the Face of Him who, when it came from His hand, had pronounced it "very good"; and what he saw as a man, he confessed as a poet. He ". was not disobedient to the heavenly vision," though he sometimes gazed on vulgar prosperities "with a dazzled eye."

There are and we are bound not to conceal the fact-serious blots upon Spenser's poetry, but these are obviously unhappy inconsistencies when compared with its immense merits, moral as well as imaginative; nor is there any poet in whom it is more easy to discriminate between the evil which is accidental, and the good which is essential. Where Spenser is himself, the greatness of his ideal hangs around his poetry like the halo round the head of a saint. His poetry has that gift without which all others, including even that of imagination itself, leaves it but a maimed and truncated thing—a torso without a head. It has a soul. In this respect Spenser was as like Tasso as he was unlike Ariosto, whom he too often imitated, but from whom he derived little save harm. It is noteworthy that Shelley, who admired Spenser almost as much as Wordsworth and Southey did, expressed himself in disparaging terms of Ariosto; while Byron, who was a great reader of Ariosto, gave back the volumes of Spenser which Leigh Hunt had urged him to peruse, with no remark except, "I can make nothing of him."

The magnificent ideal design on which Spenser founded his Faery Queen was one which dedicated itself pre-eminently to the exaltation of humanity. His

aim was "to strengthen man by his own mind"; teaching him to submit that mind and its labours to the regimen of those twelve great Virtues which, according to the teaching of antiquity, preside like tutelary guardians over all social polities. Thus to vanquish all evil by simply making Virtue meet Wrong face to face, and strike it down-the great idea at the heart of chivalry-was a noble conception.

Such a poem could never have been conceived by one who had been rendered indifferent to human interests through an exclusive devotion to ideal Beauty or abstract Truth. Embodied Vices are but abstractions, and do not constitute human characters, because the Vices are themselves but accidents of human nature when disnatured. It is otherwise with the Virtues they belong to the essence of human nature; and in a large measure they create by the predominance now of this virtue, now of that, the different types of human character, each type drawing to itself by a gradual accretion the subordinate qualities most in harmony with that fundamental virtue. A true poet's knowledge of human character is thus in a large measure the result of a moral insight which sees both its intellectual and practical development enclosed within their moral germ, like the tree within the seed: though it is by a very different faculty-viz. observation-that he is enabled to realise his knowledge and delineate that character. Where the conception of character is a true one, that truthfulness stands attested by its consistency, the

different qualities which compose that character coalescing into a perfect whole, alike when they possess an obvious resemblance to each other, and when, though unlike, they are supplemental to each other. Let us illustrate this by three of Spenser's favourite characters. Belphoebe is his great type of Purity, as her twin sister Amoret is of Love. Britomart is as eminently a type of Purity as Belphoebe, but notwithstanding, she is an essentially different character; and while Belphoebe glides like a quivered Dian through the forests, and sends shaft on shaft after the flying deer, Britomart cannot be contented except when she rides forth on heroic enterprise. Amoret, Belphoebe's sister, is equally unlike both: she can. love only, love always, endure all things for love, and love but one. The woodland sport and the war field are alike alien to her. Britomart, who unites both those sister types of character, loves as ardently as Amoret, but she cannot, like her, love only; her life must be a life of arduous action and sustained endeavour, and while these are with her she is contented alike in the presence or absence of her lover. The reason of this heart-freedom in the midst of heart-thraldom is that Britomart is predominantly a being of Imagination. She falls in love with Artegall before she has ever met him, having but seen a vision of him in Merlin's magic glass (Book III. canto ii. stanza 24). For a time she pines away, but strength and gladness return to her in the midst of heroic achievement. At last she meets Artegall jousting

amid the other knights: she does not recognise him, but engages with him in fight and wins the victory (Book IV. canto iv.) Here there is a clear conception of character, and if that conception is not appreciated the fault is with the reader, not the poet. He had himself interpreted Britomart, and her unintended victory—

Unlucky mayd to seek him far and wide,

Whom, when he was unto herself most nie,

She through his late disguisement could him not descrie ! It is long before Belphoebe can be brought to return her lover's affection. Neither her heart nor her Imagination stands in need of love. The woodland ways suffice for her; and when she loves, her love is chiefly compassion. This is true to human nature: such boundless activities as Belphœbe rejoiced in are the aptest type of that redundant vitality, both moral and material, which suffices for itself, which can spend its energies for ever without a return, and which needs no other support than its own inherent strength and wavelike elasticity.

This triple delineation of character is not the less lifelike because it is intended to imply a philosophic truth—viz. that the highest purity is capable of engendering the most passionate devotion; and that an affection at once the most devoted and the most ideal is one which intensifies, not weakens, the active powers.

We need go no farther than the first book of the Faery Queen for a proof that Spenser could illustrate

human nature as well as allegorise the Passions; for its heroine, Una, is one of the noblest contributions which poetry, whether of ancient or modern times, has made to its great picture gallery of character. As long as Homer's Andromache and Nausicaa, Chaucer's Cecilia, Griselda, and Constance, the Imogen of Shakespeare, or the Beatrice of Dante, are remembered, so long will Una hold her place among them. One of the most noteworthy things in this character is the circumstance that so few elements suffice to invest it with an entire completeness. What are those elements? Truth, Reverence, Tenderness, Humility. It is that conception of character, at once Christian and womanly, which belongs to the earlier Italian poetry more than to that of other nations, or of those later times in which the woman is so often lost in the Goddess or the Syren. Una's life is spent in the discharge of one great duty-the deliverance of her parents from thrall. In her simplicity she reposes an entire trust in the youthful knight who, at Queen Gloriana's command, has undertaken the enterprise, and with whom she travels alone through wood and wild, gladly repaying his love with hers, but never shaken in her devotion to her parents far away. He forsakes her, persuaded through the spells of the enchanter Archimago that she is false. She wonders, and she mourns; but the wound of an insulted love is not exasperated by self-love, and therefore it heals. She is too humble to be humiliated; and when she learns that he has fallen under the thraldom of the