496 APPENDIX TO PART II

would give them a definition of the poet and the painter together, which they would remember, though it was a hissing one. The poet or the painter was a man who concentrated sermons into sights. If they could not do this, they deserved not the name of poet or painter. A few strokes from the pen or the pencil should convey to the mind in a moment what it would take an hour to describe. Supposing he was to attempt to describe the vice of gluttony, it would take him a long time to bring before them the hardness of heart, the degradation of intellect, and all the evils which resulted from it. But Spenser did this in twenty-seven lines in grotesque. The Red Cross Knight in the course of his chivalry is led unhappily to the House of Pride. The poet there displays to him the Seven Mortal Sins, one of whom, Gluttony, is thus described:¹-

“And by his side rode loathsome Gluttony,

Deforméd creature, on a filthy swine;

His belly was up-blowne with luxury,

And eke with fatnesse swollen were his eyne,

And like a crane his neck was long and fyne,

With which he swallowed up excessive feast.

. . . . .

“In greene vine leaves he was right fitly clad;

For other clothes he could not wear for heat;

And on his head an yvie girland had,

From under which fast trickled down the sweat;

Still as he rode, he somewhat still did eat,

And in his handle did bear a bouzing can,

Of which he supt so oft, that in his seat

His dronken corse he scarse upholden can. .

. . . . .

Full of diseases was his carcass blew,

And a dry dropsie through his flesh did flow.”

Here evils, which would take a long sermon to work out, were described in not twenty-seven lines, as he had said, but in sixteen, and were fixed in the memory in such a way as not to be forgotten. Take another example from the same poet,-his description of Avarice:²-

“And greedy Avarice by him did ride

Upon a camell loaden all with gold;

Two iron coffers hong on either side,

With precious metall full as they might hold;

And in his lap an heap of coine he told;

. . . . .

And thred-bare cote and cobbled shoes he ware;

Ne scarse good morsell all his life did tast;

But both from backe and belly still did spare,

To fill his bags, and richesse to compare.”

24. In both these cases, and throughout the greater parts of Spenser and

¹ [Faerie Queene, book i. canto iv. 21-23. Ruskin cites some of the lines in Stones of Venice, vol. ii. (Vol. X. p. 402).]

² [Ibid., book i. canto iv. 27-28. See, again, Stones of Venice, vol. ii. (Vol. X. p. 403), where Ruskin compares Spenser’s “Avarice” with that on the Ducal Palace.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]