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Dryden's Note on The Faerie Queene V.vii.24 and the Gifts of Literal ReadingThis article discusses an annotation that John Dryden made in one of his copies of Spenser's poems. In it, Dryden expressed surprise at the sudden emergence of the gifts that Britomart gives to the priests of Isis in Book V of The Faerie Queene. This annotation is used to explore the tendency of objects suddenly to emerge in Spenser's poem, with varying degrees of explanation for their origins. This tendency is part of what grants the literal surface of the narrative its perennial capacity to surprise and delight. Where does the stuff in The Faerie Queene come from? What kind of questions should and shouldn't we ask of the sheer clutter to be found in Faerieland, the flotsam and jetsam that is left behind as the poem's tide of meaning moves in and out? These are questions that have been of some interest to recent scholars-and, as the attention being paid to the history of marks left in extant copies of Spenser's poems has begun to suggest, they were questions that concerned his earlier readers too. This essay will focus on a specific annotation made by one of Spenser's most noteworthy seventeenth-century readers, John Dryden, in which he ques-

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The dialogue between Adam and Raphael that fills the middle books of Paradise Lost closes with a dispute surrounding the value of the sense of touch, which the angel dismisses as too bestial to be valuable. Touch had long been dismissed in similar terms by Aristotle, Marcilius Ficino, and others, but I argue that the angel’s view should not be accepted as John Milton’s own. He explores in Eden the manifold forms that touch can take, acknowledging the potential of the sense to damage and perturb but also suggesting that its intermittent and habitual exercise is foundational to unfallen human experience.