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The Faerie Queene reflects, perhaps, more fully than any other English work, the many-sided literary influences of the Renascence. It was the blossom of a richly composite culture. Its immediate models were Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the first forty cantos of which were published in 1515, and Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, printed in 1581.
Dante speaks still more clearly in the ninth and tenth cantos of the 'Inferno. That terrible fiery field covered with half-opened tombs, from which issued cries of hopeless agony, was peopled by the two great classes of those whom the Church had vanquished or expelled in the thirteenth century.
There is, perhaps, in the whole range of literature, no nobler homage to Art than that which is contained in the tenth and twelfth cantos of the "Purgatory," in which Dante represents the Creator himself as using its means to impress the lessons of truth upon those whose souls were being purified for the final attainment of heaven.
Each was in her own line a 'power, each could coax large advances of money out of the pockets of millionaires to further certain 'schemes' which were vaguely talked about, but which never came to fruition, each had a little bevy of young journalists in attendance, press boys whom they petted and flattered, and persuaded to write paragraphs concerning their wit, wisdom and beauty, and how they 'looked radiant in pink' or 'dazzling in pea green. Contemplating first one and then the other of these ladies, Julian almost resolved to compose a poem about them, entitled 'The Sirens' and, dividing it into Two Cantos, to dedicate the First Canto to Lady Beaulyon and the Second to Mrs.
As a proof of the extent to which Italian books were read in England at the end of the sixteenth century, we may take a stray sentence from a letter of Harvey, in which he disparages the works of Robert Greene: 'Even Guicciardine's silver histories and Ariosto's golden cantos grow out of request: and the Countess of Pembroke's "Arcadia" is not green enough for queasy stomachs; but they must have seen Greene's "Arcadia," and I believe most eagerly longed for Greene's "Faery Queen."
The early cantos were ushered into the world amid a chorus of mingled applause and execration. The minor Reviews, representing middle-class respectability, were generally vituperative, and the higher authorities divided in their judgments.
Some verses were printed which were attributed to him, and he was instantly thrown into the Bastille. He passed a year in prison, without society, books, or pen and ink. While imprisoned, the idea occurred to him of writing a great French epic, and he actually composed in his dungeon two cantos of it, which afterwards were not altered.
Francis and that of St. Dominic had upon the poet's mind is shown by the contrast in tone in which in successive cantos he tells of these two great pillars of the Church. In lines 71 and 72, speaking of Poverty, the bride of the Saint, he says,
At the same time she addressed a letter to her old friend, Messer Matteo Boiardo, at Ferrara, requesting him to send her the concluding cantos of his poem, the "Orlando Innamorato," which had not as yet been given to the world.
One night, for the entertainment of his fellow-passengers in a stagecoach, he repeated two cantos of Scott's poem of "Marmion"! I have heard him quote, in a public address before the New York University, a whole page of Cicero without the slip of a single word! His passion for polysyllables was very amusing, and he loved to astonish his hearers by his "sesquipedalian" phraseology.
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