Luxuriance and irregularity were the two features of the new literature. Sir Philip Sydney may be selected as exhibiting the greatness and the folly of the prevailing taste. How can his pastoral epic, "The Arcadia," be described? It is but a recreation, a poetical romance written in the country for the amusement of a sister, a work of fashion, a relic, but it shows the best of the general spirit, the jargon of the world of culture, fantastic imagination, excessive sentiment, a medley of events which suited men scarcely recovered from barbarism. At his period men's heads were full of tragical images, and Sydney's "Arcadia" contains enough of them to supply half a dozen epics. And Sydney was only a soldier in an army; there is a multitude about him, a multitude of poets. How happens it that when this generation was exhausted true poetry ended in England as true painting in Italy and Flanders? It was because an epoch of the mind came and passed away. These men had new ideas and no theories in their heads. Their emotions were not the same as ours. For them all things had a soul, and though they had no more beauty then than now, men found them more beautiful.
Among all the poems of this time there is one truly divine--Spenser's "Faërie Queene." Everything in his life was calculated to lead Spenser to ideal poetry; but the heart within is the true poet. Before all, his was a soul captivated by sublime and chaste beauty. Philosophy and landscapes, ceremonies and ornaments, splendours of the country and the court, on all which he painted or thought he impressed his inward nobleness. Spenser remains calm in the fervour of invention. He is epic, that is, a narrator. No modern is more like Homer. Like Homer, he is always simple and clear; he makes no leap, he omits no argument, he preserves the natural sequence of ideas while presenting noble classical images. Like Homer, again, he is redundant, ingenuous: even childish. He says everything, and repeats without limit his ornamental epithets.
To expand in epic faculties in the region where his soul is naturally borne, he requires an ideal stage, situated beyond the bounds of reality, in a world which could never be. His most genuine sentiments are fairy-like. Magic is the mould of his mind. He carries everything that he looks upon into an enchanted land. Only the world of chivalry could have furnished materials for so elevated a fancy. It is the beauty in the poet's heart which his whole works try to express, a noble yet laughing beauty, English in sentiment, Italian in externals, chivalric in subject, representing a unique epoch, the appearance of Paganism in a Christian race, and the worship of form by an imagination of the North.