THE FAERY QUEENE FOR SCHOOLMASTERS.*

IT is a peculiarity of that fashionable instruction of which litera- ture without inductive science is made the staple, that it can only give the understanding an elementary culture by misusing the brilliant works on which the taste and imagination should • be mainly exercised. Its facts must be founded on fiction. It sets the schoolboy to puzzle himself over classical poets merely as long as each can serve him for a praxis on irregular verbs or a hand- book to the curiosity-shop of antique usages. It calls him abruptly from an unfinished book when he has just learned the chresto- mathy of it, or just got into the way of mastering it so gradually and easily that he can now give to the poetry or comedy before him a little of the attention of which the lexicon demanded heretofore a " pre-preference share." A like use can obviously be made of English literature, if we go back to a sufficiently remote period. In the same time that a neglected and desultory child, as Alexander Pope was, could blunder by himself through as much as he chose of the Faery Queene, gathering the sense of the old words by the context, and getting glimpses of allegories and innuendoes in the dim, slow way that Spenser meant his own- contemporaries to get them in, the modern pupil may be exercised upon the poet far more gmnptiously, as well as bumptiously. He may be put through the First Book only, after a neat and dry life of Spenser and chronological table, with a proper prepara- tion from the first for recognizing in Duessa and the other charac- ters their triune personalities—as of Falsehood, Popery, and Mary Stuart, and the like—and after meanwhile reading and forgetting some hundreds of derivations of words from tongues unknown to- him, and as many literary references to authors who may remain beyond his reach. He may then, when he has finished the First Book, be fairly supposed to have had enough of Spenser, and to be ready for the next author in the course, which happens to be, according to the series announced at the end of the work before * Spenatr.—Book I. of the Faery Queene, edited by G. W.Iiitchlo, M.A., Oxford. At the Clarendon Preen. 1d67. us, Hooker's Ecclesiastical Policy. And by this course our young friend will probably have benefited (so Mr. Kitchin states, as an

advocate of the system) in at least four ways,—(1) " By obtaining an insight into the genius of a great poet, and thereby purifying and ennobling his taste, as well as exercising his imagination ; (2) getting plentiful texts found on which his teacher may hang historical instruction ; (3) being taught to look carefully into the meaning of words, the inflexions, &c., of the mother tongue ; (4) learning lessons of religious and moral truth from the descriptions of human qualities, &c., contained in the book." We are strongly inclined to believe that objects 2 and 3 should be kept more in the background (whenever there is a real desire to secure 1 and 4), than it is allowed that they should be by the plan of the excerpts in our new Clarendon Press Series. And we doubt much whether any of its young readers will imbibe that unaffected taste for Spenser, and those weird recollections of his "gallery of pictures," which many have retained from a stolen perusal of editions much more simply got up than the present one.

We grant that the system before us is a comparatively plausible one, if you start by asking what authors shall be selected for our courses of general education, and then what excerpts from those authors, and how they can be uniformly elucidated, and so on. But the misfortune is, we are all grown so interested in debates on general education, that we overlook the fact that uniformity may

be the bane of all true culture. Culture requires some judicious humouring of our individual natural bents, some abandon in the pursuit that has once interested us, some discreet temporary with- holding of such illustrations as sicken when we are crammed with them. Let it be granted, for instance, that the first book of the Faery Queene is in most respects the best ; still there are many young persons to whom the " Legend of Friendship," or that of " Courtesy," may be infinitely more impressive than the "Legend of Holiness." There is an increasing number to whom it can matter little how the deceits of Popery have been exposed in the stripping of Duessa, who can find no edifying example in the cavalier or the bigot who defends the Red Cross against the Saracens ; there are numbers who would rather consult our romantic and dreamy poet on those graces of the "gentle life" which really furnished the most suitable subject to a man of his calibre. The fact is, that where young men have acquired a true taste for poetry, you may mostly trace it to any source, rather than the classical routine they have gone through in Latin, Greek, or English.

On the other hand, our present editor, Mr. Kitchin, has done his work, such as it is, in the most commendable manner, and we can even say that his numerous, though concise notes, may be found very interesting and instructive by those of us who have already grown familiar with the Faery Queene by any ordinary and somewhat irregular course of reading. His etymological inquiries are often completed and verified by all the resources that modern scholarship supplies, though we must deem him to have reposed too much confidence in Horne Tooke's system, where he has treated the pronoun " it " as a contraction of " bight," con- nected with the German " heissen." Otherwise he is well informed on most of the needful points, and skilful in condensing his infor- mation, and his literary references and parallels are ample and, in general, very striking.

In the interpretation, however, of Spenser's fable, it is difficult to attain that precision which must appear desirable for tutorial purposes. One thing needful, as it seems to us, is to distinguish carefully between the poet's leading ideas and his merely accidental afterthoughts. We must undoubtedly acknowledge, in one place, that his Duessa is or becomes Mary Stuart; the two Queens who are brought face to face in Book v, c. 9, cannot possibly be explained without reference to the contemporary Queens of England and of .Scotland. But we doubt whether Mary need once be thought of while we are reading Spenser's First Book, which was possibly composed at a time when Elizabeth would not have found it politic or even desirable to encourage coarse invectives against her rival. Many other personal allusions of Spenser's may require to be understood within the like limits. And the incon- gruities which they involve might serve as texts for the novice in poetry and criticism on a subject where the experience of the adept is peculiarly needed by him. This subject is the nature and character of the Sycophantic or Court poet, and his strange apt- ness for spoiling by petty personal flatteries the symmetry and moral truth of a work he may have designed with real art and genius.

We distrust, furthermore, our editor's intimation that the three brethren, " Sansfoy," " Sansloy," and " Sansjoy," are alike imperson- ations of Mohammedanism and of the heathenish and promiscuously

wicked tendencies which were imputed to it by popular prejudice. A is true, the brethren are all called "Sarazins ;" but the word supplies a kind of local costume, which was perhaps needed for the comple- tion of Spenser's picttu•es. Besides, the epithet " Paynim " had in the Middle Ages become almost synonymous with Mussulman. 'raking a broad view of the references to Church history implied in the poem, we should say that " Sansfoy " alone must be con- sidered as the representative of Islam, or of all or any religions not nominally Christian. The names "Sansloy " and "Sansjoy" point to other heresies, audwe might not be far from the mark in calling these Anabaptism and Puritanism, or at least some other forms of A.ntinomianism and Asceticism. It would have been preposterous to stigmatize the faith of the Turk as joyless; we all know that the

abstinence which it inculcates from wine and, perhaps, from all strong drinks, is counterbalanced by the licence it accords to the male sex in another species of indulgence not less alluring or less perilous.

The entire excerpt from the Fairy Queene has been Bowd- lerized with considerable severity. In some places we should recommend our editor to reinstal some inoffensive lines of an offensive stanza, in order to throw a little light on the birth and

pedigree of one or two important personages. We should like it to appear somehow that Sir Satyr once had a satyr for his father, and not an ordinary man or human brute like Therion. In another place the reader may be a little too much shocked by learning how the giant Orgoglio tore a "snagged oke " from the bowels of his own mother, if he be not previously informed what sort of a parent it was who could sustain such a peculiar form of unfilial cruelty. One should be at least allowed here to learn from the poet that,-

" The greatest Earth his uncouth mother was, And blustring1EAus his boasted lyre,'"

—though we will be silent on the further details which are given of this mythical cohabitation.

In settling the orthography of his Faery Queene, Mr. Kitchin has laid himself somewhat open to the charge of making "two bites of a cherry." He has modernized Spenser, but not as fully as that poet (unlike Chaucer) might be modernized without detriment to his rhymes and numbers, that is to say, in ninety-nine words out of a hundred. Instead of this, our editor professes to have compared the texts of 1590 and 1596, and to have taken everywhere the more modern spelling of those that occur (which might often enough have happened to be that of the earlier edition, inasmuch as in the second we must recog- nize a more marked love of redundant letters, and of the " y " for " i," which is to John Bull a letter with a redundant flourish). He has not adhered to this plan very exactly ; else he might have given us " bloodie" for " bloudie " in the very first stanzas ; but for such omissions he may have had plausible reasons, which he has not specified.

But his method gives us at most a very few familiar forms,

which are gained by a great sacrifice of symmetry and method ; thus he makes mindes rhyme to kinds and finds, and what is more singular, hed to dredd, where one edition has hedd dredd, and the other, lied dred. We note these matters, because ordinary re- prints would make it appear that English people can copy anti- quated spellings with no other object than that of quizzing them (as it has been the constant habit of the Western nations during their modern career of progress, to treat everything that has once gone out of fashion in costume or in orthography as essentially barbarous, and everything in fashion as enlightened and msthetic).

In graver points, our editor prefers the edition of 1596, as hav- ing been corrected under the author's eye. But the fact of this correction will appear very questionable, if we observe that the _ list of errata in the first edition has been transferred bodily to the end of the second, and not applied in the proper places to correct the text. It must be owned that the second edition has a more uniform and compositor-like orthography than the first. But the text of 1590 has, nevertheless, its advantages ; and it is not, we think, without good reason that it was followed in Messrs. Pickering's edition of 1839. Mr. Kitchin's punctuation is in some measure conformed to modern laws and bylaws, but founded on a careful examina- tion of the old texts wherever they can explain any ambiguity.