Hence “The Schoolmistress” is no mere parody or imitation: there is a real and tender humanity in the description of the village school (adumbrating, it would seem, Goldsmith’s efforts with a similar theme), whilst the judicious use of Spenser’s stanza and the sprinkling of his old words help to invest the whole poem with an atmosphere of genuine and unaffected humour.
The next Spenserian whose work merits attention is William Thompson, who, it would seem, had delved not a little into the Earlier English poetry, and who was one of the first to capture something of the real atmosphere of the “Faerie Queene.” His “Epithalamium”[139] and “The Nativity,”[140] which appeared in 1736, are certainly among the best of the imitations. It is important to note that, while there is a free use of supposedly archaic words, with the usual list of certes, perdie, sikerly, hight, as well as others less common, such as belgards (“beautiful looks”), bonnibel (“beautiful virgin”), there is no abuse of the practice. Not a little of the genuine spirit of Spenser’s poetry, with its love of nature and outdoor life, has been caught and rendered without any lavish recourse to an artificial and mechanical diction, as a stanza from “The Nativity,” despite its false rhymes, will perhaps show:
Eftsoons he spied a grove, the Season’s pride,
All in the centre of a pleasant glade,
Where Nature flourished like a virgin bride,
Mantled with green, with hyacinths inlaid,
And crystal-rills o’er beds of lilies stray’d:
The blue-ey’d violet and King-cup gay,
And new blown roses, smiling sweetly red,
Out-glow’d the blushing infancy of Day