Guyon, the emblem-knight of Temperance (Faery Queen, Book II. canto i.), is led through scenes meant to teach him successively the baleful effects of ungoverned passion. He hears the wail of a woman, Amavia, whose husband has deserted her mastered by his fatal love for the witch Acrasia is faithful wife had rescued him from thrall; but ere his departure from her castle the witch had given him an enchanted cup: he had drained it and died. Guyon finds that wife beside a fountain bleeding from a self-inflicted wound in her heart, and with a late-born babe in her lap-a babe blood-stained. Beside her lies the murdered husband, dead. She tells Guyon her story, and dies, but not until she has thus adjured her babe

Thy little hands embrewed in bleeding breast

Loe I for pledges leave.

The good knight deems that

So give me leave to rest.

since this wretched woman overcome

Of anguish rather than of crime hath been,

With

she merits the last offices of Christian charity. the aid of a hermit he digs a grave, strews it with cypress branches, and inters the husband and wife; but first cuts off with the dead knight's sword a tress from the head of each, flings it into the grave, and vows to revenge them. Lastly

The little babe up in his armes he hent,

Who with sweet pleasaunce and bold blandishment
Gan smyle on them, that rather ought to weep.

Guyon bends above the fountain to wash the mother's blood from the hands of her babe. He labours in

D

:

vain the sanguine blots but deepen, and can never be erased. The little hands must keep their bloodstains,

That they his mother's innocence may tell,
As she bequeathed in her last testament;
That as a sacred symbole it may dwell
In her sonne's flesh, to mind revengèment.

Here is a memorable symbol of the passion that can never sleep, and the vengeance bequeathed from age to age. The beauty of this tale is even greater than its terror. It is a flower that wears blood-drops for its ornament, yet is a flower still. But greatest of all is its significance. The same lesson is taught by the bleeding spray which Guyon breaks from one of the two trees into which two lovers had been changed. They stand side by side, summer after summer, and murmur in the same breeze; but their branches can never meet.

Not less characteristic of Spenser's poetry is its wonderful descriptive power. Everywhere this faculty is illustrated, but nowhere more exquisitely than in that passage where we meet Belphoebe out hunting (Book II. canto iii.) The poet's picture, like Guido's Aurora, has the freshness of the morning about it: youth and gladness breathe in every line, beam in every gesture, and wave with every movement of that raiment made in this rich description almost as beauteous as the slender limbs and buoyant form it embraces, yet laughingly reveals. It is plain that so long as this youthful Dian may but race with those winds which add a richer glow to her cheek and more

vivid splendour to her eye, so long as she may but chase the hart and hind through the dewy forest lawns, so long must all love-ties be for her without a meaning. Dryden has imitated this passage, after his fashion, in his Cymon and Iphigenia, missing the poetry and purity of the whole, and imparting a touch of coarseness, not felt in the original, to what he retains-just as in his version of Chaucer's poems he omits each finer touch, and makes the rest vulgar. A sculptor might perhaps remark that the line

Upon her eyelids many graces sate

would be more in place if a Venus were described rather than this handmaid of the "quivered Queen" who, like Apollo, is ever represented in Greek art with lifted lids and eyes wide open. Dian is a luminary, like her brother, and even in the marble her eye flings its glances far.

The allegory of "Despair" is too well known to need comment; but it can never be too much praised. It proves that narrative poetry may, in the hand of a great master, fully reach the intensity of the drama, and carry to the same height those emotions of pity and terror through which to purify the soul was, according to Aristotle, the main function of tragedy. Spenser could at will brace his idyllic strain till it / became palpably the prelude of that fierce and fair Elizabethan drama destined so soon to follow it.

The most grateful admirer of Spenser will perhaps be the most willing to admit that, with all its trans

cendent merits, the Faery Queen, like all long poems, has great faults—and can afford to have them. It is no irreverence to acknowledge them. If his more important allegories are at once deep and graphic, others are crude or trivial. To the nobler class belong the allegory of "Guile"; of Talus, the iron man with the iron flail, who represents Judgment only, and is so happily distinguished from Artegall, who represents Justice; and to it also the fantastic shapes that threaten Guyon as he sails along the sea of mortal life. To a more vulgar order must be remanded such allegories as those of "Envy," "Detraction," "Scandal," the Vices in the "House of Pride," and those which, in the form of beasts, assail the castle of "Temperance"; while "Furor," "Strife," "Diet," etc., are frigid and unpoetic. The battle between Una's knight and the winged dragon half a mile long, if serious, admits of no defence, and if the contrary, only reminds us that Spenser's genius was the genius of the north, and could not afford to be insincere. Spenser is also often prolix, and repeats himself. Except in his highest moods, he seldom braced himself up to do his best as Milton constantly did with a proud conscientiousness, and Shakespeare more often than is consistent with the fable that he "never blotted a line." Spenser was probably himself an easy" reader as well as writer; and when books were few a poet might expect to find students docile and not soon tired. He was large in the great gift of admiration, and too true a poet to suspect in others a touch of that essentially

unpoetical quality, cynicism. Like the mathematician, the poet of romance had a right to start with his postulates, such as that the gods of mythology might lawfully be mixed up with saints; that a knight might receive any number of wounds and be well again next day; that physical strength was commonly the expression of a corresponding moral greatness; and that the most delicate ladies suffered nothing from lack of food, or exposure to the elements. It was less safe to assume that battles would always have the inexhaustible interest they had for those who gathered round Homer when he sang.

But the most serious fault in the Faery Queen was unquestionably a structural one. In Chaucer, whom Spenser revered so loyally and acknowledged as his master, the stories are complete, each in itself; the narrative is thus easily followed, the interest undivided, and the catastrophe conclusive. But in the Faery Queen the tales are interwoven; the same knights and ladies reappear successively in many of them; the story breaks off where the interest is at its crisis; and the reader is invited to follow again the fortunes of persons he has forgotten. This is to cheat us doubly. A short poem may have the bright perfection of a flower, an epic the stately mass of a tree that combines the variety of its branches with the unity of the stem; but a romance of this intricate character is neither the flower nor the tree,-it is a labyrinth of underwood not easily pierced. Perseverance may vanquish all difficulties; but when this has been