edition of Books I-III of the Faery Queene, which came out in that year with Books IV-VI, then first given to the world. In 1597 he returned to Ireland, hoping for an honourable and quiet life at Kilcolman. But it was a vain hope. The Queen had already recommended him to the Irish Government as Sheriff of Cork, when the Tyrone rebellion broke out in 1598, and he was obliged to flee in great haste to save his life. In the confusion and terror of flight one of his little ones by some strange chance was left behind in the castle; and the rebels, following swiftly after, sacked and burnt the house. The child was never more heard of, and probably perished in the fire. Spenser reached England broken-hearted, and next January, some three months later, his body rested by Chaucer's side in the south transept of Westminster Abbey.

So his life withered away; he died at the age of forty-five or forty-six. The limits of that life were almost those of the reign of the great Queen; it seemed to take its tone and character from it. Spenser's poems are full of allusions to the young life of England-to her outburst of national feeling, her devotion for the Queen, her resistance to Spain, her ocean adventures, her great men, her high artistic and intellectual culture, her romantic spirit, her championship of freedom abroad, and her reverence for law and authority at home. Spenser is the first of the great series of writers who are the glory of English literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare appears soon after the publication of the Faery Queene; Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity is brought out in 1594; Bacon's Essays in 1597. The land is a-glow with every form of life: and Spenser connects the past with the future. Looking back to his master, Chaucer, he draws his own England with a romantic hand, the chivalrous and the imaginative qualities of his mind being rather of the past than of his own time. He couches his marvellous creations in a somewhat archaic language; not in an obsolete dialect, as some have said, but with a natural affinity for older forms and turns of idiom, which help to give the proper

1 See Todd's Life, Ed. 1863, p. xlvii.

colouring to his pictures; while at the same time we can trace the real life of his age in every canto of his great work. His star set, wept by the unfortunate Earl of Essex, just as the other lights were rising in the firmament; he had but a glimpse of the coming splendour, when he was cut off in the midst of his days. But he had done enough to entitle him to his acknowledged place among English poets. Shakespeare stands alone; and who can be reckoned next after Milton, if it be not Spenser ?

Short curling hair, a full moustache, cut after the pattern of Lord Leicester's, close-clipped beard, heavy eyebrows, and under them thoughtful brown eyes, whose upper eyelids weigh them dreamily down; a long and straight nose, strongly developed, answering to a long and somewhat spare face, with a well-formed sensible-looking forehead; a mouth almost obscured by the moustache, but still shewing rather full lips denoting feeling, well set together, so that the warmth of feeling shall not run riot, with a touch of sadness in them;-such is the look of Spenser, as his portrait hands it down to us. A refined, thoughtful, warmhearted, pure-souled Englishman. The face is of a type still current among us; and we may read in it loyalty, ability, and simplicity. Its look is more modern in character than that of most of the portraits of the period,—modern, not of the Stuart gaiety, or of the Hanoverian heaviness, but as of our own age in its best form, in its return to religious feeling, truthfulness, and nobility of thought and character.

We have ample opportunities for studying the poet's mind and education. At Cambridge his love for poetry grew strong, though vitiated at first by the bad taste of his friends, who worshipped the English hexameter, in a rude form, as a new revelation of poetic power and promise; but the strength of the poet was not likely to be held in such bands as these, and the Shepheards Calender, published some three years after he left Cambridge, proves at once how entirely he had freed himself from these trammels. His studies, by natural affinity, led him to those sources in which the highest poetry was to be found. He was full of Biblical knowledge and feeling: we can trace the influence of the Hebrew

poets, and of the more unconscious poetry of the New Testament, in all he wrote. He knew and understood the Homeric epics; was conversant 'with the chief Latin poets; studied, and was master of Italian, in order that he might enjoy the free fancy of Ariosto, and the more classical and colder muse of the Gierusalemme Liberata. Drawing deep draughts of poetical life from the freshest of English poets, he delighted in all ways to proclaim himself the disciple of the ancient 'Tityrus,' the father of English poetry, Dan Chaucer himself.

Nor did he neglect stricter studies.

Fascinated by Plato,

as we see by his 'Four Hymns on Love and Beauty,' he was no less filled with respect for the great "Master of them that know m," and we see traces of the influence of Aristotle throughout the Faery Queene. But it is Aristotle idealized. We have the Twelve Moral Virtues, with their crowning chief, Magnanimity; but they take the forms of knights and heroes, and Arthur, mysterious type of man's perfection, is their Prince.

Fortunate in his studies, he was not less fortunate in his friends. He dwelt among the noblest of the youth of England. No wonder that high dreams of gentle life filled his mind. He lived among those who reproduced in England the chivalrous hopes and proud endeavours which had, just half a century before, gilded the last moments of the German Ritterdom-the knightestate, with its dream of a world to be regenerated by the Gospel and the knightly sword. We think of Ulrich von Hütten, and Franz von Sickingen, crushed by the joint weight of lay and ecclesiastical nobility in arms against the revolution, to them almost as terrible as a peasant war, which would have destroyed their grand feudal privilege, and set up in its room a knightly aristocracy and an emancipated people, governed by the Bible and the sense of honour! Spenser's whole character felt the influence of the refinement and nobility of mind which he saw around him: Sidney, Raleigh, and Lord Grey, and at greater distance, Walsingham, Leicester, and Essex, taught him that

m

"Maestro di color che sanno." Dante, Inf. iv. 131.

high sense of honour, that loyalty and sensitiveness, which marked him in both his life and his writings.

Add to these a pure and deep sense of religion; and an acquaintance with the subtilties of that Calvinism which was the aristocratic form of Protestantism at that time in both France and England, and we shall obtain a fair conception of the elements of that genius which produced the Faery Queene.

...

The First Book of the Faery Queene is in reality a complete work, taken by itself. Hallam tells us that "it is generally admitted to be the finest of the six. In no other is the allegory so clearly conceived by the poet or so steadily preserved. . . . That the Red Cross Knight designates the militant Christian, whom Una, the true Church, loves, whom Duessa, the type of Popery, seduces, who is reduced almost to despair, but rescued by the intervention of Una and the assistance of Faith, Hope, and Charity, is what no one feels any difficulty in acknowledging, but what every one may easily read the poem without perceiving or remembering. In an allegory conducted with such propriety, and concealed or revealed with so much art, there can surely be nothing to repel our taste; and those who read the First Book of the Faery Queene without pleasure, must seek (what others perhaps will be at no loss to discover for them) a different cause for their insensibility than the tediousness or insipidity of allegorical poetry. Every canto of this book teems with the choicest beauties of imagination; he came to it in the freshness of his genius, which shines throughout "."

The general bearings of the poem are marked out with sufficient distinctness by the poet himself in his Letter to Sir W. Raleigh, to which we call the reader's attention. It will be found printed as a kind of preface to this little volume. From it we learn that Prince Arthur is the centrepiece of the whole work; that lesser knights will be introduced, Book by Book, endeavouring their best, each for the virtue which he represents; but that the help of

n Hallam, Literature of Europe, Part II. ch. ii. § 80.

Arthur, or Magnificence °, who was "perfected in the twelve private moral virtues," is always needed to bring each adventure through. So in the First Book, the hero, the Red Cross Knight, after sundry slips and failings, is rescued by Arthur out of the Giant's Castle in which he lies a helpless thrall. Taking the story as such, and setting allegory aside, we must be struck with the rapid movement of the tale, its completeness of structure, the great variety of scenes, the beauty of the descriptive passages, and the numerous types of character, all distinctly and freely touched off. The whole book is full of graphic power, of pictures bright or dark, vivid personification, marked character; nor do either the moral or the religious sentiments fall below the poetic level. It is the highest poetic fancy combined with most complete truthfulness.

But if we undertake also to interpret the allegorical bearings of the poem-for such we may fairly call this single Book-we shall find ourselves in the presence of another series of phenomena full of real interest.

same.

Two allegories underlie the tale: one of abstract virtues and religious qualities, the other of the concrete presentations of the The first is the struggle of the human soul after holiness and purity, under the guidance of 'gospel truth;' the second sets before us the chief personages of Spenser's day, each playing a part, according to the character of each, in this 'life's drama.'

If we study the more abstract side of the allegory, we shall be aware of the Christian warrior, prototype of Bunyan's Pilgrim (and the resemblance is not merely fortuitous), who, with many failures and some downfalls, wins his heavenward way over the vanquished bodies of sins and temptations. Clad (as the poet says) in the armour spoken of by St. Paul, and guided by snowwhite Truth, he goes forth to fight against the Dragon, the 'old Serpent,' who has wrought man's ruin and holds him beleaguered, having blasted the land which ought to be a paradise.

• Spenser thus translates that virtue of Magnanimity, which seemed to Aristotle to contain in itself all the moral virtues. It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that Spenser's twelve virtues are not the same as Aristotle's.