received, at the plantation of Munster, an estate thirty miles from Cork, which he was to occupy and cultivate. This manor, which included over three thousand acres,

in Ireland.

was confiscated by the English Government, with Spenser the rest of the Earl of Desmond's property, in 1586. Spenser lived at Kilcolman Castle, the mansion on the estate, for several years, and went on with The Faëry Queen. Ralegh, who was then living at Youghal, came to visit him in 1589, and was so delighted with the first three books of the poem, which Spenser showed him, that he took the author with him to London and presented him again to Elizabeth. The Queen, pleased with the flattering tone of the work, granted Spenser a pension of £50. The Lord Treasurer Burghley is said to have objected to a larger grant. At the end of 1589 the first three books of The Faery Queen were entered at Stationers' Hall, and were published in 1590. Soon after he returned to Kilcolman, and, in 1594, married a lady who, it is generally supposed, was Elizabeth Boyle, a kinswoman of the Earl of Cork. Between 1591 and 1595 he published, "from my house at Kilcolman," several poems, including Colin Clout's Come Home Again (1595), in which, with a profusion of pastoral conceits, he gave his impressions of London and the Court; and Epithalamion (1594), in which he celebrated his wedding. In 1591 Ponsonby published for him a miscellaneous volume of Complaints, and, in 1595, the Amoretti, or love-sonnets, of which his wife is the heroine; while, in January, 1596, three more books of The Faery Queen appeared. Unfortunately, in 1598, soon after his nomination as Sheriff of Cork, the great rebellion under the Earl of Tyrone, which had been raging in the northern province of Ulster, spread to the region surrounding Spenser's retreat. He had probably, as an innovator, rendered himself hateful to the half-savage Celtic population whom the English colonists had ejected and oppressed; indeed, the very curious tract, written earlier in this very year and called A View of the Present State of Ireland, in which he powerfully defended Lord Grey's policy and described the curious manners and customs of the indigenous race, indicates plainly enough that the poet shared the prejudices of his race and position. Kilcolman Castle was attacked and burned by the insurgents. Spenser and his family escaped with difficulty, losing all they possessed, and suffering, it is said, the still more cruel bereavement of a young child which was left behind and perished in the house. Completely ruined, and overwhelmed by so tragic an affliction, Spenser His death. returned to London, and died in King Street, West

minster, if we are to accept Ben Jonson's statement, "for lack of bread," forgotten by the Court and neglected by the majority of his patrons. This was on January 16, 1599. He was followed, however, to his grave with the unanimous admiration of his countrymen, who bewailed in his death the loss of the greatest

poet of the age. He was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey, near the tomb of Chaucer.

$5. Spenser's greatest work, The Faery Queen, is a poem whose subject is chivalric, narrative, and descriptive, but, above everything else, allegorical. Its execution is derived "The Faery in a great degree from Boiardo and Ariosto, and, in Queen." point of chronology, it comes very soon after the Gerusalemme Liberata of Tasso. It was originally planned to consist of twelve books or moral adventures, each typifying the triumph of a Virtue, and couched under the form of an exploit of knight-errantry. The hero of the whole was to be the mythical Prince Arthur, the type, in Spenser, of perfect virtue, just as he is the ideal hero of a vast collection of medieval legends. This fabulous personage is supposed to fall in love with the Faëry Queen, who appears to him in a dream; and, arriving at the court in the land of Faery, he finds her holding her annual twelve days' festival. Upon these twelve days arise the occasions of the adventures which were to be related in the twelve books of the poem, each of them being undertaken by some knight of the court of Gloriana, Queen of the land of Faëry. The First Book relates the expedition of the Red-cross Knight, the allegorical type of Holiness, to rescue the ancestral realm of his mistress Úna, the representative of Religion, from the foul dragon of Heresy. The Second Book tells the adventures of Sir Guyon, or Temperance; and the Third, those of Britomartis, or Chastity. It must be remarked that each of these books is subdivided into twelve cantos, and that the poem, even in the imperfect form under which we possess it, is consequently very voluminous.

These first three books were published, we have said, in 1590, and dedicated to Elizabeth. The three following books, which appeared in 1596, contain the following legends: in the Fourth we find the Legend of Cambell and Triamond, an allegory of Friendship; in the Fifth, the Legend of Artegall, or of Justice; and in the Sixth, the Legend of Sir Calidore, or of Courtesy. Thus half of the original design was executed. What progress Spenser made in the six remaining books it is now impossible to ascertain. There are traditions which assert that this latter portion was completed, but that the manuscript was lost at sea; while the more probable theory is that Spenser had no time to complete his extensive plan, but that the dreadful misfortunes amid which his life ended prevented him from bringing it to perfection. The extant fragment, consisting of two cantos and two stanzas of a third upon the theme of Mutability was to have been inserted, according to tradition, in the legend of Constancy, one of the books projected. The vigour, invention, and splendour of expression that flow so brightly in the first three books manifestly decline in the fourth, fifth, and sixth; and we need not, perhaps, regret that the poet never completed so vast a

design, whose very nature necessitated a monotony that not all the fertility of genius could have obviated. We may apply to The Faery Queen the paradox of Hesiod, "the half is more than the whole." In this poem three different Composition of the poem. elements are united which at first sight would appear almost irreconcilable. The skeleton or framework of the action is derived from the feudal or chivalric legends; the ethical or moral sentiment from the lofty ideal philosophy of Plato, which is harmonised, in a manner agreeing with the general tone of contemporary education at Cambridge, with the most elevated Christian purity; while the form and colour of the language and versification is saturated in the flowing grace and sensuous elegance of the great Italian poets of the Renaissance. The principal defects of The Faery Queen, as a whole, arise from two causes apparently opposed, yet conveying a similar impression to the reader. The first is a want of unity, which involves a loss of interest Its defects. in the story; for we altogether forget Arthur, the nominal hero of the whole, as we follow each separate adventure of the subordinate knights. Each book is therefore intrinsically a separate poem, and excites a separate interest. The other defect is the monotony of character inseparable from a series of adventures which, although varied with an inexhaustible fertility, are all, from their chivalric nature, fundamentally similar, being either combats between one knight and another, or between the hero of the moment and some supernatural being-a monster, a dragon, or a wicked enchanter. these contests, however brilliantly painted, we feel little or no suspense, for we are beforehand nearly certain of the victory of the hero; and, even were this otherwise, the knowledge that the valiant champion is himself nothing but the impersonation of some abstract quality or virtue would be fatal to that interest with which we follow the vicissitudes of human fortune. Hardly any degree of genius or invention can long sustain the interest of an allegory; and where Bunyan's intense realism has only partially succeeded, the unreal phantasmagoria of Spenser's imagination, brilliant as it was, could not do other than fail. The strongest proof of the justice of these remarks will be found in the fact that those who read Spenser with the greatest delight are precisely those who, entirely neglecting the moral lessons typified in his allegory, endeavour to follow his heroes' adventures as they would follow those of human beings, voluntarily surrendering themselves to the mighty magic of his unequalled imagination. Another result to be deduced from the above considerations is, that Spenser, although extremely monotonous and tiresome to the ordinary reader who determines to plod doggedly through two or three successive books of The Faery Queen, is the most enchanting of poets to him who, endowed with a lively fancy, confines his attention to one or two at a time of his delightful episodes, descriptions, or impersona

In

tions. Independently of the general allegorical meaning of the persons and adventures, it must be remembered that many of these were also intended to contain allusions to facts and individuals of Spenser's own time, and porary allusions in particularly to convey compliments to his friends

Contem

Analysis of the Second Book of the poem.

"The Faery and patrons. Thus Gloriana, the Faëry Queen Queen." herself, as well as the beautiful huntress Belphœbe, were intended to allude to Elizabeth; Sir Artegall, the Knight of Justice, is Lord Grey; and the adventures of the Red-cross Knight shadow forth the history of the Anglican Church. In all probability a multitude of such allusions, now become obscure, were clear enough, when the poem first appeared, to those who were familiar with the courtly and political life of the time; but the modern reader will little regret the dimness in which time has plunged these references, for they serve only to the further complication of an allegory which of itself often detracts from the charm and interest of the narrative. § 6. A rapid analysis of the Second Book, or Legend of Temperance, will give some idea of Spenser's mode of conducting his allegory. In Canto I the wicked enchanter Archimago, meeting Sir Guyon, informs him that a fair lady, supposed by the knight to be Una, but in reality the false Duessa, has been foully outraged by the Red-cross Knight. Guyon, led by Archimago, meets the Red-cross Knight, and is on the point of attacking him, when the two champions recognise each other, and, after courteous conference, part. Sir Guyon then hears the despairing cry of a lady, and finds Amavia, newly stabbed, lying beside the dead body of Sir Mordant, and holding in her lap a babe with his hands stained by his mother's blood. After relating her story the lady dies. Canto II describes Sir Guyon's unsuccessful attempts to wash the babe's bloody hands. He then finds his steed gone, and proceeds on foot to the castle of the lady Medina, or Golden Mean, where dwell also her two sisters, Elissa and Perissa-Too Little and Too Much-with their knights. Canto III contains the adventures of the boaster Braggadocchio, who steals Guyon's steed, and, with his man Trompart, meets Archimago and the fair Belphoebe. Belphœbe herself is described with consummate beauty. In Canto IV Guyon delivers the youth Phedon from the violence of Furor and the malignity of the hag Occasion. In Canto V he fights with Pyrochles, who unbinds Furor, and is then wounded by him; and Atin, Pyrochles' varlet, flies to obtain the aid of Cymochles. Canto VI gives a rich and most exquisite picture of the temptation of Guyon by the Lady of the Idle Lake, and contains the fight with Cymochles. In Canto VII is contained the admirable description of the Cave of Mammon, who tempts Sir Guyon with the sight of his subterranean riches. Canto VIII shows how Guyon, falling into a trance, is disarmed by the sons of Acrates, and delivered

by Arthur. Canto IX describes the House of Temperance, the body, inhabited by Alma, the soul-a beautiful descrip tion, in which each bodily part and mental faculty is typified. Canto X gives a chronicle, from a book found by Guyon in Alma's house, of the ancient British kings down to the reign of Gloriana, or Elizabeth. In Canto XI the Castle of Temperance is besieged, and delivered by Arthur. In the twelfth and last Canto we have Guyon's attack upon the Bower of Bliss, and the ultimate defeat of Acrasia, or Sensual Pleasure. From this very rough and meagre analysis, which is all that the present limits will permit, the reader may in some measure judge of the conduct of the fable in Spenser's great poem.

versification.

§ 7. The versification of the work is founded upon a peculiar stanza, derived from the ottava rima so universally employed by the romantic and narrative poets of Italy, and made familiar by the masterpieces of Tasso and Spenser's Ariosto. To the eight lines, each of ten syllables, which compose this form of metre, Spenser's exquisite taste and consummate ear for harmony induced him to add a ninth, which, being of twelve syllables, winds up each phrase with a long lingering cadence of the most delicious melody. We have already observed how extensively the forms of Italian versification-as in the various examples of the sonnet and the heroic stanza-had been adopted by the English poets; and we have insisted, particularly in the case of Chaucer, on the skill with which our language, naturally rude, monosyllabic, and unharmonious, had been softened into melody until, in power of musical expression, it was little inferior to the tongues of Southern Europe. None of our poets is more exquisitely and uniformly musical than Spenser. Indeed, the sweetness and fluency of his verse is sometimes carried so far as to become cloying and enervating. The metre he employed was very complicated, and made the frequent recurrence of similar rhymes in each stanza necessary-namely, four of one ending, three of another, and two of a third. Consequently, he was obliged to take considerable liberties with the orthography and accentuation of the English language. In doing this, in giving to our metallic northern speech the flexibility of the liquid Italian, he shows himself as unscrupulous as masterly. By employing an immense number of old Chaucerian words and provincialisms, and even by inventing occasional words himself, he furnishes his verse with an inexhaustible and various vocabulary; but at the same time the reader must remember that much of this was a dialect that never really existed. Its peculiarities have been less permanent than those of almost any other of our great writers.

§ 8. The power of Spenser's genius consists not in any deep analysis of human passion or feeling, nor in any skill in the delineation of character, but in an unequalled richness of

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