ich should make it essential to the plan of his poem to be
always recommending some virtue; and remind him, like a voice from
heaven, that the place on which he was standing was holy ground.

Then as to the benefit which the _readers_ of the _Faerie Queene_ may
derive from its allegorical form; a good deal surely is to be gained
from the mere habit of looking at things with a view to something
beyond their qualities merely sensible; to their sacred and moral
meaning, and to the high associations they were intended to create in
us. Neither the works nor the word of God, neither poetry nor
theology, can be duly comprehended without constant mental exercise of
this kind. The comparison of the Old Testament with the New is nothing
else from beginning to end. And without something of this sort,
poetry, and all the other arts, would indeed be relaxing to the tone
of the mind. The allegory obviates this ill effect, by serving as a
frequent remembrancer of this higher application. Not that it is
necessary to bend and strain everything into conformity with it; a
little leaven, of the genuine kind, will go a good way towards
leavening the whole lump. And so it is in the _Faerie Queene_; for one
stanza of direct allegory there are perhaps fifty of poetical
embellishment; and it is in these last, after all, that the chief
moral excellency of the poem lies; as we are now about to show.

But to be understood rightly, we would premise, that there is a
disposition,--the very reverse of that which leads to parody and
caricature,--which is common indeed to all generous minds, but is
perhaps unrivalled in Spenser. As parody and caricature debase what is
truly noble, by connecting it with low and ludicrous associations; so
a mind, such as we are now speaking of, ennobles what of itself might
seem trivial; its thoughts and language, on all occasions, taking a
uniform and almost involuntary direction towards the best and highest
things.

This, however, is a subject which can be hardly comprehended without
examples. The first which occurs to us is the passage which relates
the origin of Belphoebe.

Her birth was of the womb of morning dew,
And her conception of the joyous prime,
And all her whole creation did her show
Pure and unspotted from all loathly crime
That is ingenerate in fleshly slime.
So was this Virgin born, so was she bred,
So was she trained up from time to time,
In all chaste virtue and tr