These figures of Bunyan's are already familiar inmates of the mind, and,
if there be any sublimity in him, it is the daring frankness of his
verisimilitude. Spenser's giants are those of the later romances, except
that grand figure with the balances in the second Canto of Book V., the
most original of all his conceptions, yet no real giant, but a pure
eidolon of the mind. As Bunyan rises not seldom to a natural poetry, so
Spenser sinks now and then, through the fault of his topics, to
unmistakable prose. Take his description of the House of Alma,[297] for
instance:--
"The master cook was cald Concoctioen,
A careful man, and full of comely guise;
The kitchen-clerk, that hight Digestion,
Did order all the achates in seemly wise."
And so on through all the organs of the body. The author of Ecclesiastes
understood these matters better in that last pathetic chapter of his,
blunderingly translated as it apparently is. This, I admit, is the worst
failure of Spenser in this kind; though, even here, when he gets on to
the organs of the mind, the enchantments of his fancy and style come to
the rescue and put us in good-humor again, hard as it is to conceive of
armed knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking with such
visionary damsels as Ambition and Shamefastness.
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