waters sheen
That, as they bickered[146] through the sunny glade,
Though restless still, themselves a lulling murmur made.
(Canto I, 3)
Though the Spenserian imitations continued beyond the year which saw the birth of Wordsworth,[147] it is not necessary to mention further examples, except perhaps that of William Mickle, who, in 1767, published “The Concubine,” a Spenserian imitation of two cantos, which afterwards appeared in a later edition (1777) under the title “Sir Martyn.” Like his predecessors, Mickle made free use of obsolete spellings and words, while he added the usual glossary, which is significant as showing at the end of the eighteenth century, about the time when Tyrwhitt was completing his edition of Chaucer, not only the artificial character of this “Spenserian diction,” but also the small acquaintance of the average man of letters with our earlier language.[148]
It must not be assumed, of course, that all the “obsolete” words used by the imitators were taken directly from Spenser. Words like nathless, rathe, hight, sicker, areeds, cleeped, hardiment, felly, etc., had continued in fairly common use until the seventeenth century, though actually some of them were regarded even then as archaisms. Thus cleoped, though never really obsolete, is marked by Blount in 1656 as “Saxon”; sicker, extensively employed in Middle English, is rarely found used after 1500 except by Scotch writers, though it still remains current in northern dialects. On the other hand, not a few words were undoubtedly brought directly back into literature from the pages of Spenser, among them being meed, sheen (boasting an illustrious descent from Beowulf through Chaucer), erst, elfin, paramour. Others, like scrannel, and apparently also ledded, were made familiar by Milton’s use the former either being the poet’s own coinage or his borrowing from some dialect or other. On the other hand, very many of the “revived” words failed to take root at all, such as faitours, which Spenser himself had apparently revived, and also his coinage singult, though Scott is found using the latter form.
As has been said, the crowd of poetasters who attempted to reproduce Spenser’s spirit and style thought to do so by merely mechanical imitation of what they regarded as his “quaint” or “ludicrous” diction. Between them and any possibility of grasping the perennial beauty and charm of the “poet’s poet” there was a great gulf fixed, whilst, altogether apart from this fatal limitation, then parodies were little likely to have even ephemeral success, for parody presupposes in its readers at least a little knowledge and appreciation of the thing parodied. But there were amongst the imitators one or two at least who, we may imagine, were able to find in the melody and romance of “The Faerie Queene” an avenue of escape from the prosaic pressure of their times. In the case of William Thompson, Shenstone, and the author of the “Castle of Indolence,” the influence of Spenser revealed itself as in integral and vital part of the Romantic reaction, for these, being real poets, had been able to recapture something at least of the colour, music, and fragrance of their original. And not only did these, helped by others whose names have all but been forgotten restore a noble stanza form to English verse. Even their mechanical imitation of Spenser’s language was not without its influence, for it cannot be doubted that these attempts to write in an archaic or pseudo-archaic style did not a little to free poetry from the shackles of a conventional language.
This process was greatly helped by that other aspect of the eighteenth century revival of the past which was exemplified in the publication of numerous collections of old ballads and songs.[149] There is, of course, as Macaulay long ago noted, a series of conventional epithets that is one mark of the genuine ballad manner, but the true ballad language was not a lifeless stereotyped diction. It consisted of “plain English without any trimmings.” The ballads had certain popular mannerisms (the good greenwood, the wan water, etc.), but they were free from the conventional figures of speech, or such rhetorical artifices as personification and periphrasis.