3-082-428 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Spenser's "Faerie Queene", 1895. '"CANTO IX. His loves and lignage Arthur tells: The knight's knit friendly bands: Sir Trevisan flies from Despayre, Whom Redcrosse knight withstands". The completion of the first book of the "Faerie Queene" in the really gorgeous (it is a genuine Elizabethan word and not displaced) edition which Mr. Allen has enlisted Mr. Walter Crane to produce, gives a better opportunity of estimating it than the first part alone could afford...the single books even in this stately quarto form will not make cumbrous volumes; while the ample space allotted enables the peculiar beauty of the Spenserian stanza to unfold itself and be enjoyed after a fashion impossible when, as in the ordinary editions, ten or a dozen such stanzas are crowded on a page. Of course the ideal thing would, be to have Spenser actually illuminated - to catch your artist, buy much vellum, and shut the two up together till something like the wonderful works of old were produced. But in default of this the present issue provides as good a substitute as can reasonably be expected'. George Saintsbury. Illustration by Walter Crane from "Spenser's Faerie Queene" edited by T. J. Wise, (London: George Allen), published in "Illustrated London News", 1895.