satisfaction, till he
gets accustomed to the poet's way, and resigns himself to it. It is a
heroic poem, in which the heroine, who gives her name to it, never
appears: a story, of which the basis and starting-point is whimsically
withheld for disclosure in the last book, which was never written. If
Ariosto's jumps and transitions are more audacious, Spenser's intricacy
is more puzzling. Adventures begin which have no finish. Actors in them
drop from the clouds, claim an interest, and we ask in vain what has
become of them. A vein of what are manifestly contemporary allusions
breaks across the moral drift of the allegory, with an apparently
distinct yet obscured meaning, and one of which it is the work of
dissertations to find the key. The passion of the age was for ingenious
riddling in morality as in love. And in Spenser's allegories we are not
seldom at a loss to make out what and how much was really intended, amid
a maze of overstrained analogies and over-subtle conceits, and attempts
to hinder a too close and dangerous identification.

Indeed Spenser's mode of allegory, which was historical as well as
moral, and contains a good deal of history, if we knew it, often seems
devised to throw curious readers off the scent. It was purposely
baffling and hazy. A characteristic trait was singled out. A name was
transposed in anagram, like Irena, or distorted, as if by imperfect
pronunciation, like Burbon and Arthegal, or invented to express a
quality, like Una, or Gloriana, or Corceca, or Fradubio, or adopted with
no particular reason from the _Morte d'Arthur_, or any other old
literature. The personage is introduced with some feature, or amid
circumstances which seem for a moment to fix the meaning. But when we
look to the sequence of history being kept up in the sequence of the
story, we find ourselves thrown out. A character which fits one person
puts on the marks of another: a likeness which we identify with one real
person passes into the likeness of some one else. The real, in person,
incident, institution, shades off into the ideal; after showing itself
by plain tokens, it turns aside out of its actual path of fact, and
ends, as the poet thinks it ought to end, in victory or defeat, glory or
failure. Prince Arthur passes from Leicester to Sidney, and then back
again to Leicester. There are double or treble allegories; Elizabeth is
Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, perhaps Amoret; her rival is
Duessa, the fals