[143] Cp. Joseph Warton’s “Essay on Pope,” Vol. I, p. 366 (4th edition, 1782). Wordsworth, too, as we know, called it a “fine poem” and praised it for its harmonious verse and pure diction, but we may imagine that he was praising it for its own sake without regard to its merits as a Spenserian imitation (vide Hutchinson, op. cit., p. 949).
[144] There are at least forty stanzas in the First Canto, without a single archaic form, and an equal proportion in Canto Two: Cf. Morel, op. cit., pp. 629-630.
[145] “The letter y,” he naïvely says in his “Glossary,” “is frequently placed at the beginning of a word by Spenser, to lengthen it a syllable, and en at the end of a word, for the same reason.”
[146] Thompson seems to have been the first to use the word bicker as applied to running water, an application which was later to receive the sanction of Scott and Tennyson (N.E.D.).
[147] Among the last examples was Beattie’s “Minstrel” (1771-74), which occasioned some of Gray’s dicta on the use of archaic and obsolete words.
[148] Spenserian “forgeries” had also made their appearance as early as in 1713, when Samuel Croxall had attempted to pass off two Cantos as the original work of “England’s Arch-Poet, Spenser” (2nd edition, London, 1714). In 1747, John Upton made a similar attempt, though probably in neither case were the discoveries intended to be taken seriously.
[149] See Phelps, op. cit., Chap. VIII, and Grace R. Trenery, “Ballad Collections of the Eighteenth Century,” “Modern Language Review,” July, 1915, pp. 283 foll.
[150] Vide “Preface to A Collection of Old Ballads,” 3 vols. (1723-52), and cf. Benjamin Wakefield’s “Warbling Muses” (1749), Preface.
[151] Yet thirty years later the collections of Joseph Ritson, the last and best of the eighteenth century editors, failed to win acceptance. His strictly accurate versions of the old songs and ballads were contemptuously dismissed by the “Gentleman’s Magazine” (August, 1790) as “the compilation of a peevish antiquary.”
[152] “Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript,” edited Furnivall and Hales, 4 vols. (1867-68).