that is the younger voice of Milton.
And ever and anon the rosy red
Flasht thro' her face,
one might fancy the unmistakable note and accent of Tennyson.[3]
English poetry fell with the neglect of Spenser, who was buried and forgotten from the middle of the seventeenth century till Thomson revived his measures in the middle of the eighteenth, and English poetry came fully to her own again when the magic book of Spenser was opened by Keats.
[1] A well-known diplomatist of Queen Elizabeth, Harry Killigrew, is said to have been "a Holbein in oils".
[2] On this and on the more than mediaeval size of "The Faery Queen," see Mr. Mackail's "Springs of Helicon," pp. 132-28.
[3] Mackail, "Springs of Helicon," pp. 90, 91.