He took the ottava
rima, or eight-lined stanza of the Italian poets, and by adding an
Alexandrine line, formed it into what has since been called the Spenserian
stanza, which has been imitated by many great poets since, and by Byron,
the greatest of them, in his Childe Harold. Of his language it has already
been said that he designedly uses the archaic, or that of Chaucer; or, as
Pope has said,
Spenser himself affects the obsolete.
The plan of the poem, neglecting the unities of an epic, is like that of a
general history, rambling and desultory, or like the transformations of a
fairy tale, as it is: his descriptions are gorgeous, his verse exceedingly
melodious, and his management of it very graceful. The Gerusalemme
Liberata of Tasso appeared while he was writing the Faery Queene, and he
imitated portions of that great epic in his own, but his imitations are
finer than the original.
HIS OTHER WORKS.--His other works need not detain us: Hymns in honor of
Love and Beauty, Prothalamion, and Epithalamion, Mother Hubbard's Tale,
Amoretti or Sonnets, The Tears of the Muses or Brittain's Ida, are little
read at the present day.
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