and Lynette; the enchanter who is their chief enemy is no distant relative of Ariosto's hermit, who deceives Angelica; on their travels they meet with classical satyrs and Elizabethan courtiers, their adventures are reminiscent now of Vergil, now of Sir Bevis and The Seven Champions of Christendom, now of the Apocalypse, and their betrothal is celebrated with a confusion of pagan and Christian ritual; yet there is nothing to disturb the harmony of the imaginative atmosphere. The ante-room in the house of Busirane is hung with goodly arras whereon, as in the castle of many a mediaeval poet, are woven legends of classical mythology. Their source is Ovid, but nothing could be less like Ovid than the music and the feeling with which Spenser delineates them. And over the portals of the room are inscribed the words Be bold, which have come from the old wives' tale of Mr. Fox. Among the lovers whose spotlesse pleasures' make glad the garden of Venus, David and Jonathan, Pylades and Orestes walk side by side; in the dark river of Cocytus Pilate stands next to Tantalus. Nor is the poet's method different when he is uttering his deepest religious conviction. The well of life into which the Red Cross Knight sinks in his conflict with the dragon is likened not merely to Silo or to Jordan, but to Cephise and to Hebrus, to the English Bath and the German Spau. The guardian angel who watches over the prostrate Sir Guyon after his fierce struggle with the temptations of Mammon, and evokes that superb expression of Christian humility and gratitude :

O why should heauenly God to men haue such regard? (11. viii. 2.) appears to Spenser as a fair young man

Of wondrous beautie, and of freshest yeares (11. viii. 5.)

like to Phoebus, or 'to Cupido on Idaean hill'. The pedant finds the comparison ludicrous, the more prosaic pietist finds it profane. To Spenser it was natural, almost inevitable. (As Truth appealed to him in terms of beauty, so all beauty, whatever its source, could be brought to serve and to illuminate the highest truth.

This wealth of varied reminiscence he brings into touch with his own observation of nature and of human character. The main features of Irish scenery supplied a background for his poem hardly distinguishable from the traditional landscape of mediaeval romance, and he often treats it in an entirely traditional manner. But it gave him also, as the fruit of intimate observation, pictures of vivid reality. The little mountain path of trodden grass where Una comes upon the damzell that on her shoulders sad a pot of water bore' (1. iii. 10), the house of Care under the steep hillside with its muddie brook and few crooked sallows (Iv. v. 33), the valley in which, through the tops of the high trees, Florimel descries

A little smoke, whose vapour thin and light
Reeking aloft, uprolled to the sky;

and the hovel

built of stickes and reeds,

In homely wize, and walled with sods around, (111. vii. 5, 6.)

are all drawn from the life. (But Spenser's delicate observation is shown

less in set description than in incidental simile and suggestion In describ*ing the wood of error (1. i. 8, 9) he is content to follow a conventional catalogue that he has drawn from Chaucer: only incidentally does he show his knowledge and love of trees, bringing us in sight of those

two goodly trees, that faire did spred

Their armes abroad, with gray mosse ouercast,

And their greene leaues trembling with euery blast,
Made a calme shadow far in compasse round; (1. ii. 28.)

and noting how in winter the

Hoarie frost with spangles doth attire

The mossy braunches of an Oke halfe ded. (1. x. 48.)

(In his treatment of the sea he is less hampered by precedent. It is

patriotism, doubtless, and the adventurous spirit of his age that suggest the nautical metaphors with which he delights to mark the stages of his poem But his love for the sea was personal, founded on a familiar knowledge of the coast.) He knows the moyst mountains of the Irish shore, that each on other throng'. He has watched the meeting of two billows in the Irish sounds,

Forcibly driuen with contrarie tydes. (Iv. i. 42.)

With Florimel he has visited the little sheltered bay where

A little boate lay houing her before,
In which there slept a fisher old and pore,
The whiles his nets were drying on the sand.

(111. vii. 27.)

His ears have caught the hollow thunder of the horses' hoofs upon the beach; and the low boom of the water as it breaks in foam upon the rocks is re-echoed in his verse:

With that the rolling sea resounding soft,
In his big base them fitly answered,

And on the rocke the waues breaking aloft,

A solemne Meane vnto them measured. (11. xii. 33.)

As the ferryman brushes the sea with his stiff oars he notes

That the hoare waters from his frigot ran,

And the light bubbles daunced all along, (11. xii. 10.)

and his eye detects the checked wave' that covers the dangerous quicksand (11. xii. 18).

He is deeply sensitive to the beauty of light upon the water.) The armour of Pyrochles glitters

as the Sunny beames do glaunce and glide Vpon the trembling waue. (II. v. 2).

The moistened eyes of Acrasia are like the starry light

Which sparckling on the silent waues, does seeme more bright. (11. xii. 78.)

6

(The beauty of women again and again suggests to him imaginative effects of light and shade) The angel face' of Una makes a sunshine in the shady place', the damsells who dance before Colin have faces ' glancing like evening lights', Britomart, as her hair falls to her feet,' is creasted all with lines of fierie light,' like the sky upon a summer evening.

The conventions of the life of chivalry which have dictated the outward actions of his dramatis personae should not blind our eyes to the truthful simplicity of their emotions. The heroic career of the warrior maid, Britomart, may have little in common with ordinary life, but the manner in which her inner life is revealed, in all its subtle changes of mood, might well excite the envy of a realistic novelist. Spenser's knowledge of a woman's heart and a woman's ways finds constant and subtle expression. With a touch of vivid detail he can invest with living interest a wholly subordinate character. Clarinda, asked for news of her prisoner for whom she has a secret love, is taken off her guard and thrown into confusion, but,

so soone

As she her face had wypt, to fresh her blood, (v. v. 45.)

she recovers herself, and is able to invent a plausible tale. The anxious care of the aged nurse Glauce over her sick mistress is depicted in many delicate strokes of humour and pathos; and the stanza that closes the midnight scene between them would be hard to surpass in its homeliness, its dramatic truth of detail, and its climax of tenderness :

Her chearefull words much cheard the feeble spright
Of the sicke virgin, that her downe she layd

In her warme bed to sleepe, if that she might;

And the old-woman carefully displayd

The clothes about her round with busie ayd;

So that at last a little creeping sleepe

Surprisd her sense: She therewith well apayd,

The drunken lampe downe in the oyle did steepe,

And set her by to watch, and set her by to weepe. (111. ii. 47.)

Spenser's love of children is quickened by a rare sympathy with the experience of woman. He realizes by an intuition, in which he comes near to Wordsworth, her passionate tenderness for the child unborn, for the child that is her living care, for the child that is not hers. When Britomart

learns from the Red Cross Knight that Sir Artegall is worthy of her secret devotion

The louing mother, that nine monethes did beare,

In the deare closet of her painefull side,

Her tender babe, it seeing safe appeare,

Doth not so much reioyce as she reioyced theare.1 (III. ii. 11.) Satyrane's mother finds her sweete boy' playing with the cubs of an angry lioness. Her first emotion is a paralysing terror; then her maternal instinct makes the tender natural appeal: for love of me leave off this dreadfull play.' Sir Calepine rescues a baby from the clutches of a wild bear. He examines it tenderly but cannot allay its irritating cries, and in his well-meaning incompetence he is glad to entrust it to the childless Matilda. No amount of psychological analysis could reveal her strange conflict of emotions as fully as does Spenser's simple dramatic touch:

And bauing ouer it a litle wept,

She bore it thence, and euer as her owne it kept. (VI. iv. 37.) The romantic, often impossible, situations in which his characters are found only throws into stronger relief the exquisite delicacy of the sentiment and its essential truth to human nature.

In all this is revealed a side of Spenser's genius which finds too little recognition, his knowledge of the simple emotions of life, and the relation of his world of magnificence and pageant to the sources of human joy and tears. We have already dwelt upon the ornate description of Sir Guyon's guardian angel, who is like 'to Cupido on Idaean hill'. But the angels seen in vision by the Red Cross Knight

into that Citie wend,

As commonly as friend does with his frend; (1. x. 56.)

and the saints of his New Jerusalem are

More deare vnto their God, then younglings to their dam.

(1. X. 57.)

As he brings down heaven to earth so the humblest of earth's creatures can be irradiated with the light of their celestial home. The bare naked wretches' who are clothed by the Almoner of the House of Holiness are enshrined in one of Spenser's most beautiful lines as

The images of God in earthly clay. (1. x. 39.)

His art varies from homeliness to splendour, from the remoteness of romance to the realistic suggestion of common life. His greatness as an artist lies not in the one sphere or in the other, but in the fusion of the two. In this lies the secret of his style, which easily adapts itself to his mood, and is the fitting expression of his unique and graceful personality, His

1 Compare, too, his account of the emotion of Pastorella's mother on the recovery of her lost child (VI. xii. 21).

character, less forceful perhaps than Milton's, is no less indelibly stamped on all he wrote. Wordsworth and Keats have written lines which might have come from the pen of Milton; no one has ever written a stanza that could be taken for Spenser's. His many imitators in the eighteenth century only succeeded in mingling the magniloquent with the childish ; and Thomson, the best of them, emphasized his failure to recapture the tones of his master by apologizing for a simplicity of diction which borders on the ludicrous'. Those who, like Shelley and Keats, have fallen most deeply under his spell come nearest to attaining his effects by avoiding all attempt at detailed imitation, and writing in their own best manner. His distinctive quality is to be found in his language and its melody. To an archaism which is inimitable because it is purely capricious, he was drawn at once by its reminiscent picturesqueness and by its musical possibilities. Already, in the Shepheardes Calender, he had experimented in the use of archaic language; the diction of the Faerie Queene is the mature product of his peculiar poetic temperament. Undeterred by criticism, he took full advantage of the unsettled state of English in his day, not only to revive the obsolete, but to coin new words on old analogies, and to adapt both his spelling and his pronunciation to his desired effects of cadence and melody. It was his aim to perfect for himself an instrument from which he could extract a music as subtle as Chaucer's, and by means of which he could create around his subject the atmosphere of an ideal antique world.

The Chaucerian element in his language is like a distinct but seldom perceived flavour, which can be tasted in occasional words like 'warray', 'encheason', or 'solas', in the use of abstract nouns with romance terminations, and in the cadence or verbal reminiscence of such a line as

There many minstrales maken melodye,

which suggests that from Chaucer he learnt the metrical value of the short syllable. A special touch of the old romance, transplanted by Malory and others from France, is given by such words as 'prow', 'persaunt', belgardes', 'beauperes, paravaunt'. But it is significant that many of Spenser's supposed archaisms are really in a sense Elizabethan. He cherished words which though still in use were rapidly passing out of fashion, and the sustained colouring and atmosphere of his style is thus given by a constant use of words which are found in Marlowe, Shakespeare, or Sidney, perhaps once or twice. 'Eftsoons', 'ne', 'als', 'whilom', uncouth', 'wight', 'eke', 'sithens', ywis '—it is words like these continually woven into the texture of his diction which, more even than the Chaucerian or romance elements, give it the Spenserian colour. Thus by freely adapting spelling, pronunciation, and even word-formation, to his needs, Spenser made the fullest use of this richly compounded language. To lighten the movement and smooth the flow of his metre he could

1 Introduction to the Castle of Indolence.