s and
imagery, on which Spenser has lavished all his riches. There can be no
doubt of Byron's real habits of thought and feeling on subjects of this
kind, even when his language for the occasion is the chastest; we detect
in it the mood of the moment, perhaps spontaneous, perhaps put on, but
in contradiction to the whole movement of the man's true nature. But
Spenser's words do not ring hollow. With a kind of unconsciousness and
innocence, which we now find hard to understand, and which perhaps
belongs to the early childhood or boyhood of a literature, he passes
abruptly from one standard of thought and feeling to another; and is
quite as much in earnest when he is singing the pure joys of chastened
affections, as he is when he is writing with almost riotous luxuriance
what we are at this day ashamed to read. Tardily, indeed, he appears to
have acknowledged the contradiction. At the instance of two noble ladies
of the Court, he composed two Hymns of Heavenly Love and Heavenly
Beauty, to "retract" and "reform" two earlier ones composed in praise of
earthly love and beauty. But, characteristically, he published the two
pieces together, side by side in the same volume.

In the _Faery Queen_, Spenser has brought out, not the image of the
great Gloriana, but in its various aspects, a form of character which
was then just coming on the stage of the world, and which has played a
great part in it since. As he has told us, he aimed at presenting before
us, in the largest sense of the word, the English gentleman. It was as a
whole a new character in the world. It had not really existed in the
days of feudalism and chivalry, though features of it had appeared, and
its descent was traced from those times: but they were too wild and
coarse, too turbulent and disorderly, for a character which, however
ready for adventure and battle, looked to peace, refinement, order, and
law as the true conditions of its perfection. In the days of Elizabeth
it was beginning to fill a large place in English life. It was formed
amid the increasing cultivation of the nation, the increasing varieties
of public service, the awakening responsibilities to duty and calls to
self-command. Still making much of the prerogative of noble blood and
family honours, it was something independent of nobility and beyond it.
A nobleman might have in him the making of a gentleman: but it was the
man himself of whom the gentleman was made. Great birth, even great
capacit