man are the manifestation. As to the study of an artist's technical qualities, this, by virtue of the fact that he is an artist, is of capital importance; and it may often be associated with the study of that which his technique is employed to express and render—the characteristics of his mind, and of the vision which he has attained of the external universe, of humanity, and of God.

Of all our study the last end and aim should be to ascertain how a great writer or artist has served the life of man; to ascertain this, to bring home to ourselves as large a portion as may be of the gain wherewith he has enriched human life, and to render access to that store of wisdom, passion, and power, easier and surer for others. If our study does not directly or indirectly enrich the life of man, it is but a drawing of vanity with cart-ropes, a weariness to the flesh, or at best a busy idleness.

D

SPENSER, THE POET AND TEACHER.

In England of the age of Elizabeth what place is filled by the poetry of Spenser ? What blank would be made by its disappearance? In what, for each of us who love that poetry, resides its special virtue? Shall we say in answer to these questions that Spenser is the weaver of spells, the creator of illusions, the enchanter of the Elizabethan age; and that his name is to us a word of magic by which we conjure away the pain of actual life, and obtain entrance into a world of faery? Was Spenser, as a poet of our own time names himself, "the idle singer" of his day-that day not indeed "an empty day," but one filled with heroic daring and achievement? While Raleigh was exploring strange. streams of the New World, while Drake was chasing the Spaniard, while Bacon was seeking for the principles of a philosophy which should enrich man's life, while Hooker, with the care of a wise master-builder, was laying the foundation of polity in the National Church, where was Spenser ? Was he forgetful of England, forgetful of earth, lulled and lying in some bower of fantasy, or moving in a dream among imaginary champions of chivalry, distressed damsels, giants and dragons and satyrs and savage men, or shepherds who pipe and shepherdesses who dance for ever in a serene Arcady?

Assuredly it was not thus that a great Englishman of a later age thought of Spenser. When Milton entered upon his manhood, he entered upon a warfare; the peaceful Horton days, days of happy ingathering of varied culture, days of sweet repose amid rural beauty, were past and gone; and he stood with loins girt, prepared for battle on behalf of liberty. And then, in London, when London was a vast arsenal in which weapons were forging for the defence of truth and freedom, Milton in his moment of highest and most masculine ardour, as he wrote his speech on behalf of unlicensed printing, thought of Spenser. It was not as a dreamer that Milton thought of him. Spenser had been a power with himself in youth, when he, "the lady of his college," but such a lady as we read of in "Comus," grew in virginal beauty and virginal strength. He had listened to Spenser's "sage and solemn tunes," "Of turneys and of trophies hung;

Of forests and enchantments drear,

Where more is meant than meets the ear."

And now, in his manhood, when all of life has grown for him so grave, so glorious with heroic effort, Milton looks back and remembers his master, and he remembers him not as an idle singer, not as a dreamer of dreams, but as "our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare to name a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas."

"The true

A teacher,what is the import of this? use of Spenser," says a poet of our own day, Mr J. R. Lowell," is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two at a time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long

as to cloy them." And again: "Whenever in the 'Faery Queen' you come suddenly on the moral, it gives you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one's teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of strawberries and cream." This, then, is the "Faery Queen "a dish of strawberries and cream mixed up unfortunately with a good deal of grit. And as for the allegory, we may "fairly leave it on one side; Spenser employed it to "convince the scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master Bull his new way of making fine words butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer." Shall we accept this view, or that of Milton-" a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas?" Was Spenser such a teacher "sage sage and serious" to his own age? If so, does he remain such a teacher for this age of ours?

Let us put the question in another way, and inquire, What was the highest function which an English poet in the second half of the sixteenth century could fulfil? The death of the medieval world and the birth of the modern world had been the achievements of Italy. In Italy the fire of intellectual life had been gathered as on a hearth, and its flame leaped highest; it was from Italy that the light and warmth diffused themselves to other lands. To Italian seamen we owe the discovery of the New World: Columbus was a Genoese, John Cabot was a Venetian. To Italian students we owe the rediscovery of the Old World of classical art, poetry, and

* With which contrast Coleridge's words, "No one can appreciate Spenser without some reflection on the nature of allegorical writing;" and Mr Ruskin's painstaking attempt in 'Stones of Venice" to interpret the allegory of Book I.

eloquence. The great thinkers of Greece were no longer denaturalised in the interests of an effete scholastic system; the pillars of the Parthenon were not employed to prop the crumbling walls of a chapter-house. Plato became at least an equal master with Aristotle, and in Plato the humanists found that beauty and enthusiasm which were needed to arouse and satisfy the imaginative reason. At the same time the architecture of Italy passed from its period of free and varied experiment— experiment nobly inventive to its period of fulfilled attainment. To the first thirty years of the sixteenth century belong the painters who represent the culmination of the great art-movement of Italy. Life in that southern land seemed like a blossoming plant with petals. deep of dye and rich in floating perfume; like a flame swift, delicate, and aspiring.

But there was a dark side to the Italian Renaissance. The Church and the world had alike too much forgotten that true humanism includes a noble morality. In Rome, at the heart of Christendom, were fraud, avarice, ambition, violence, foul living, effeminacy. And the Church possessed no monopoly of vices. A tendency to materialism in philosophy coincided in point of time with a practical cynicism as to what is most spiritual in human conduct and character. Sensuality was elaborated into an art. "The immorality of the Italians," says Mr Symonds, making a just distinction, "was not that of beasts; it rather resembled that of devils."

Over

In such a moral environment had appeared for a short time a man possessed by the old prophetic fire. against Lorenzo, with his splendour and his culture, arose