rival of our own century, the 'Idylls of the King.' As a whole it is confusing; but we need not treat it as a whole. Its continued interest soon breaks down. But it is probably best that Spenser gave his mind the vague freedom which suited it, and that he did not make efforts to tie himself down to his pre-arranged but too ambitious plan. We can hardly lose our way in it, for there is no way to lose. It is a wilderness in which we are left to wander. But there may be interest and pleasure in a wilderness if we are prepared for the wandering. Still the complexity, or rather the uncared-for and clumsy arrangement of the poem, is matter which disturbs a reader's satisfaction till he gets accustomed to the poet's way and resigns himself to it. It is a heroic poem in which the heroine who gives her name to it never appears; a story of which the basis and starting-point is whimsically withheld for disclosure in the last book, which was never written." Another objection often made to the "Faerie Queene" is the archaic character of the language. Spenser is in the habit of using words that had ceased to be used in his own day. He goes to Chaucer for old forms, wishing probably to fix them permanently in our English tongue. Poets are makers in two senses. They give a shape to imaginative conceptions, and they form the language in which they write. It was therefore by no means unreasonable of Spenser, the first poet worthy to be named as the successor of Chaucer, to endeavour as far as he might, to recall words and expressions that had fallen out of use. But he was too daring in this exploit; for not only did he employ obsolete words, he also invented words with a contemptuous disregard of precedent or grammar, in order to suit the exigencies of rhyme. These eccentricities, although hurtful to the poet's fame, interfere but little with the pleasure of his readers, who, if they cannot sometimes explain a word, can always guess at a meaning. Dean Church has pointed out another fault in Spenser's poetry, which unhappily he shares in common with the poets of his own and of the next two centuries. The adulation of monarchs has been until of late years the glaring vice of poets. The disease was at its height in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and Spenser, a great poet, offended greatly. This at least may be said, that there was more reasonableness in his flattery, absurd though it sometimes appears, than in the stupendous adulation lavished by smaller poets upon the Stuarts and Georges. Another count brought against the "Faerie Queene" is the offensiveness of the imagery sometimes employed by the poet. Spenser can excite the strongest feelings of disgust, and does this in such forcible language that the reader is compelled to remember what he would fain forget. All great poets, however, know how much in their art, as in the art of the painter, may be effected by contrast. The presentation of a disagreeable scene makes the reader all the more ready to welcome a scene of beauty; and Spenser, who is pre-eminently the poet of the beautiful, no doubt used repulsive imagery as a foil to the incomparable loveliness of the passages in which his genius expands most freely. In vivid power of representation and a belief in what he sees, Spenser has been compared to Homer. He is like him in the directness and force of his imagery, in his simplicity and homeliness, in the faith with which he narrates impossible adventures. To an artificial, world-ridden nature, Spenser may seem childish; he is really childlike,) and to him may be applied with more exquisite pertinence, the fine lines which Collins dedicated to Tasso "Prevailing poet! whose undoubting mind Believed the magic wonders which he sung! To many readers the principal stumbling-block in the "Faerie Queene" is the allegory. The modern mind is not attracted by the figurative representation of ideas and if the "Pilgrim's Progress" continues to be the most popular of books, it is because Bunyan's pictures are regarded as real, because the personations of spiritual agencies speak and move in his pages as if endowed with bodily life. We forget the allegory while reading about Christian and Christiana, Great-heart and Giant Despair, and we may, without much loss, forget the allegory (which, by the way, Spenser himself often forgets) while reading the "Faerie Queene." The student will do well to master the purport of the poem, as explained by its author in his letter to Raleigh; but, having done this, it is not necessary that he should perplex himself with the attempt, often a vain one, to interpret the allegorical meaning which is supposed to pervade the work. Moreover,(although a fault in the construction of the "Faerie Queene," it is to the reader's advantage that each book can be regarded as a separate poem.) The first book, which is, as Hallam observes, the finest of the six, is indeed a complete poem in itself, and it is one with which the student will do well to gain a thorough familiarity. He should learn by heart all its finest stanzas ; he should master all the difficult passages, the allusions with which it abounds, the purpose with which it is written; and in doing this he cannot have a better guide than the edition published by Mr. Kitchin in the Clarendon Press Series. But I hope the student will discover for himself, without the aid of a teacher, the noble lessons to be gathered from this divine poem-lessons which, like flowers by the wayside, instruct unconsciously and through the potent influence of beauty.) The reader who, like Keats, "ramps" through this splendid work, will overlook or forget its faults, in his admiration of its gorgeous imagery, the enchanting melodiousness of the verse, the wealth of fancy and imagination, which the poet lavishes so freely.) (Spenser is diffuse; he takes his own way, and, like a river, winds "at his own sweet will." Do you find fault with this method of a poet's workmanship, which enables him to reveal at every turn some fresh vision of beauty? or do you prefer to the secret movements of the stream that "winds about and in and out," and "murmurs under moon and stars in brambly wildernesses," the open and orderly but sluggish course of the canal? The metre used by Spenser is a striking feature of the poem. He was the inventor of it, and it is therefore termed Spenserian. The stanza, consisting of nine lines, and ending with an Alexandrine-a measure termed by Shelley "inexpressibly beautiful," and by Professor Wilson the finest. ever conceived by the soul of man-is not well fitted for rapid narrative; but for meditative verse, and for the dreamy pictures of beauty in which Spenser delighted, it is an incomparable instrument. And this has been felt so strongly by later poets, that several of the most familiar poems in the languageThomson's "Castle of Indolence," Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night," Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes," and Byron's "Childe Harold," for example-are written in the Spenserian stanza. But not one of these poets can be said to have treated it with the mastery displayed by Spenser.* The following passage from the first canto of the poem, in which the Red Cross Knight and "heavenly Una" seek shelter from a storm, will suffice to illustrate Spenser's metre and spelling "Enforst to seeke some covert nigh at hand, |