O'er his white bones as they lie bare
The wind shall blow forevermair."
There was a lesson in rhetoric for our worthy friends, could they have
understood it. But they were as much afraid of an attack of nature as of
the plague.
Such was the poetical inheritance of style and diction into which Spenser
was born, and which he did more than any one else to redeem from the
leaden gripe of vulgar and pedantic conceit. Sir Philip Sidney, born the
year after him, with a keener critical instinct, and a taste earlier
emancipated than his own, would have been, had he lived longer, perhaps
even more directly influential in educating the taste and refining the
vocabulary of, his contemporaries and immediate successors. The better of
his pastoral poems in the "Arcadia" are, in my judgment, more simple,
natural, and, above all, more pathetic than those of Spenser, who
sometimes strains the shepherd's pipe with a blast that would better suit
the trumpet. Sidney had the good sense to feel that it was
unsophisticated sentiment rather than rusticity of phrase that befitted
such themes.[264] He recognized the distinction between simplicity and
vulgarity, which Wordsworth was so long in finding out, and seems to have
divined the fact that there is but one kind of English that is always
appropriate and never obsolete, namely, the very best.
Pages:
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202