in the wide deep wandering are."
--_Spenser_.[22]

In 1715 John Hughes published his edition of Spenser's works in six
volumes. This was the first attempt at a critical text of the poet, and
was accompanied with a biography, a glossary, an essay on allegorical
poetry, and some remarks on the "Faerie Queene." It is curious to find
in the engravings, from designs by Du Guernier, which illustrate Hughes'
volumes, that Spenser's knights wore the helmets and body armor of the
Roman legionaries, over which is occasionally thrown something that looks
very much like a toga. The lists in which they run a tilt have the
facade of a Greek temple for a background. The house of Busyrane is
Louis Quatorze architecture, and Amoret is chained to a renaissance
column with Corinthian capital and classical draperies. Hughes' glossary
of obsolete terms includes words which are in daily use by modern
writers: aghast, baleful, behest, bootless, carol, craven, dreary,
forlorn, foray, guerdon, plight, welkin, yore. If words like these, and
like many which Warton annotates in his "Observations," really needed
explanation, it is a striking proof, not only of the degree in which our
older poets had been forgotten, but also of the poverty to which the
vocabulary of English poetry had been reduced by 1700.

In his prefatory remarks to the "Faerie Queene," the editor expresses the
customary regrets that the poet should have chosen so defective a stanza,
"so romantick a story," and a model, or framework for the whole, which
appears so monstrous when "examined by the rules of epick poetry"; makes
the hackneyed comparison between Spenser's work and Gothic architecture,
and apologizes for his author, on the ground that, at the time when he
wrote, "the remains of the old Gothick chivalry were not quite
abolished." "He did not much revive the curiosity of the public," says
Johnson, in his life of Hughes; "for near thirty years elapsed before his
edition was reprinted." Editions of the "Faerie Queene" came thick and
fast about the middle of the century. One (by Birch) was issued in 1751,
and three in 1758; including the important edition by Upton, who, of all
Spenser's commentators, has entered most elaborately into the
interpretation of the allegory.

In the interval had appeared, in gradually increasing numbers, that
series of Spenserian imitations which forms an interesting department of
eighteenth-century verse. The series