[287] Perhaps his most striking single epithet is the "sea-shouldering whales," B. II 12, xxiii. His ear seems to delight in prolongations For example, he makes such words as glorious, gratious, joyeous, havior, chapelet dactyles, and that, not at the end of verses, where it would not have been unusual, but in the first half of them. Milton contrives a break (a kind of heave, as it were) in the uniformity of his verse by a practice exactly the opposite of this. He also shuns a hiatus which does not seem to have been generally dipleasing to Spenser's ear, though perhaps in the compound epithet bees-alluring he intentionally avoids it by the plural form.
[288]
"Like as a wayward child, whose sounder sleep
Is broken with some fearful dream's affright,
With froward will doth set himself to weep
Ne can be stilled for all his nurse's might,
But kicks and squalls and shrieks for fell despight,
Now scratching her and her loose locks misusing,
Now seeking darkness and now seeking light,
Then craving suck, and then the suck refusing."
He would doubtless have justified himself by the familiar example of
Homer's comparing Ajax to a donkey in the eleventh book of the
Illiad. So also in the "Epithalamion" it grates our nerves to hear,
"Pour not by cups, but by the bellyful,
Pour out to all that wull."
Such examples serve to show how strong a dose of Spenser's aurum
potabile the language needed.
[289] I could not bring myself to root out this odorous herb-garden, though it make my extract too long. It is a pretty reminiscence of his master Chaucer, but is also very characteristic of Spenser himself. He could not help planting a flower or two among his serviceable plants, and after all this abundance he is not satisfied, but begins the next stanza with "And whatso else."
[290] Leigh Hunt's Indicator, XVII.
[291] Ben Jonson told Drummond "that in that paper Sir W. Raleigh had of the allegories of his Faery Queen, by the Blatant Beast the Puritans were understood." But this is certainly wrong. There were very different shades of Puritanism, according to individual temperament. That of Winthrop and Higginson had a mellowness of which Endicott and Standish were incapable The gradual change of Milton's opinions was similar to that which I suppose in Spenser. The passage in Mother Hubberd may have been aimed at the Protestant clergy of Ireland (for he says much the same thing in his "View of the State of Ireland"), but it is general in its terms.
[292] Two of his eclogues, as I have said, are from Marot, and his earliest known verses are translations from Bellay, a poet who was charming whenever he had the courage to play truant from a bad school. We must not suppose that an analysis of the literature of the demi-monde will give us all the elements of the French character. It has been both grave and profound; nay, it has even contrived to be wise and lively at the same time, a combination so incomprehensible by the Teutonic races that they have labelled it levity. It puts them out as nature did Fuseli.
[293] Taste must be partially excepted. It is remarkable how little eating and drinking there is in the "Faery Queen." The only time he fairly sets a table is in the house of Malbecco, where it is necessary to the conduct of the story. Yet taste is not wholly forgotten:—