e Knight, the Patron of Holinesse, which
we find in the opening lines:

A gentle knight was pricking on the plain,
Ycladd in mighty arms and silver shield.

As we read we discover, without effort, that he is the St. George of
England, or the impersonation of England herself, whose red-cross banner
distinguishes her among the nations of the earth. It is a description of
Christian England with which the poet thus opens his work:

And on his brest a bloodie cross he bore,
The dear remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead, as living ever, Him adored.
Upon his shield the like was also scored,
For sovereign hope which in his help he had.

Then follows his adventure--that of St. George and the Dragon. By slaying
this monster, he will give comfort and aid to a peerless lady, the
daughter of a glorious king; this fair lady, _Una_, who has come a long
distance, and to whom, as a champion, the Faery Queene has presented the
red-cross knight. Thus is presented the historic truth that the reformed
and suffering Church looked to Queen Elizabeth for succor and support, for
the Lady Una is one of several portraitures of the Church in this poem.

As we proceed in the poem, the history becomes more apparent. The Lady
Una, riding upon a lowly ass, shrouded by a veil, covered with a black
stole, "as one that inly mourned," and leading "a milk-white lamb," is the
Church. The ass is the symbol of her Master's lowliness, who made even his
triumphant entry into Jerusalem upon "a colt the foal of an ass;" the
lamb, the emblem of the innocence and of the helplessness of the "little
flock;" the black stole is meant to represent the Church's trials and
sorrows in her former history as well as in that naughty age. The dragon
is the old serpent, her constant and bitter foe, who, often discomfited,
returns again and again to the attack in hope of her overthrow.

THE WOOD OF ERROR.--The adventures of the knight and the lady take them
first into the Wood of Error, a noble and alluring grove, within which,
however, lurks a loathsome serpent. The knight rushes upon this female
monster with great boldness, but

... Wrapping up her wreathed body round,
She leaped upon his shield and her huge train
All suddenly about his body wound,
That hand and foot he strove to stir in vain.
God help the man so wrapt in Error's endless chain.

The L