Excerpt from Spenser, the School of the Fletchers, and Milton But the boy Milton took some of his Spenser second-hand from contemporary Spenserians who, for the moment, loomed large because they were in the foreground. The juvenilia of great poets are almost always tinged with the intermediary influence of the poetae minimi of the day who echo their masters with facile prettiness. So Keats, in his early work, took some of his Spenser with sugar and water from Hunt. By 1627 the names of Giles and Phineas Fletcher must have been prominent at Milton's own university, Cambridge, where he was a novitiate in poetry for seven years. The Fletchers seized upon subjects which were in the air. In an age of religious poetry they wrote quaintly and often beautifully, in ingenious and eccentric allegory, of the life of Christ and of the soul of man. They borrowed reverently, but with na'ive freedom, from the riches of The Faerie Queene, which they ransacked from end to end for allegorical figures, memorable lines, sometimes nearly whole stanzas. Over all they embroidered the curious, stiff conceits that were everywhere high in favor. They were enthusiastic imitators of the Spenserian stanza. As Spenser had given new music to the eight-line stanza by the addition of a final alex andrine, so the Fletchers experimented by adding the long line to the rhyme-royal, the ottava rima, and many other current from Spenser. I do not wish to defend them individually but to make a brief specimen list for the sake of general impressions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.