azlitt said "the
allegory will not bite you"; you can let it alone. The crudeness and
bigotry of Spenser's dealings with Catholicism, which are ridiculous
when he pictures the monster Error vomiting books and pamphlets, and
disgusting when he draws Mary Queen of Scots, do not hinder the pleasure
of those who read him for his language and his art. He is great for
other reasons than these. First because of the extraordinary smoothness
and melody of his verse and the richness of his language--a golden
diction that he drew from every source--new words, old words, obsolete
words--such a mixture that the purist Ben Jonson remarked acidly that he
wrote no language at all. Secondly because of the profusion of his
imagery, and the extraordinarily keen sense for beauty and sweetness
that went to its making. In an age of golden language and gallant
imagery his was the most golden and the most gallant. And the language
of poetry in England is richer and more varied than that in any other
country in Europe to-day, because of what he did.

(3)

Elizabethan prose brings us face to face with a difficulty which has to
be met by every student of literature. Does the word "literature" cover
every kind of writing? Ought we to include in it writing that aims
merely at instruction or is merely journey-work, as well as writing that
has an artistic intention, or writing that, whether its author knew it
or no, is artistic in its result? Of course such a question causes us no
sort of difficulty when it concerns itself only with what is being
published to-day. We know very well that some things are literature and
some merely journalism; that of novels, for instance, some deliberately
intend to be works of art and others only to meet a passing desire for
amusement or mental occupation. We know that most books serve or attempt
to serve only a useful and not a literary purpose. But in reading the
books of three centuries ago, unconsciously one's point of view shifts.
Antiquity gilds journey-work; remoteness and quaintness of phrasing lend
a kind of distinction to what are simply pamphlets or text-books that
have been preserved by accident from the ephemeralness which was the
common lot of hundreds of their fellows. One comes to regard as
literature things that had no kind of literary value for their first
audiences; to apply the same seriousness of judgment and the same tests
to the pamphlets of Nash and Dekker as to the prose of Sidney and
Baco