istant object of loyalty: the men who thus flattered knew
perfectly well, often by painful experience, what Elizabeth was:
able, indeed, high-spirited, successful, but ungrateful to her
servants, capricious, vain, ill-tempered, unjust, and in her old age,
ugly. And yet the Gloriana of the _Faery Queen_, the Empress of
all nobleness,--Belphoebe, the Princess of all sweetness and
beauty,--Britomart, the armed votaress of all purity,--Mercilla, the
lady of all compassion and grace,--were but the reflections of the
language in which it was then agreed upon by some of the greatest of
Englishmen to speak, and to be supposed to think, of the Queen.

II. But when all these faults have been admitted, faults of design and
faults of execution--and when it is admitted, further, that there is a
general want of reality, substance, distinctness, and strength in the
personages of the poem--that, compared with the contemporary drama,
Spenser's knights and ladies and villains are thin and ghostlike, and
that, as Daniel says, he

Paints shadows in imaginary lines--

it yet remains that our greatest poets since his day have loved him and
delighted in him. He had Shakespere's praise. Cowley was made a poet by
reading him. Dryden calls Milton "the poetical son of Spenser:"
"Milton," he writes, "has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his
original." Dryden's own homage to him is frequent and generous. Pope
found as much pleasure in the _Faery Queen_ in his later years as he had
found in reading it when he was twelve years old: and what Milton,
Dryden, and Pope admired, Wordsworth too found full of nobleness,
purity, and sweetness. What is it that gives the _Faery Queen_ its hold
on those who appreciate the richness and music of English language, and
who in temper and moral standard are quick to respond to English
manliness and tenderness? The spell is to be found mainly in three
things--(1) in the quaint stateliness of Spenser's imaginary world and
its representatives; (2) in the beauty and melody of his numbers, the
abundance and grace of his poetic ornaments, in the recurring and
haunting rhythm of numberless passages, in which thought and imagery and
language and melody are interwoven in one perfect and satisfying
harmony; and (3) in the intrinsic nobleness of his general aim, his
conception of human life, at once so exacting and so indulgent, his high
ethical principles and ideals, his unfeigned honour for all that is pure
and bra