until they seemed evil, but that was the fault of
others. And in his _Hymn to Heavenly Beauty_ he sets a woman little
known to theology, one that he names Wisdom or Beauty, above Seraphim
and Cherubim and in the very bosom of God, and in the _Faerie Queene_ it
is pagan Venus and her lover Adonis who create the forms of all living
things and send them out into the world, calling them back again to the
gardens of Adonis at their lives' end to rest there, as it seems, two
thousand years between life and life. He began in English poetry,
despite a temperament that delighted in sensuous beauty alone with
perfect delight, that worship of Intellectual Beauty which Shelley
carried to a greater subtlety and applied to the whole of life.

The qualities, to each of whom he had planned to give a Knight, he had
borrowed from Aristotle and partly Christianised, but not to the
forgetting of their heathen birth. The chief of the Knights, who would
have combined in himself the qualities of all the others, had Spenser
lived to finish the _Faerie Queene_, was King Arthur, the representative
of an ancient quality, Magnificence. Born at the moment of change,
Spenser had indeed many Puritan thoughts. It has been recorded that he
cut his hair short and half regretted his hymns to Love and Beauty. But
he has himself told us that the many-headed beast overthrown and bound
by Calidor, Knight of Courtesy, was Puritanism itself. Puritanism, its
zeal and its narrowness, and the angry suspicion that it had in common
with all movements of the ill-educated, seemed no other to him than a
slanderer of all fine things. One doubts, indeed, if he could have
persuaded himself that there could be any virtue at all without
courtesy, perhaps without something of pageant and eloquence. He was, I
think, by nature altogether a man of that old Catholic feudal nation,
but, like Sidney, he wanted to justify himself to his new masters. He
wrote of knights and ladies, wild creatures imagined by the aristocratic
poets of the twelfth century, and perhaps chiefly by English poets who
had still the French tongue; but he fastened them with allegorical nails
to a big barn door of common sense, of merely practical virtue. Allegory
itself had risen into general importance with the rise of the merchant
class in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and it was natural
when that class was about for the first time to shape an age in its
image, that the last epic poet of the ol