Spenser's chief thought on this subject is that true courtesy is not an accomplishment or an acquirement, but grows out of character, and is indeed the delicate flowering of a beautiful nature.

All these virtues are summed up in the one central] virtue of High-mindedness (usyaλotuxía), or, as Spenser, names it, Magnificence. Indeed, greatness in every virtue or excellence," says Aristotle, "would seem to be necessarily implied in being a high-souled or greatsouled man." But there is one thing, Aristotle goes on, about which the high-souled man is especially concerned: "For desert has reference to external good things. Now, the greatest of external good things we may assume to be that which we render to the gods as their due, and that which people in high stations most desire, and which is the prize appointed for the noblest deeds. But the thing which answers to this description is honour, which, we may safely say, is the greatest of all external goods. Honours and dishonours, therefore, are the field in which the highminded man behaves as he ought." And again:

High-mindedness, as we have said, has to do with honour on a large scale." Or, as Spenser puts it, Prince Arthur, his ideal of "Magnificence," is the lover of Gloriana.

Spenser's conception of life was Puritan in its seriousness; yet we think with wonder of the wide space that lies between the "Faery Queen" and our other great allegory, the "Pilgrim's Progress." To escape from the City of Destruction and to reach the Celestial City is Christian's one concern; all his recompense for the

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countless trials of the way lies upon the other side of the river of death. His consuming thought is this: "What must I do to be saved?" (Spenser is spiritual, but he is also mundane; he thinks of the uses of noble human creatures to this world in which we move. His general end in the poem is "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." grand self-culture," I have elsewhere said, “is that about which Spenser is concerned; not, as with Bunyan, the escape of the soul to heaven; not the attainment of supernatural grace through a point of mystical contact, like the vision which was granted to the virgin knight, Galahad, in the medieval allegory. Self-culture, the formation of a complete character for the uses of earth, and afterwards, if need be, for the uses of heaven,-this was subject sufficient for the twenty-four books designed to form the epic of the age of Elizabeth. And the means of that self- culture are of an active kindnamely, warfare,—warfare, not for its own sake, but for the generous accomplishment of unselfish ends." Bunyan, with whom the visionary power was often involuntary, who would live for a day and a night in some metaphor that had attacked his imagination, transcribed into allegory his own wonderful experience of terrors and of comfort. Spenser is more impersonal: he can refashion Aristotle in a dream. But behind him lies all the sentiment of Christian chivalry, and around him all the life of Elizabethan England; and from these diverse elements arises a rich and manifold creation, which, if it lacks the personal, spiritual passion of Bunyan's allegory, compensates by its moral breadth, its noble sanity, its conciliation of what is earthly and what is divine.

"A better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." We have seen to some small extent what Spenser sought to impress upon the mind of his own age. He strove, in his own way as poet, to make the national life of England a7 great unity, spiritual, yet not disdaining earth or the things of earth. He strove, as far as in him lay, to breed a race of high-souled English gentlemen, who should have none of the meanness of the libertine, none of the meanness of the precisian. But the contending parties of the English nation went their ways—one party to moral licentiousness and political servility, the other to religious intolerance and the coarse extravagances of the sectaries. Each extreme ran its course. And when the Puritan excess and the Cavalier excess had alike exhausted themselves, and England once more recovered a portion of her wisdom and her calm, it had become impossible to revert to the ideals of Spenser. Enthusiasm had been discredited by the sectaries until it had grown to be a byword of reproach. The orgies of the Restoration had served to elevate common decency into something like high virtue. After the Puritan excess and the Cavalier excess, England recovered herself not by moral ardour or imaginative reason, but by good sense, by a prosaic but practical respect for the respectable, and by a utilitarian conviction that honesty is the best policy.

A better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." Yet we are told by the Dean of St Paul's, that in giving himself credit for a direct purpose to instruct, Spenser "only . conformed to the curiously utilitarian spirit which pervaded the literature of the time." It is the heresy of

*

modern art that only useless things should be made beautiful. We want beauty only in playthings. In elder days the armour of a knight was as beautiful as sunlight, or as flowers. "In unaffected, unconscious, artistic excellence of invention," says one of our chief living painters, approaching more nearly to the strange beauty of nature, especially in vegetation, mediæval armour perhaps surpasses any other effort of human ingenuity." What if Spenser wrought armour for the soul, and, because it was precious and of finest temper, made it fair to look upon? That which gleams as bright as the waters of a sunlit lake is perhaps a breastplate to protect the heart; that which appears pliant as the blades of summer grass may prove at our need to be a sword of steel.

*Mr G. F. Watts.

HEROINES OF SPENSER.

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SPENSER'S manner of portraiture differs much from that v of Chaucer, whom he names his poetical master. Ambling Canterburyward, with his eyes on the ground, the earlier poet could steal sprightly glances at every member of the cavalcade-glances which took in the tuft of hairs on the Miller's nose, the sparkle of pins in the Friar's tippet, and the smooth forehead and little rosy mouth of Madam Eglantine. We should know the Wife of Bath, if we met her, by the wide-parted teeth, the dulness of hearing, the bold laugh, the liberal tongue; we should expect to see the targelike hat, the scarlet stockings, and the shining shoes. Spenser's gaze dwelt longer on things, in a more passive luxury of sensation or with reverence more devout. His powers of observation are, as it were, dissolved in his sense of beauty) and this again is taken up into his moral idealism and becomes a part of it. To Chaucer a beautiful woman is a beautiful creature of this good earth, and is often nothing more; her beauty suddenly slays the tender heart of her lover, or she makes glad the spirit of man as though with some light, bright wine. She is more blissful to look on than "the new perjonette tree," and softer than the wether's wool; her mouth is sweet as "apples laid in hay or heath"; her body is gent and small as any

weasel. (For Spenser behind each woman, made to wor

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