ADVERTISEMENT

THE following Essays were contributed by me to the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, the Dublin Review, the North British Review, the Christian Remembrancer, the Nineteenth Century, the Month, the Irish Monthly, and the Catholic World. They are now collected, in a condensed form, with the kind permission of the Editors of those Journals. The "Characteristics of Spenser" appeared in the Rev. Dr. Grosart's recent edition of that poet's works; the "Recollections of Wordsworth" in his collection of Wordsworth's Prose Works.

A. DE VERE.

CURRAGH CHASE,

8th November 1887.

I

CHARACTERISTICS OF SPENSER'S POETRY

It has been said that Spenser is a poet for poets; and there is truth in the remark, implying as it does that his poetry addresses itself to something above the range of merely human, as distinguished from imaginative sympathies; but it expresses only half the truth, and the other half is commonly ignored, if not denied. Many portions of his poetry on which he must have set most value are doubtless beyond the appreciation of readers who do not combine an unusual thoughtfulness with a large imagination. It is also true that there is much in human character in which he took little of that special interest which a dramatist takes; and no less that much of that familiar incident which delighted the ballad-maker of old, and constitutes the chief ingredient in narrative poetry, was foreign to Spenser's purpose. But so far from being true that his poetry is deficient in human interest, there is a sense in which he was especially a poet of the humanities. More than any predecessor he was the VOL. I.

B