th downy wing the stilly lake;
Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake,
And evening comes with locks bedropt with dew;
On Desmond's moldering turrets slowly shake
The trembling rye-grass and the harebell blue,
And ever and anon fair Mulla's plaints renew."

A reader would be guilty of no very bad guess who should assign this
stanza--which Scott greatly admired--to one of he Spenserian passages
that prelude the "Lady of the Lake."

But it is needless to extend this catalogue any farther. By the middle
of the century Spenserian had become so much the fashion as to provoke a
rebuke from Dr. Johnson, who prowled up and down before the temple of the
British Muses like a sort of classical watch-dog. "The imitation of
Spenser," said the _Rambler_ of May 14, 1751, "by the influence of some
men of learning and genius, seems likely to gain upon the age. . . To
imitate the fictions and sentiments of Spenser can incur no reproach, for
allegory is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of instruction.
But I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction or his
stanza. His style was, in his own words and peculiarities of phrase, and
so remote from common use that Jonson boldly pronounces him _to have
written no language_. His stanza is at once difficult and unpleasing:
tiresome to the ear by its uniformity, and to the attention by its
length. . . Life is surely given us for other purposes than to gather
what our ancestors have wisely thrown away and to learn what is of no
value but because it has been forgotten."[35] In his "Life of West,"
Johnson says of West's imitations of Spenser, "Such compositions are not
to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their
effect is local and temporary: they appeal not to reason or passion, but
to memory, and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind. An
imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom
Spenser has never been perused."

The critic is partly right. The nice points of a parody are lost upon a
reader unacquainted with the thing parodied. And as for serious
imitations, the more cleverly a copyist follows his copy, the less value
his work will have. The eighteenth-century Spenserians, like West,
Cambridge, and Lloyd, who stuck most closely to their pattern, oblivion
has covered. Their real service was done in reviving a taste for a
better kind of poetry than the kind in vogue,