"Such ones ill judge of love that cannot love
Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame;
Forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove,
Ne natural affection faultless blame
For fault of few that have abused the same:
For it of honor and all virtue is
The root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame
That crown true lovers with immortal bliss,
The meed of them that love and do not live amiss."
If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of nightingales' tongues as
the "Faery Queen," he is very much more to be pitied than Spenser. The
sensitive purity of the poet might indeed well be wounded when a poem in
which he proposed to himself "to discourse at large" of "the ethick part
of Moral Philosophy"[275] could be so misinterpreted. But Spenser speaks
in the same strain and without any other than a general application in
his "Tears of the Muses," and his friend Sidney undertakes the defence of
poesy because it was undervalued. But undervalued by whom? By the only
persons about whom he knew or cared anything, those whom we should now
call Society and who were then called the Court. The inference I would
draw is that, among the causes which contributed to the marvellous
efflorescence of genius in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the
influence of direct patronage from above is to be reckoned at almost
nothing.
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