I04 Charles G. Osgood, 



In canto xi B is combined with C, though C is subordinate and 

 incidental to B.^^ 



B indeed here becomes elaborate pageantry, and the two ele- 

 ments represent two favorite and dominating interests of the 

 poet. 



His love of all that is old is readily apparent to every obser- 

 vant reader. The words 'ancient,' 'antique,' 'old,' 'eld,' and their 

 kind, are always on his lips, often without designation of a par- 

 ticular period, or distinction between myth and history. For his 

 masterpiece he dared revive setting, legend, and apparatus which 

 were long out of fashion and covered with dust. His dialect 

 is everywhere, in varying degree, archaic. He is keenly suscep- 

 tible to the charm which age and long association with the life 

 of men add to everything — so keenly that this charm sometimes 

 becomes an illusion that deceives him. At the beginning of this 

 pageant of the rivers, he iuA^okes for new inspiration the IMuse 



To whom those rolles, layd up in heaven above, 

 And records of antiquitie appeare. 



As in his love of pageantry, so in his love of topographical 

 antiquities, Spenser was of his time. It was the century of 

 Leland, Hall, Stow, Speed, Harrison, Holinshed, and Camden. 

 His friend Sir Walter Raleigh was a member of Archbishop 

 Parker's Society of Antiquaries, and in such works as these men 

 produced, Spenser, from early manhood, found both a stimulus 

 for his poetic powers and material to work on. 



That Spenser knew the poems by Vallans and Camden is well- 

 nigh certain. He was never so given as his great Puritan suc- 

 cessor to verbal echo and refinement upon the details of his 

 original; therefore one is not surprised to find little evidence 

 that his verses about rivers owed few if any details to similar 

 poems. ''^ 



Much as two of the nymphs crowned the two swans, when 

 they set out, with garlands of freshest flowers, and sang a song 



""Cf. stanzas 15, 16, 19, 26, 28, 31-9, 4i-3- 



""The resemblance between Proth. 1 19-21 and a passage in The Two 

 Swans, remarked in Athcnsum 1897. i, 379, can hardly have been a 

 coincidence. 



