"Even Spenser himself, though assuredly one of the greatest poets that ever lived, could not succeed in the attempt to make allegory interesting. It was in vain that he lavished the riches of his mind on the House of Pride and the House of Temperance. One unpardonable fault, the fault of tediousness, pervades the whole of the Fairy Queen. We become sick of cardinal virtues and deadly sins, and long for the society of plain men and women. Of the persons who read the first Canto, not one in ten reaches the end of the First Book, and not one in a hundred perseveres to the end of the poem. Very few and very weary are those who are in at the death of the Blatant Beast. If the last six books, which are said to have been destroyed in Ireland, had been preserved, we doubt whether any heart less stout than that of a commentator would have held out to the end."
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Note: The Blatant Beast does not die in the poem. C. A. Patrides comments: "Macaulay himself, it is clear, did not persevere to the end." In Figures in a Renaissance Context, eds. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 35. Quoted in Hazel Wilkinson's Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Introduction, p. 1
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The Faerie Queene
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