State, and grown so majestic with long hereditary customs and ceremonies, that, by taking it utterly away, Death, instead of putting the final touch to his perfection, would leave him infinitely less complete than we have already known him.  He could not be roundly happy.  Paradise, among all its enjoyments, would lack one daily felicity which his sombre little island possessed.  Perhaps it is not irreverent to conjecture that a provision may have been made, in this particular, for the Englishman’s exceptional necessities.  It strikes me that Milton was of the opinion here suggested, and may have intended to throw out a delightful and consolatory hope for his countrymen, when he represents the genial archangel as playing his part with such excellent appetite at Adam’s dinner-table, and confining himself to fruit and vegetables only because, in those early days of her housekeeping, Eve had no more acceptable viands to set before him.  Milton, indeed, had a true English taste for the pleasures of the table, though refined by the lofty and poetic discipline to which he had subjected himself.  It is delicately implied in the refection in Paradise, and more substantially, though still elegantly, betrayed in the sonnet proposing to “Laurence, of virtuous father virtuous son,” a series of nice little dinners in midwinter; and it blazes fully out in that untasted banquet which, elaborate as it was, Satan tossed up in a trice from the kitchen-ranges of Tartarus.