The Fiend's Delight By Dod Grile

Yesterday I lay in a bushrope hammock in an Indian house, finishing a flash-card lesson on numbers.

Robin promis'd me / A' my winter vittle; / Fient haet he had but three / Goos feathers and whittle.

His [Edmund Spenser’s] stile was in his own time allowed to be vicious, so darkened with old words and peculiarities of phrase, and so remote from common use, that Johnson boldly pronounces him to have written no language.