with men of a very different sort, till a fortunate exile set him free; and in some part he followed their ways. In his political views he must have imbibed from a ruthless time, and reckless associates, a spirit wholly alien from his own benign and sympathetic nature, or in his sagacious but pitiless state-paper on Ireland he would not have recommended courses as unrelenting as those which later drove him from his blazing home. It was, doubtless, also from a time in which controversial weapons were brandished in and out of place, that he learned to sour his youthful pastorals by declamations against the shepherds on the margin of the Tyber, though at a maturer age he admitted that the English monasteries, and many a roofless church, had suffered wrong from the “Blatant Beast,” Calumny

From thence into the sacred church he broke,

And robbed the chancell, and the deskes down threw,
And altars foulèd, and blasphemy spoke,

And the images, for all their goodly hew,

Did cast to ground, whilest none was them to rew.1

Neither did he wholly escape the lowering influences of a political time when despotic princes and their favourites were worshipped. That worship, which in many proceeded from obsequious self-interest, was probably in Spenser little more than an imaginative prodigality of the loyal instinct bequeathed by past ages, but attaching itself, for want of a better investment, to objects they would not have revered. Life, political and civil, "in all its equipage," was to him a

1 Book V. canto x. stanza 25.

splendid pageant, and seeing behind all things the goodly "idea" which they symbolised, a royal court must have appeared in his eyes "the great Schoolmaistresse of all Courtesy," and as such to be venerated. He was not one to waste a life climbing official palace stairs; but he spent on such dreary pastimes time sufficient to have produced several books of his immortal poem; and the memorial of that time remains in the well-known lines

Full little know'st thou that hast not tried,
What hell it is, etc.

In one respect, however, it must be admitted that the Renaissance had assisted Spenser: it had imparted to him an acquaintance with classical, and especially with mythological lore, such as no medieval writer possessed. His own profound sense of beauty made him fully appreciate what was thus presented to him; and whereas medieval writers had often dealt with antiquity as medieval painters had done, placing the head of a saint upon the neck of a Hebe or a Mars, he entered into its spirit in an ampler manner than any of his predecessors, or any southern poet had done. He had learned much from ancient philosophy, especially that of the Academy, to which his poetry was indebted for the great Platonic "ideas," a swanflight of which is always floating over his meads and vales, and for those lofty aspirations which are the sustaining spirit of his poetry. The degree in which the sixteenth century was animated by new discoveries, political changes, and intellectual controversies, must

also have had an awakening effect on his genius. But they also, and in a lamentable degree, drew that genius aside from what would have been its natural walk. In the Divina Commedia the middle ages had bequeathed to all time, not an epic, as it has sometimes been called, but a mystical poem, incomparably the highest flight of poetry since the volume of the Hebrew prophets was closed. The great romantic poem of the middle ages was never written, and the opportunity is lost. Spenser was the man to have written it; but even if the Faery Queen had been finished, it would not have wholly proved that work. It contains much that belongs to such a theme: it includes much that is alien to it and—a matter yet more to be regretted— it misses much that is essential to it. Spenser lived near enough to the middle ages to have understood them in a more profoundly sympathetic way than is possible to us. His imagination and his affections followed the medieval type. All that he saw was to him the emblem of things unseen; the material world thus became the sacrament of a spiritual world, and the earthly life a betrothal to a life beyond the grave. Spenser's moral being was also to a large extent mediæval in character, notwithstanding the sectarian teaching he had imbibed in youth. Had he been a medieval poet, he would have given us on a large scale such illustrations of things spiritual, seen from the poetic point of view, as Chaucer's enchanting "Legend of St. Cecilia" has given us in a fragmentary form. In the early chronicles he would also have

found large materials; for even the minuter events of the middle ages must have then retained a significance lost for us. Still more full of meaning must the chivalrous romances have then been. He would have selected and combined their treasures, and become their great poetic representative, as Homer was the representative of numberless bards whose minstrelsies had delighted the youth of Greece. Spenser would there, too, have found a far ampler field for that unconscious symbolism which belongs to high poetry, and especially to his; and he would not have been driven upon those artificial allegories which chill many a page of his verse. Symbols and allegories, though often confounded, are things wholly different in character. Symbols have a real, and allegories but an arbitrary existence. All things beautiful and excellent are symbols of an excellence analogous to them, but ranged higher in Nature's scale. Allegories are abstractions of the understanding and fancy; and it is the especial function of imagination and passion, not by any means to pass by deep thoughts, which are their most strengthening nourishment, but to take them out of the region of the abstract, which is that of science, not of poetry, and present them to our sympathies in the form of the concrete, investing them with life-its breath, its blood, and its motion.

It was for the human side of a great mediæval theme that Spenser's characteristics would have preeminently qualified him, as it was the supernatural side that challenged most the genius of Dante.

C

He

had a special gift for illustrating the offices and relationships of social life. For such illustration his age was unsuited. The world was passing through one of those transitional periods, so irregular in their nature, and made up of elements so imperfectly combined, that a picture of national life and the civilisation of an epoch, attempted while the confusion lasts, must needs be deficient in harmony. The world has other periods in which society has adjusted itself, and blended its elements into a consistent whole ; in which the kaleidoscope has been turned round until it has reached that point at which its contents emerge from disorder, and fling themselves into a pattern; and to such a period we may ourselves be on our way. One of these periods was that sung by Homer: in it the best characters, and the worst, had a something in common; and hence the admirable consistency of that social picture presented by him. Another such period was exemplified by the middle ages, which, abundant as they were in extremes of good and of evil, held notwithstanding certain common characteristics admitted alike by those who designate them the "Ages of Faith," and those who call them "the dark ages." Spenser's poem would doubtless have illustrated both the evil and the good in them, but there would have been more light than gloom in his picture. His Faery Queen's magnificent aimthat of setting forth those great Virtues which are in fact so many great Truths embodied in corresponding affections would have thus been harmoniously real