"A better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." We have seen to some small extent what Spenser sought to impress upon the mind of his own age. He strove, in his own way as poet, to make the national life of England a great unity, spiritual, yet not disdaining earth or the things of earth. He strove, as far as in him lay, to breed a race of high-souled English gentlemen, who should have none of the meanness of the libertine, none of the meanness of the precisian. But the contending parties of the English nation went their ways-one party to moral licentiousness and political servility, the other to religious intolerance and the coarse extravagances of the sectaries. Each extreme ran its course. And when the Puritan excess and the Cavalier excess had alike exhausted themselves, and England once more recovered a portion of her wisdom and her calm, it had become impossible to revert to the ideals of Spenser. Enthusiasm had been discredited by the sectaries until it had grown to be a byword of reproach. The orgies of the Restoration had served to elevate common decency into something like high virtue. After the Puritan excess and the Cavalier excess, England recovered herself not by moral ardour or imaginative reason, but by good sense, by a prosaic but practical respect for the respectable, and by a utilitarian conviction that honesty is the best policy.

"A better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." Yet we are told by the Dean of St Paul's, that in giving himself credit for a direct purpose to instruct, Spenser "only conformed to the curiously utilitarian spirit which pervaded the literature of the time." It is the heresy of

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modern art that only useless things should be made beautiful, We want beauty only in playthings. elder days the armour of a knight was as beautiful as sunlight, or as flowers. "In unaffected, unconscious, artistic excellence of invention," says one of our chief living painters,* approaching more nearly to the strange beauty of nature, especially in vegetation, mediæval armour perhaps surpasses any other effort of human ingenuity." What if Spenser wrought armour for the soul, and, because it was precious and of finest temper, made it fair to look upon? That which gleams as bright as the waters of a sunlit lake is perhaps a breastplate to protect the heart; that which appears pliant as the blades of summer grass may prove at our need to be a sword of steel.

* Mr G. F. Watts.

HEROINES OF SPENSER.

SPENSER'S manner of portraiture differs much from that of Chaucer, whom he names his poetical master. Ambling Canterburyward, with his eyes on the ground, the earlier poet could steal sprightly glances at every member of the cavalcade-glances which took in the tuft of hairs on the Miller's nose, the sparkle of pins in the Friar's tippet, and the smooth forehead and little rosy mouth of Madam Eglantine. We should know the Wife of Bath, if we met her, by the wide-parted teeth, the dulness of hearing, the bold laugh, the liberal tongue; we should expect to see the targelike hat, the scarlet stockings, and the shining shoes. Spenser's gaze dwelt longer on things, in a more passive luxury of sensation or with reverence more devout. His powers of observation are, as it were, dissolved in his sense of beauty, and this again is taken up into his moral idealism and becomes a part of it. To Chaucer a beautiful woman is a beautiful creature of this good earth, and is often nothing more; her beauty suddenly slays the tender heart of her lover, or she makes glad the spirit of man as though with some light, bright wine. She is more blissful to look on than "the new perjonette tree," and softer than the wether's wool; her mouth is sweet as "apples laid in hay or heath"; her body is gent and small as any weasel. For Spenser behind each woman, made to wor

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ship or to love, rises a sacred presence-womanhood itself. Her beauty of face and limb is but a manifestation of the invisible beauty, and this is of one kin with the Divine Wisdom and the Divine Love. In the poet of Edward's reign a gay and familiar side of chivalry is presented, which existed in life and in art and literature along with that chivalry which was the mysticism of human passion. The more modern poet retains of chivalry only what is exalted, serious, and tender. While heartily a man of his own Elizabethan age—a Protestant age, an age of awakening science, of a high mundane spirit-Spenser does not break with the past. He does not, like Cervantes, with remorseful mockery bid farewell to romance and knight-errantry. Don Quixote, dying, begs pardon of his honest squire for perverting his understanding and persuading him to the folly of chivalric adventure; he had been mad, now he is sane, and is once again Alonzo Quixano the Good. For Spenser knightly warfare against evil was still the rule of heroic manhood; the champions of the great Queen must all be knights-errant; there were giant oppressors to overthrow, there were deceivers of men to unmask, there were captive lands and causes to succour ; nor could a time ever come when truth and justice, and purity and gentleness, would not be at odds with evil and untamed forces in our own hearts within and in the broad world without.

Spenser retained for the uses of the Renaissance the moral idealism of chivalry, and he renewed and recreated this; for Spenser's chivalry is one which has made acquaintance with the robust energies of his own time,

with the hearty morality of the Reformed faith, and also with the broad and well-based thoughts of the great master of ethical philosophy. What England of the Renaissance needed most, Spenser declared, was noble character in man and woman. The most worshipful and lovely things this earth could show were, in his eyes, a true English gentleman and a true English lady; these, Spenser said, were actually to be found in Elizabethan England. He had known Sidney; he knew Sidney's sister

"Urania, sister unto Astrofell,

In whose brave mind, as in a golden cofer,
All heavenly gifts and riches locked are."

There were others no less praiseworthy, and among them his own three kinswomen, of whom one afterwards, in majestic old age, seemed to the youthful Milton equal to Latona or the towered Cybele,

"Mother of a hundred gods."

These Spenser had seen and known. But in Elizabeth's Court he had found also much that repelled himspurious gentry, aristocratic barbarism, vulgar pleasures, ignoble ambition and ignoble ease, wantonness misnaming itself love, the bark of slander, the bite of envy. He had experienced the anxieties, the disappointments, the humiliations of one who is a seeker for preferment. Then came a time when he could look at these thingsboth the evil and the good-from a distance, when his imagination could deal with them in its own mode of serene ardour and could shape them to their ideal forms. To have a part in the ragged commonwealth of Ireland