our admiration; one cannot read
him without fancying oneself transported into Fairy Land, and there
conversing with the Graces, in that enchanted region: In elegance of
thinking and fertility of imagination, few of our English authors have
approached him, and no writers have such power as he to awake the
spirit of poetry in others. Cowley owns that he derived inspiration
from him; and I have heard the celebrated Mr. James Thomson, the
author of the Seasons, and justly esteemed one of our best descriptive
poets, say, that he formed himself upon Spenser; and how closely he
pursued the model, and how nobly he has imitated him, whoever reads
his Castle of Indolence with taste, will readily confess.

Mr. Addison, in his characters of the English Poets, addressed to Mr.
Sacheverel, thus speaks of Spenser:

Old Spenser next, warm'd with poetic rage,
In ancient tales amus'd a barb'rous age;
An age, that yet uncultivate and rude,
Where-e'er the poet's fancy led, pursued
Thro' pathless fields, and unfrequented floods,
To dens of dragons, and enchanted woods.
But now the mystic tale, that pleas'd of yore,
Can charm an understanding age no more;
The long spun allegories, fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lyes too plain below.
We view well pleased at distance, all the sights,
Of arms, and palfries, battles, fields, and fights,
And damsels in distress, and courteous knights.
But when we look too near, the shades decay,
And all the pleasing landscape fades away.

It is agreed on all hands, that the distresses of our author helped
to shorten his days, and indeed, when his extraordinary merit is
considered, he had the hardest measure of any of our poets. It appears
from different accounts, that he was of an amiable sweet disposition,
humane and generous in his nature. Besides the Fairy Queen, we find he
had written several other pieces, of which we can only trace out the
titles. Among these, the most considerable were nine comedies, in
imitation of the comedies of his admired Ariosto, inscribed with the
names of the Nine Muses. The rest which are mentioned in his letters,
and those of his friends, are his Dying Pelicane, his Pageants,
Stemmata Dudleyana, the Canticles paraphrazed, Ecclesiastes, Seven
Psalms, Hours of our Lord, Sacrifice of a Sinner, Purgatory, a
S'ennight Slumber, the Court of Cupid, and Hell of Lovers. It is
likewise said, he had written a treatise in prose called the English
Poet