" The passage is one of the very few disgusting ones in the
"Faery Queen." Spenser was copying Ariosto; but the Italian poet,
with the discreeter taste of his race, keeps to generalities. Spenser
goes into particulars which can only be called nasty. He did this, no
doubt, to pleasure his mistress, Mary's rival; and this gives us a
measure of the brutal coarseness of contemporary manner. It becomes
only the more marvellous that the fine flower of his genius could
have transmuted the juices of such a soil into the purity and
sweetness which are its own peculiar properties.
[295] There is a gleam of humor in one of the couplets of "Mother
Hubberd's Tale," where the Fox, persuading the Ape that they should
disguise themselves as discharged soldiers in order to beg the more
successfully, says,--
"Be you the soldier, for you likest are
For manly semblance _and small skill in war."_
[296] Bunyan probably took the hint of the Giants suicidal offer of
"knife, halter, or poison," from Spenser's "swords, ropes, poison,"
in Faery Queen, B. I. c. ix. 1.
[297] Book II. c. 9.
[298] See Sidney's "Defence," and Puttenham's "Art of English Poesy,"
Book I. c. 8.
[299] We can fancy how he would have done this by Jeremy Taylor, who
was a kind of Spenser in a cassock.
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