for granted with unquestioning alacrity that man is
called--by his call to high aims and destiny--to a continual struggle
with difficulty, with pain, with evil, and makes it the point of honour
not to be dismayed or wearied out by them. It is a cheerful and serious
willingness for hard work and endurance, as being inevitable and very
bearable necessities, together with even a pleasure in encountering
trials which put a man on his mettle, an enjoyment of the contest and
the risk, even in play. It is the quality which seizes on the paramount
idea of duty, as something which leaves a man no choice; which despises
and breaks through the inferior considerations and motives--trouble,
uncertainty, doubt, curiosity--which hang about and impede duty; which
is impatient with the idleness and childishness of a life of mere
amusement, or mere looking on, of continued and self-satisfied levity,
of vacillation, of clever and ingenious trifling. Spenser's manliness is
quite consistent with long pauses of rest, with intervals of change,
with great craving for enjoyment--nay, with great lapses from its ideal,
with great mixtures of selfishness, with coarseness, with
licentiousness, with injustice and inhumanity. It may be fatally
diverted into bad channels; it may degenerate into a curse and scourge
to the world. But it stands essentially distinct from the nature which
shrinks from difficulty, which is appalled at effort, which has no
thought of making an impression on things around it, which is content
with passively receiving influences and distinguishing between emotions,
which feels no call to exert itself, because it recognizes no aim
valuable enough to rouse it, and no obligation strong enough to command
it. In the character of his countrymen round him, in its highest and in
its worst features, in its noble ambition, its daring enterprise, its
self-devotion, as well as in its pride, its intolerance, its fierce
self-will, its arrogant claims of superiority, moral, political,
religious, Spenser saw the example of that strong and resolute
manliness, which, once set on great things, feared nothing--neither toil
nor disaster nor danger, in their pursuit. Naturally and unconsciously,
he laid it at the bottom of all his portraitures of noble and virtuous
achievement in the _Faery Queen_.

All Spenser's "virtues" spring from a root of manliness. Strength,
simplicity of aim, elevation of spirit, courage are presupposed as their
necessary