It was, indeed, an obsession with him. Except when reality compelled him to remain starkly truthful, he lingered over the loveliness of persons and things, scenes and circumstance; so that often his characters, the knights, damsels, dwarfs, giants, and witches, who all are stock figures of chivalrous romance, appear rather as stage-folk backed by a sliding panorama, painted with brilliant colours and consistently beautiful. It was so because habitually he saw life through the glamour of poetic dream; yet, curiously, his delight in loveliness was merged with a strange and morbid weakness for nastiness. He seemed to delight in describing the spewings and bloody scatterings, especially of the entrails, of the villainous. Such passages are so frequent as almost to be amusing, and are invariably written with a detail and extravagance which possibly testify to his relief at escaping for a time from the persistent glow and rhythm through which his mind sang.

'Still the blood gushed in so great store

That he lay wallowed all in his own gore.' He loved gore, the hue of which varied with the virtuousness of the person dispossessed of it. 'Coalblack' with the evil, it was purple or red with the good. Such excess in ugliness after all was not unnatural. The mind of the poet, often at strain, must sometimes be permitted to react. Art, as well as Nature, insists on attaining a balance; therefore, Spenser relieved the flowing, similar music of his verse with an occasional discord or a broken line. So discord oft in Music makes the sweeter lay,' he sang.

There was plenty of reality in his work, in spite of its frequent dreaminess; and Macaulay, in his essay on Bunyan, not for the first time was guilty of a rapid injustice, when he decried the readableness of Spenser and called him tedious. The 'Faerie Queene,' though often diffuse, is not tedious if taken in the right spirit, with pauses for rest when the mind has grown tired, as is inevitable to any stretch of sustained attention. The theme is rich with incident and invention, and no canto of the great epic could be deleted without injuring the symmetry of the whole. Unlike Shakespeare, Spenser did not pen many of those compact jewelled phrases

which have found immortality in the common speech'the art of mighty words that men can charm'-but often, with a touch, he brings a fine effect. For death sat on the point of that enchanted spear.' Is not that actual enough with all its imaginativeness?

'With bloody mouth his Mother Earth did kiss
Greeting his grave.'

Spenser's prose, too, is nervous, well-modelled, actual. It is a fact overlooked, yet none the less true, that he is to be numbered amongst our best writers of prose. In the notes to his poems-probably often his own, even when apparently he wishes them to be taken as the editorials of others as well as in his 'Present State of Ireland,' he shows a lucidity and directness of style which produce a thought or a picture with luminous and sometimes moving precision. Of the poor outlawed Irish he wrote:

'Out of every corner of the woodes and glinnes they came creeping foorthe upon theyr handes, for theyr legges could not beare them; they looked like anatomyes of death, they spake like ghostes crying out of theyr graves; they did eate of the dead carrions, happy were they yf they could finde them, yea, and one another soone after, insoemuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of theyr graves; and yf they founde a plot of water-cresses or sham-rokes, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithall; that in shorte space there were none allmost left, and a most populous and plentifull countrey suddaynly made voyde of man or beast; yet sure in all that warre, there perished not many by the swoorde, but all by the extremitye of famine which they themselves had wrought.'

We pass to another aspect of his genius. The power, delicacy, variety, and almost infinite scope of his imagination require no advertisement. To people a magic forest with the many who suffer and make adventure through the course of his numerous pages is a sufficient achievement, even although they had few of those particularities of individuality which are necessary to the persons of successful fiction. Spenser's inadequate gift of characterisation was his worst weakness. The ha knights and blessed damozels, the witches and dwarfs of

his management, are much of a pattern. Even Merlin, who from his origins—the child of a sprite and a nunand mystical reputation might have been expected to differ from the rest, is a conventional figure. His utterance is never oracular or cryptic. Yet when the poet was interested his imagination grew vivid and he saw the details of an incident or person with lustrous exactitude. So clear, then, was his sight that sometimes it went too far; as when, referring to the Red Sea, he saw its blood-red billows.' Occasionally this tendency to over-describe caused him to topple. In ' Virgil's Gnat,' an early effort, he describes the insect as of 'grisly countenance and visage grim.' In 'Muiopotmos,' when the fate of the butterfly has fallen, its

'deepe-groning spright

In bloodie streames foorth fled into the aire,
His bodie left the spectacle of care.'

Bathos could hardly tumble into a muddier pit. Other similar absurdities may also be noticed; for as every hero should have his faults to keep him human, so these blemishes do not detract from Spenser's poetic greatness, but even help to prove him sincere. 'Straight down she ran like an enragéd cow,' to our modern eyes does not suggest a wrathful woman hurrying to her revenge; while the love of Clarinda for Artegall might have been more happily expressed than with,

'his private fire, which boyld

Her inward brest, and in her entrails fryde.'

Those entrails were irresistible to Spenser. They are a perpetual intrusion on the magic scene. At the first impression these passages suggest that he was wanting in humour, and certainly he was incapable of producing such full-bodied, amusing characters as Toby Belch, or Nick Bottom, or the Wife of Bath; but that he had humour is shown by his well-told tale, in the 'Faerie Queene,' of Malbecco and his naughty wife, Hellenore; which is so rich in its Boccaccian and Rabelaisian irony and mirth, that Spenser must have borrowed the inspiration and joy of it from his confessed master, Chaucer. It has subtle and delightful touches- the pictures of Malbecco, with his cuckold horns and goatish

beard being, therefore, taken by the satyrs for one of themselves, is delicious-and makes one wish that more of such quality had been merged with his sage and noble seriousness.

Uncongenial mirth, as well, was in his equipment, and is found in the bitter satire, 'Mother Hubberds Tale'; an early poem also inspired by Chaucer, in which an ape and a fox set out to advance themselves in circumstance. The poem reveals the angry grief of soul suffered by Spenser at times throughout his sensitive life; but especially as it was to be in the gloom of twilight towards the end. That chapter of his experience must be referred to again; but here the poem is noticed because it shows how truly he possessed satiric humour, when Chaucer was before him as a guide, and he had a purpose, with ills and injustice to bear, on which to whet the weapon of his ridicule. The tale is told with gusto. In that age, as since and before it, the time-server, the charlatan, the hypocrite, the cheat, were able to fatten on the stupidity and good faith of their fellows, being taken as true at the expense of the true and of those who did their duty and wanted no pay for it.

In spite of his former confidence in the eventual triumph of right, Spenser saw the apes and foxes among men successful; while such as his own master, Lord Grey of Wilton, the Artegall' who represented Justice in the Faerie Queene,' were left at the end of their ardours and hazards of service, worn-out, to die broken men. It is necessary, however, over Lord Deputy Grey to take him at Spenser's valuation, forgetting the harsh cruelty, as all must feel it now, of his treatment of the foreign garrison at the Fort of Smerwick, as told in the 'Present State.' Possibly such a remembrance, an aching blot upon his gentle spirit, added to Spenser's wretched. ness in his later life. His extraordinary gift for illusion would help him to forget the inconvenient and the cruel; but seeing how easily some men had profited by the selling of the ideals of patriotism and religion, and through cunning could triumph in a careless and troubled civilisation, he found ease for his pain and an outlet for his indignation in this bitter fable.

The fox, being determined that an easy life was the best for himself and the ape, his comrade, devised a

passport to hoodwink the officials, for feare lest we like rogues should be reputed.' The ape dressed up like a soldier in a blue jacket with a cross of red, and many slits to suggest that he had been often wounded. He put on his head an old Scotch cap.' They met a -husbandman, whom the ape persuaded to engage him as shepherd with the fox, this curdog,' to help in guarding the sheep. Of course, they abused the trust. Feasting first on the lambs and then on the sheep those false shepherds soon had devoured the whole flock; when they departed in search of other and more ambitious opportunities. They donned gowns and became religious. Meeting an ignorant priest who doubted their genuineness they showed him their passport. Unable to read it, though pretending to do so, he could not prevent their continuing the deceitful game. They thought of securing a benefice for the fox, and the priest explained how best that could be done. After attiring himself 'in handsome wise,' he should seek a nobleman's patronage; then fashion a godly zeal and walk in sober gravity.

'Fast much, pray oft, looke lowly on the ground,
And unto everie one doo curtesie meeke;

These looks (nought saying) doo a benefice seeke
And be thou sure one not to lacke or long.'

Everything proceeded as the priest foretold; and in describing the courses of the two rascals Spenser was able to prick some of the bubbles of worldly vanity and ambition and disclose corruptions that he had witnessed. The end of the tale brings disaster to the adventurers, but that was merely conventional; for Spenser, himself to be a sufferer from favours lost, knew that in the conditions of the world, as he found it, there were pickings and preferments enough for the unscrupulous with cunning, and that the happy ending is rare and never inevitable. 'Mother Hubberds Tale' is a jewel of satirical humour. The wit bites.

Beyond all other qualities-as gentleness truly isSpenser was a great gentleman.

'A Gentle Mind by gentle deeds is known,
For a man by nothing is so well bewrayed
As by his manners.'