allegory almost becomes
history. Arthur, Lord Grey, is Sir Arthegal, the Knight of Justice. The
story touches apparently on some passages of his career, when his
dislike of the French marriage placed him in opposition to the Queen,
and even for a time threw him with the supporters of Mary. But the
adventures of Arthegal mainly preserve the memory of Lord Grey's
terrible exploits against wrong and rebellion in Ireland. These exploits
are represented in the doings of the iron man Talus, his squire, with
his destroying flail, swift, irresistible, inexorable; a figure,
borrowed and altered, after Spenser's wont, from a Greek legend. His
overthrow of insolent giants, his annihilation of swarming "rascal
routs," idealize and glorify that unrelenting policy, of which, though
condemned in England, Spenser continued to be the advocate. In the story
of Arthegal, long separated by undeserved misfortunes from the favour of
the armed lady, Britomart, the virgin champion of right, of whom he was
so worthy, doomed in spite of his honours to an early death, and
assailed on his return from his victorious service by the furious
insults of envy and malice, Spenser portrays almost without a veil, the
hard fate of the unpopular patron whom he to the last defended and
honoured.

Ralegh, his last protector, the Shepherd of the Ocean, to whose judgment
he referred the work of his life, and under whose guidance he once more
tried the quicksands of the Court, belonged to a different class from
Sidney or Lord Grey; but of his own class he was the consummate and
matchless example. He had not Sidney's fine enthusiasm and nobleness; he
had not either Sidney's affectations. He had not Lord Grey's
single-minded hatred of wrong. He was a man to whom his own interests
were much; he was unscrupulous; he was ostentatious; he was not above
stooping to mean, unmanly compliances with the humours of the Queen. But
he was a man with a higher ideal than he attempted to follow. He saw,
not without cynical scorn, through the shows and hollowness of the
world. His intellect was of that clear and unembarrassed power which
takes in as wholes things which other men take in part by part. And he
was in its highest form a representative of that spirit of adventure
into the unknown and the wonderful of which Drake was the coarser and
rougher example, realizing in serious earnest, on the sea and in the New
World, the life of knight-errantry feigned in romances. With Raleg