Miscellanea hibernica Author:Kuno Meyer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Criticism : The Observations On The Faerie Queene Of Spenser 1754-1762 "Warton did not immediately find himself in another field. He underto... more »ok a number of different kinds of work at this time, and either partly or wholly abandoned each. British antiquities claimed his attention, and this interest produced the Description of . . . Winchester;1 the study of mediaeval antiquity resulted in a project merely—that of collaborating with his brother in a history of the revival of learning,2— but it bore fruit later; as a result of his interest in the classics he planned translations of Homer and Apollonius Bhodius; the Observations on the Faerie Queene was the commencement of a larger plan of writing observations on the best of Spenser's work. The hand of the poet is as evident as that of the scholar in the Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser.3 Warton's love for Spenser and his poetical enthusiasm were here first turned to criticism, but of a sort unknown before. And the secret of the new quality is to be found in this poetical enthusiasm of the writer which enabled him to study the poem from itsownpointLof. view,.Jiot Jiampered. .by artificial, pseudo-classical standards of which the poet had known nothing, but with a sympathetic appreciation of his literary models, the spirit of his age, Tiis heritage of romance and chivalry, and the whole many-coloured life of the middle ages. These things Warton was able to see and to ,' reveal not with the eighteenth century prejudice against, and ignorance of, the Gothic, but with the understanding and long familiarity of the real lover of Spenser. 1A Description of the City, College and Cathedral of Winchester. . . . The whole illustrated with . . . particulars, collected from a manuscript of A. Wood. London, n. ...« less