xplain and excuse his work by claiming for it this design.
He did not venture to send the _Faery Queen_ into the world without also
telling the world its moral meaning and bearing. He cannot trust it to
tell its own story or suggest its real drift. In the letter to Sir W.
Ralegh, accompanying the first portion of it, he unfolds elaborately the
sense of his allegory, as he expounded it to his friends in Dublin. "To
some," he says, "I know this method will seem displeasant, which had
rather have good discipline delivered plainly by way of precept, or
sermoned at large, as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in
allegorical devises." He thought that Homer and Virgil and Ariosto had
thus written poetry, to teach the world moral virtue and political
wisdom. He attempted to propitiate Lord Burghley, who hated him and his
verses, by setting before him in a dedication sonnet, the true intent of
his--

Idle rimes;
The labour of lost time and wit unstaid;
Yet if their deeper sense he inly weighed,
And the dim veil, with which from common view
Their fairer parts are hid, aside be laid,
Perhaps not vain they may appear to you.

In earlier and in later times, men do not apologize for being poets; and
Spenser himself was deceived in giving himself credit for this direct
purpose to instruct, when he was really following the course marked out
by his genius. But he only conformed to the curious utilitarian spirit
which pervaded the literature of the time. Readers were supposed to look
everywhere for a moral to be drawn, or a lesson to be inculcated, or
some practical rules to be avowedly and definitely deduced; and they
could not yet take in the idea that the exercise of the speculative and
imaginative faculties may be its own end, and may have indirect
influences and utilities even greater than if it was guided by a
conscious intention to be edifying and instructive.

The first great English poem of modern times, the first creation of
English imaginative power since Chaucer, and like Chaucer so thoroughly
and characteristically English, was not written in England. Whatever
Spenser may have done to it before he left England with Lord Grey, and
whatever portions of earlier composition may have been used and worked
up into the poem as it went on, the bulk of the _Faery Queen_, as we
have it, was composed in what to Spenser and his friends was almost a
foreign land--in the conq