inks that the Renaissance poets, Ariosto and Spenser, owe
their finest effects not to their tinge of classical culture but to their
romantic materials. Shakspere "is greater when he uses Gothic manners
and machinery, than when he employs classical." Tasso, to be sure, tried
to trim between the two, by giving an epic form to his romantic
subject-matter, but Hurd pronounces his imitations of the ancients "faint
and cold and almost insipid, when compared with his original
fictions. . . If it was not for these _lies_ [_magnanima mensogna_] of
Gothic invention, I should scarcely be disposed to give the 'Gierusalemme
Liberata' a second reading." Nay, Milton himself, though finally
choosing the classic model, did so only after long hesitation. "His
favorite subject was Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. On this
he had fixed for the greater part of his life. What led him to change
his mind was partly, as I suppose, his growing fanaticism; partly his
ambition to take a different route from Spenser; but chiefly, perhaps,
the discredit into which the stories of chivalry had now fallen by the
immortal satire of Cervantes. Yet we see through all his poetry, where
his enthusiasm flames out most, a certain predilection for the legends of
chivalry before the fables of Greece." Hurd says that, if the "Faerie
Queene" be regarded as a Gothic poem, it will be seen to have unity of
design, a merit which even the Wartons had denied it. "When an architect
examines a Gothic structure by the Grecian rules he finds nothing but
deformity. But the Gothic architecture has its own rules by which; when
it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the
Grecian."

The essayist complains that the Gothic fables fell into contempt through
the influence of French critics who ridiculed and disparaged the Italian
romancers, Ariosto and Tasso. The English critics of the
Restoration--Davenant, Hobbes, Shaftesbury--took their cue from the
French, till these pseudo-classical principles "grew into a sort of a
cant, with which Rymer and the rest of that school filled their flimsy
essays and rumbling prefaces. . . The exact but cold Boileau happened to
say something about the _clinquant_ of Tasso," and "Mr. Addison,[2] who
gave the law in taste here, took it up and sent it about," so that "it
became a sort of watchword among the critics." "What we have gotten,"
concludes the final letter of the series, "by this revolution, i