s
trials, its achievements. There were two accepted forms in poetry in
which this had been done by poets. One was under the image of warfare.
The other was under the image of a journey or voyage. Spenser chose the
former, as Dante and Bunyan chose the latter. Spenser looks on the scene
of the world as a continual battle-field. It was such in fact to his
experience in Ireland, testing the mettle of character, its loyalty, its
sincerity, its endurance. His picture of character is by no means
painted with sentimental tenderness. He portrays it in the rough work of
the struggle and the toil, always hardly tested by trial, often
overmatched, deceived, defeated, and even delivered by its own default
to disgrace and captivity. He had full before his eyes what abounded in
the society of his day, often in its noblest representatives--the
strange perplexing mixture of the purer with the baser elements, in the
high-tempered and aspiring activity of his time. But it was an ideal of
character which had in it high aims and serious purposes, which was
armed with fortitude and strength, which could recover itself after
failure and defeat.

The unity of a story, or an allegory--that chain and backbone of
continuous interest, implying a progress and leading up to a climax,
which holds together the great poems of the world, the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_, the _AEneid_, the _Commedia_, the _Paradise Lost_, the
_Jerusalem Delivered_--this is wanting in the _Faery Queen_. The unity
is one of character and its ideal. That character of the completed man,
raised above what is poor and low, and governed by noble tempers and
pure principles, has in Spenser two conspicuous elements. In the first
place, it is based on manliness. In the personages which illustrate the
different virtues, Holiness, Justice, Courtesy, and the rest, the
distinction is not in nicely discriminated features or shades of
expression, but in the trials and the occasions which call forth a
particular action or effort: yet the manliness which is at the
foundation of all that is good in them is a universal quality common to
them all, rooted and imbedded in the governing idea or standard of moral
character in the poem. It is not merely courage, it is not merely
energy, it is not merely strength. It is the quality of soul which
frankly accepts the conditions in human life, of labour, of obedience,
of effort, of unequal success, which does not quarrel with them or evade
them, but takes