ment, and in the eighteenth century it needed renovating'in durable marble.' But it was Spenser's funeral rites that permanently ensured for literary eminence the loftiest dignity of sepulture that the English nation has to bestow. Great literature was thenceforth held to rank with the greatest achievements wrought in the national service. During the last two centuries few English poets of supreme merit have been denied in death admission to the national sanctuary in the neighbourhood of Spenser's tomb. Those who have been buried elsewhere have been, like Shakespeare, commemorated in Westminster Abbey by sculptured monuments.

X

In practical affairs Spenser's life was a failure. It ended in a somewhat sordid tragedy, which added nothing to his political reputation. His literary work stands on a very different footing. Its steady progress in varied excellences was a ceaseless triumph for art. It won him immortal fame. Spenser's chief work, the Faerie Queene, was the Spenser's greatest poem that had been written in England greatness. since Chaucer died, and remains, when it is brought into comparison with all that English poets have written since, one of the brightest jewels in the crown of English poetry. It is worthy of closest study. Minute inquiry into its form and spirit is essential to every estimate of Spenser's eminence.

The amplitude of

In all senses the work is great. The scale on which Spenser planned his epic allegory has indeed no parallel in ancient or modern literature. All that has reached us is but a quarter of the contemplated whole. Yet the Faerie Queene is, in its extant shape, as long as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey combined with Virgil's Aeneid. Even epics of more recent date, whose example Spenser confesses to have emulated, fell far behind

scale.

his work in its liberality of scale. In the unfinished form that it has come down to us, Spenser's epic is more than twice as long as Dante's La Divina Commedia or Tasso's Gierusalemme Liberata; Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, with which Spenser was thoroughly familiar, was brought to completion in somewhat fewer lines. Nor did Spenser's great successors compete with him in length. Milton's Paradise Lost, the greatest of all English epics, fills, when joined to its sequel Paradise Regained, less than a third of Spenser's space. Had the Faerie Queene reached a twenty-fourth book, as the poet at the outset thought possible, not all the great epics penned in ancient or modern Europe would, when piled one upon the other, have reached the gigantic dimensions of the Elizabethan poem.

The serious temper and erudition, of which the enterprise was the fruit, powerfully impress the inquirer at the outset. It is doubtful if Milton and Gray, who are usually reckoned the most learned of English poets, excelled Spenser in the range of their reading, or in the extent to which their poetry Assimila- assimilated the fruits of their study. Homer and tive power. Theocritus, Virgil and Cicero, Petrarch and Du Bellay, mediæval writers of chivalric romance, Tasso and Ariosto, supply ideas, episodes and phrases to the Faerie Queene. Early in life Spenser came under the spell of Tasso, the monarch of contemporary Italian poetry, and gathered much suggestion from his ample store. But the Faerie Queene owes most to the epic of Orlando Furioso by Tasso's predecessor, Ariosto. The chivalric adventures which Spenser's heroes undergo are often directly imitated from the Italian of 'that most famous Tuscan pen.' Many an incident, together with the moralising which its details suggest, follows Ariosto in phraseology too closely to admit any doubt of its source. Spenser is never a plagiarist. He invests his borrowings

with his own individuality. But very numerous are the passages which owed their birth to Ariosto's preceding invention. The Italian poet is rich in imagery. He drank deep of the Pierian spring. He is, indeed, superior to Spenser in the conciseness and directness of his narrative power. But Ariosto has little of the warmth of human sympathy or moral elevation which dignifies Spenser's effort. Spenser's tone is far more serious than that of the Italian master, whose main aim was the telling of an exciting tale. Ariosto is far inferior to Spenser in the sustained energy alike of his moral and of his poetic impulse.

aim.

The Faerie Queene was not designed, like Ariosto's achievement, as a mere piece of art. It was before all else a moral treatise. Although it was fashioned on the epic The moral lines with which constant reading of the work of Homer and Virgil among the ancients, and more especially of Ariosto and Tasso among the moderns, had made Spenser familiar, Spenser was not content merely to tell a story. According to the poet's own account, he sought to represent all the moral virtues, Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, and the like, assigning to every virtue a knight to be the pattern and defender of the same; in whose actions and feats of arms and chivalry the operations of that virtue, whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against the same to be beaten down and overcome.' Twelve books, one for each moral virtue, were needed for such an exposition of ethical philosophy. But this was only the first step in the poet's contemplated journey. The author looked forward to supplementing this ethical effort by an exposition of political philosophy, in another twelve books which would expound the twelve political virtues that were essential to a perfect ruler of men. Of the twenty-four projected books there is a

tradition that Spenser wrote twelve, nearly half of which were destroyed in manuscript by the rebels in Ireland. It is certain that only the first six books, with a small portion of the seventh, have reached us.

The debt to Plato.

Spenser's ethical views are not systematically developed, but, considered in their main aspect, they owe an immense debt to the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato's ethical teaching glows in page after page of the Faerie Queene and of Spenser's shorter poems. The English poet loyally accepts Plato's doctrines that true beauty is only of the mind, that reason is the sole arbiter of man's destiny, that war must be waged on the passions and the bodily senses, that peace and happiness are the fruit of the intellect when it is enfranchised of corporeal infirmity. 'All happy peace and goodly government' are only 'settled in sure establishment'

'In a body which doth freely yield

His parts to reason's rule obedient,

And letteth her that ought the sceptre wield.'1

But it is not merely in his general ethical tone that Spenser acknowledges his discipleship to Plato. Many details of the Faerie Queene embody Platonic terminology and Platonic conceptions. In book III. he borrows from Plato the conception of the garden of Adonis '-Nature's nursery-and under that image he presents Plato's theory of the infinite mutability of matter, despite its indestructibility. Infinite shapes of creatures are bred, Spenser points out, in that same garden' wherewith the world is replenished,

'Yet is the stock not lessened, nor spent,

But still remains in everlasting store,

As it at first created was of yore.' '

2

Bk. II., canto xi., stanza ii.

Bk. III., canto vi., stanza xxxvi.

In book . Spenser describes the threefold elements which go to the making of man's soul: right reason (Medina), the passion of wrath (Elissa), and the passion of sensual desire (Perissa). Although the poet here recalls the doctrine of Plato's great disciple, Aristotle, to the effect that virtue is the golden mean between excess and defect, he actually accepts the older Platonic principle that virtue is the mean between two equally active and powerful evil passions Occasionally Spenser ranges himself with later Greek philosophers, who developed and exaggerated Plato's doctrine of the eternal spirit's supremacy over mutable matter. But Plato is always his foremost teacher, not only in the Faerie Queene but in his sonnets, in his rapturous hymns of beauty, and in much else of his occasional poetry.

Spenser's Knights of the Virtues.

In fulfilment of his ethical purpose the poet imagined twelve knights, each the champion of one of the private moral virtues,' who should undertake perilous combats with vice in various shapes. The first and second champions, respectively, the knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, and Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance, embody with singular precision Platonic doctrine. The third champion, a more original conception, was a woman, Britomart, the lady-knight of Chastity; the fourth was Cambell, who, joined with Triamond, illustrates the worth of Friendship; the fifth was Artegal, the knight of Justice; the sixth, Sir Calidore, the knight of Courtesy. Spenser intended that his seventh knight should be champion of Constancy, but of that story only a fragment survives. Sir Calidore is the last completed hero in the poet's gallery.

The allegorised adventures in which Spenser's knights engage are cast for the most part in the true epic mould. Episode after episode reads like chapters of chivalric romance of adventure. Rescues of innocent ladies by the knights, of knights,