, if more conformed to our modern language." The
grotesque, though it has its place as one of the instruments of poetical
effect, is a dangerous element to handle. Spenser's age was very
insensible to the presence and the dangers of the grotesque, and he was
not before his time in feeling what was unpleasing in incongruous
mixtures. Strong in the abundant but unsifted learning of his day, a
style of learning, which in his case was strangely inaccurate, he not
only mixed the past with the present, fairyland with politics, mythology
with the most serious Christian ideas, but he often mixed together the
very features which are most discordant, in the colours, forms, and
methods by which he sought to produce the effect of his pictures.

3. Another source of annoyance and disappointment is found in the
imperfections and inconsistencies of the poet's standard of what is
becoming to say and to write about. Exaggeration, diffuseness,
prolixity, were the literary diseases of the age; an age of great
excitement and hope, which had suddenly discovered its wealth and its
powers, but not the rules of true economy in using them. With the
classics open before it, and alive to much of the grandeur of their
teaching, it was almost blind to the spirit of self-restraint,
proportion, and simplicity which governed the great models. It was left
to a later age to discern these and appreciate them. This unresisted
proneness to exaggeration produced the extravagance and the horrors of
the Elizabethan Drama, full, as it was, nevertheless, of insight and
originality. It only too naturally led the earlier Spenser astray. What
Dryden, in one of his interesting critical prefaces says of himself, is
true of Spenser; "Thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast
upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject; to run them
into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose." There was in
Spenser a facility for turning to account all material, original or
borrowed, an incontinence of the descriptive faculty, which was ever
ready to exercise itself on any object, the most unfitting and
loathsome, as on the noblest, the purest, or the most beautiful. There
are pictures in him which seem meant to turn our stomach. Worse than
that there are pictures which for a time rank the poet of _Holiness_ or
_Temperance_, with the painters who used their great art to represent at
once the most sacred and holiest forms, and also scenes which few pe