"The

a richly composite culture. Its immediate models were
Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," the first forty cantos of
which were published in 1515, and Tasso's "Gerusa-
lemme Liberata," printed in 1581. Both of these
were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the first based
upon the old Charlemagne epos-Orlando being iden-
tical with the hero of the French "Chanson de
Roland"; the second upon the history of the first
crusade and the recovery of the Holy City from the
Saracen. But in both of them there was a splendor of
diction and a wealth of coloring quite unknown to the
rude medieval romances. Ariosto and Tasso wrote
with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in
mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of
Italian art, in its early freshness and power.
Faerie Queene," too, was a tale of knight-errantry.
Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with the
familiar adventures and figures of Gothic romance:
distressed ladies and their champions, combats with
dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings,
charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side by
side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology
and the personified abstractions of fashionable allegory.
Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and
river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superstition, jostle
each other in Spenser's fairy-land. Descents to the
infernal shades, in the manner of Homer and Vergil,
alternate with descriptions of the Palace of Pride, in the
manner of "The Romaunt of the Rose.' But Spenser's
imagination was a powerful spirit, and held all these
diverse elements in solution. He removed them to an
ideal sphere "apart from place, withholding time,"
where they seem all alike equally real, the dateless con-
ceptions of the poet's dream.

"

Composite

character of

the work.

Its allegorical plan.

Its verse and diction.

The poem was to have been “a continued allegory or dark conceit," in twelve books, the hero of each book representing one of the twelve moral virtues. Only six books and a fragment of the seventh were written. By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary interest, Spenser undertook to make his allegory a double one, personal and historical, as well as moral or abstract. Thus Gloriana, the Queen of Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, to whom the poem was dedicated. Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as Magnificence. Duessa is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots.

Grantorto is Philip II. of Spain. Sir Artegal is Justice, but likewise he is Arthur Grey de Wilton. Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Henry IV. of France, etc. ; and such public events as the revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, the Irish rebellion, the execution of Mary Stuart, and the rising of the northern Catholic houses against Elizabeth are told in parable. In this way the poem reflects the spiritual struggle of the time, the warfare of young England against popery and Spain. The allegory is not always easy to follow. It is kept up most carefully in the first two books, but it sat rather lightly on Spenser's conscience, and is not of the essence of the poem. It is an ornament put on from the outside and detachable at pleasure.

The "Spenserian stanza," in which "The Faerie Queene" was written, was adapted from the ottava rima of Ariosto. Spenser changed somewhat the order of the rimes in the first eight lines and added a ninth line of twelve syllables, thus affording more space to the copious luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweetness of his verse. It was his instinct to dilate and elaborate every image to the utmost, and his similes,

sensuous.

Sensuous character of

poetry.

especially—each of which usually fills a whole stanza—
have the pictorial amplitude of Homer's. Spenser was,
in fact, a great painter. His poetry is almost purely
The personages in "The Faerie Queene
are not characters, but richly colored figures, moving to Spenser's
the accompaniment of delicious music, in an atmosphere
of serene remoteness from the earth. Charles Lamb
said that he was the poet's poet, that is, he appealed
wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of beauty.
Not until Keats did another English poet appear so filled
with the passion for outward shapes of beauty, so ex-
quisitely alive to all impressions of the senses. Spenser
was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English
poet. It is said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing
the stanzas of Tasso's “Gerusalemme Liberata." It is
not easy to imagine the Thames bargees chanting pas-
sages from "The Faerie Queene." Those English poets
who have taken strongest hold upon their public have Ideal quality of
done so by their profound interpretation of our common
life. But Spenser escaped altogether from reality into
a region of pure imagination. His aerial creations re-
semble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which
have no root in the soil, but draw their nourishment
from the moisture of the air.

Their birth was of the womb of morning dew,
And their conception of the glorious prime.

his art.

poems.

Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his "Prothalamion" and "Epithalamion.' The first was a "spousal verse," made for the double His minor wedding of the Ladies Catherine and Elizabeth Somerset, whom the poet figures as two white swans that come swimming down the Thames, the surface of which the nymphs strew with lilies, till it appears "like a bride's chamber-floor."

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

is the burden of each stanza. The "Epithalamion" was Spenser's own marriage song, written to crown his series of "Amoretti" or love sonnets, and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the language. Hardly less beautiful than these was "Muiopotmos; or, the Fate of the Butterfly," an addition to the classical myth of Arachne, the spider. The four hymns in praise of "Love" and "Beauty,' "Heavenly Love" and "Heavenly Beauty," are also stately and noble poems, but by reason of their abstractness and the His Platonism. Platonic mysticism which they express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned. Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's genius. He was a seer of visions, of images full, brilliant, and distinct; and not, like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into bodily shapes of ideas, typical and emblematic; the shadows which haunt the conscience and the mind.

1. HENRY MORLEY: "English Writers." New York: 1887.

4 vols.

2. SKEAT: "Specimens of English Literature, 1394– 1579." (Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford.

3. "Morte Darthur." London: 1868.

4. "English and Scottish Ballads.' Edited by Francis J. Child. 8 vols. Boston 1859.

5. SPENSER: "Poetical Works."

ard Morris. London: 1877.

Edited by Rich

6. "A Royal Poet." In Washington Irving's 'Sketch Book."

New York: 1864.

CHAPTER III.

THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE, 1564-1616.

THE great age of English poetry opened with the publication of Spenser's "Shepheardes Calendar" in 1579, and closed with the printing of Milton's "Samson Agonistes" in 1671. Within this period of little less than a century English thought passed through many changes, and there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature. Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who was a boy of eight years at Shakspere's death, lived long enough to witness the establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the persons of Dryden and his contemporaries. But, roughly speaking, the dates above given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not improperly be called the Elizabethan. In strictness the Elizabethan age ended with the queen's death, in 1603. But the poets of the succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked the diction of their forerunners; and "the spacious times of great Elizabeth" have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the Restoration (1660). There is a certain likeness in the intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamp them all alike with the queen's seal.

Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of the reigns succeeding hers. The expression "Victorian poetry" has a rather

Limits of

the Eliza

bethan age.

Elizabeth the central figure

in the litera

ture of her

reign.