"In her left hand a cup of gold she held,
And with her right the riper fruit did reach,
Whose sappy liquor, that with fulness sweld,
Into her cup she scruzed with dainty breach
Of her fine fingers without foul impeach,
That so fair wine-press made the wine more sweet."
B. II c. xii. 56.
Taste can hardly complain of unhandsome treatment!
[294] Had the poet lived longer, he might perhaps have verified his friend Raleigh's saying, that "whosoever in writing modern history shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth." The passage is one of the very few disgusting ones in the "Faery Queen." Spenser was copying Ariosto; but the Italian poet, with the discreeter taste of his race, keeps to generalities. Spenser goes into particulars which can only be called nasty. He did this, no doubt, to pleasure his mistress, Mary's rival; and this gives us a measure of the brutal coarseness of contemporary manner. It becomes only the more marvellous that the fine flower of his genius could have transmuted the juices of such a soil into the purity and sweetness which are its own peculiar properties.
[295] There is a gleam of humor in one of the couplets of "Mother Hubberd's Tale," where the Fox, persuading the Ape that they should disguise themselves as discharged soldiers in order to beg the more successfully, says,—
"Be you the soldier, for you likest are
For manly semblance and small skill in war."
[296] Bunyan probably took the hint of the Giants suicidal offer of "knife, halter, or poison," from Spenser's "swords, ropes, poison," in Faery Queen, B. I. c. ix. 1.
[297] Book II. c. 9.
[298] See Sidney's "Defence," and Puttenham's "Art of English Poesy,"
Book I. c. 8.
[299] We can fancy how he would have done this by Jeremy Taylor, who was a kind of Spenser in a cassock.
[300] Of this he himself gives a striking hint, when speaking in his own person he suddenly breaks in on his narrative with the passionate cry,