conditions. But they have with him another condition as
universal. They all grow and are nourished from the soil of love; the
love of beauty, the love and service of fair women. This of course, is a
survival from the ages of chivalry, an inheritance bequeathed from the
minstrels of France, Italy, and Germany to the rising poetry of Europe.
Spenser's types of manhood are imperfect without the idea of an
absorbing and overmastering passion of love; without a devotion, as to
the principal and most worthy object of life, to the service of a
beautiful lady, and to winning her affection and grace. The influence of
this view of life comes out in numberless ways. Love comes on the scene
in shapes which are exquisitely beautiful, in all its purity, its
tenderness, its unselfishness. But the claims of its all-ruling and
irresistible might are also only too readily verified in the passions of
men; in the follies of love, its entanglements, its mischiefs, its
foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never
absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the
poem. The picture of life held up before us is the literal rendering of
Coleridge's lines:--

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
Are all but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.

We still think with Spenser about the paramount place of manliness, as
the foundation of all worth in human character. We have ceased to think
with him about the rightful supremacy of love, even in the imaginative
conception of human life. We have ceased to recognize in it the public
claims of almost a religion, which it has in Spenser. Love will ever
play a great part in human life to the end of time. It will be an
immense element in its happiness, perhaps a still greater one in its
sorrows, its disasters, its tragedies. It is still an immense power in
shaping and colouring it, both in fiction and reality; in the family, in
the romance, in the fatalities and the prosaic ruin of vulgar fact. But
the place given to it by Spenser is to our thoughts and feelings even
ludicrously extravagant. An enormous change has taken place in the ideas
of society on this point: it is one of the things which make a wide
chasm between centuries and generations which yet are of "the same
passions," and have in temper, tradition and language, so much in
common. The ages of the Courts of Love, whom Chaucer r