fancy,--historical events and personages
under allegorical masks, beautiful ladies, chivalrous knights, giants,
monsters, dragons, sirens, enchanters, and adventures enough to stock a
library of fiction. If you read Homer or Virgil, you know his subject in
the first strong line; if you read Caedmon's _Paraphrase_ or Milton's epic,
the introduction gives you the theme; but Spenser's great poem--with the
exception of a single line in the prologue, "Fierce warres and faithfull
loves shall moralize my song"--gives hardly a hint of what is coming.

As to the meaning of the allegorical figures, one is generally in doubt. In
the first three books the shadowy Faery Queen sometimes represents the
glory of God and sometimes Elizabeth, who was naturally flattered by the
parallel. Britomartis is also Elizabeth. The Redcross Knight is Sidney, the
model Englishman. Arthur, who always appears to rescue the oppressed, is
Leicester, which is another outrageous flattery. Una is sometimes religion
and sometimes the Protestant Church; while Duessa represents Mary Queen of
Scots, or general Catholicism. In the last three books Elizabeth appears
again as Mercilla; Henry IV of France as Bourbon; the war in the
Netherlands as the story of Lady Belge; Raleigh as Timias; the earls of
Northumberland and Westmoreland (lovers of Mary or Duessa) as Blandamour
and Paridell; and so on through the wide range of contemporary characters
and events, till the allegory becomes as difficult to follow as the second
part of Goethe's _Faust_.

POETICAL FORM. For the _Faery Queen_ Spenser invented a new verse form,
which has been called since his day the Spenserian stanza. Because of its
rare beauty it has been much used by nearly all our poets in their best
work. The new stanza was an improved form of Ariosto's _ottava rima_ (i.e.
eight-line stanza) and bears a close resemblance to one of Chaucer's most
musical verse forms in the "Monk's Tale." Spenser's stanza is in nine
lines, eight of five feet each and the last of six feet, riming
_ababbcbcc_. A few selections from the first book, which is best worth
reading, are reproduced here to show the style and melody of the verse.

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
Ycladd[117] in mightie armes and silver shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine
The cruell markes of many a bloody fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he never wield:
His angry steede did ch