therine Somerset. Nowhere has Spenser more
emphatically displayed himself as the very poet of Beauty: The
Renaissance impulse in England is here seen at its highest and purest.

The genius of Spenser, like Chaucer's, does itself justice only in
poems of some length. Hence it is impossible to represent it in this
volume by other pieces of equal merit, but of impracticable
dimensions. And the same applies to such poems as the _Lover's Lament_
or the _Ancient Mariner_.

46 -- _entrailed_: twisted. Feateously: elegantly.

48 -- _shend_: shame.

49 -- _a noble peer_: Robert Devereux, second Lord Essex, then at the
height of his brief triumph after taking Cadiz: hence the allusion
following to the Pillars of Hercules, placed near Gades by ancient
legend.

-- -- _Elisa_: Elizabeth.

50 -- _twins of Jove_: the stars Castor and Pollux: _baldric_, belt;
the zodiac.

52 79 This lyric may with very high probability be assigned to
Campion, in whose first Book of Airs it appeared (1601). The evidence
sometimes quoted ascribing it to Lord Bacon appears to be valueless.

_Summary of Book Second._

This division, embracing generally the latter eighty years of the
Seventeenth century, contains the close of our Early poetical style
and the commencement of the Modern. In Dryden we see the first master
of the new: in Milton, whose genius dominates here as Shakespeare's in
the former book,--the crown and consummation of the early period.
Their splendid Odes are far in advance of any prior attempts,
Spenser's excepted: they exhibit that wider and grander range which
years and experience and the struggles of the time conferred on
Poetry. Our Muses now give expression to political feeling, to
religious thought, to a high philosophic statesmanship in writers such
as Marvell, Herbert, and Wotton: whilst in Marvell and Milton, again,
we find noble attempts, hitherto rare in our literature, at pure
description of nature, destined in our own age to be continued and
equalled. Meanwhile the poetry of simple passion, although before 1660
often deformed by verbal fancies and conceits of thought, and
afterwards by levity and an artificial tone,--produced in Herrick and
Waller some charming pieces of more finished art than the Elizabethan:
until in the courtly compliments of Sedley it seems to exhaust itself,
and lie almost dormant for the hundred years between the days of
Wither and Suckling and the days of Burns and Cowper.--That the chang