ABSTRACT
From Tractulus de Carmine Dramatico ... , in John Buchler's Sacrarum Profanarumque Phrasium poeticarum Thesaurus (r669), pp. 396-7: Edmund Spenser is a man worthy immortal memory, one who described in heroic song the sum of Christian and moral virtues, most of them at any rate, for a wretched death preventing him (he is supposed to have died of starvation) he left his work unfinished. This is the more surprising since he was well known to the Queen, who had received the highest praise in his poem. The verses or stanzas of this poem accord with what is, after the Italian sonnet, the very finest arrangement of lines; as everyone knows in the ninth and last line a disyllabic foot longer than the others for the sake of grandeur. How the lines rhyme in this stanza is best seen from an example:
[quotes Faerie Queene II. xii. 71, omitting line 5] There are also additional works which survive, such as the Shepheardes Calender and certain others, but many are lost.!
