Nay, even in the most
prosy parts, unless my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile
confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles us
as of children who _play_ that everything is something else, and are
quite satisfied with the transformation.
The problem for Spenser was a double one: how to commend poetry at all to
a generation which thought it effeminate trifling,[298] and how he,
Master Edmund Spenser, of imagination all compact, could commend _his_
poetry to Master John Bull, the most practical of mankind in his habitual
mood, but at that moment in a passion of religious anxiety about his
soul. _Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci_ was not only an
irrefragable axiom because a Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met
the case in point. He would convince the scorners that poetry might be
seriously useful, and show Master Bull his new way of making fine words
butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then practised,
was imagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and
illustrated with cuts, and would thus serve both his ethical and
pictorial purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he
proceeded to put forth; but he so bordered it with bright-colored
fancies, he so often filled whole pages and crowded the text hard in
others with the gay frolics of his pencil, that, as in the Grimani
missal, the holy function of the book is forgotten in the ecstasy of its
adornment.
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