ve and unselfish and tender, his generous estimate of what is due
from man to man of service, affection, and fidelity. His fictions
embodied truths of character which with all their shadowy incompleteness
were too real and too beautiful to lose their charm with time.

1. Spenser accepted from his age the quaint stateliness which is
characteristic of his poem. His poetry is not simple and direct like
that of the Greeks. It has not the exquisite finish and felicity of the
best of the Latins. It has not the massive grandeur, the depth, the
freedom, the shades and subtle complexities of feeling and motive, which
the English dramatists found by going straight to nature. It has the
stateliness of highly artificial conditions of society, of the Court,
the pageant, the tournament, as opposed to the majesty of the great
events in human life and history, its real vicissitudes, its
catastrophes, its tragedies, its revolutions, its sins. Throughout the
prolonged crisis of Elizabeth's reign, her gay and dashing courtiers,
and even her serious masters of affairs, persisted in pretending to look
on the world in which they lived, as if through the side-scenes of a
masque, and relieved against the background of a stage-curtain. Human
life, in those days, counted for little; fortune, honour, national
existence hung in the balance; the game was one in which the heads of
kings and queens and great statesmen were the stakes,--yet the players
could not get out of their stiff and constrained costume, out of their
artificial and fantastic figments of thought, out of their conceits and
affectations of language. They carried it, with all their sagacity, with
all their intensity of purpose, to the council-board, and the
judgment-seat. They carried it to the scaffold. The conventional
supposition was that at the Court, though every one knew better, all was
perpetual sunshine, perpetual holiday, perpetual triumph, perpetual
love-making. It was the happy reign of the good and wise and lovely. It
was the discomfiture of the base, the faithless, the wicked, the
traitors. This is what is reflected in Spenser's poem; at once, its
stateliness, for there was no want of grandeur and magnificence in the
public scene ever before Spenser's imagination; and its quaintness,
because the whole outward apparatus of representation was borrowed from
what was past, or from what did not exist, and implied surrounding
circumstances in ludicrous contrast with fact, and m