AEneases. He had learned to put the State,
which desires all the abundance for itself, in the place of the Church,
and he found it possible to be moved by expedient emotions, merely
because they were expedient, and to think serviceable thoughts with no
self-contempt. He loved his Queen a little because she was the
protectress of poets and an image of that old Anglo-French nation that
lay a-dying, but a great deal because she was the image of the State
which had taken possession of his conscience. She was over sixty years
old, and ugly and, it is thought, selfish, but in his poetry she is
'fair Cynthia,' 'a crown of lilies,' 'the image of the heavens,'
'without mortal blemish,' and has 'an angelic face,' where 'the red
rose' has 'meddled with the white'; 'Phoebus thrusts out his golden
head' but to look upon her, and blushes to find himself outshone. She is
'a fourth Grace,' 'a queen of love,' 'a sacred saint,' and 'above all
her sex that ever yet has been.' In the midst of his praise of his own
sweetheart he stops to remember that Elizabeth is more beautiful, and an
old man in _Daphnaida_, although he has been brought to death's door by
the death of a beautiful daughter, remembers that though his daughter
'seemed of angelic race,' she was yet but the primrose to the rose
beside Elizabeth. Spenser had learned to look to the State not only as
the rewarder of virtue but as the maker of right and wrong, and had
begun to love and hate as it bid him. The thoughts that we find for
ourselves are timid and a little secret, but those modern thoughts that
we share with large numbers are confident and very insolent. We have
little else to-day, and when we read our newspaper and take up its cry,
above all its cry of hatred, we will not think very carefully, for we
hear the marching feet. When Spenser wrote of Ireland he wrote as an
official, and out of thoughts and emotions that had been organised by
the State. He was the first of many Englishmen to see nothing but what
he was desired to see. Could he have gone there as a poet merely, he
might have found among its poets more wonderful imaginations than even
those islands of Phaedria and Acrasia. He would have found among
wandering story-tellers, not indeed his own power of rich, sustained
description, for that belongs to lettered ease, but certainly all the
kingdom of Faerie, still unfaded, of which his own poetry was often but
a troubled image. He would have found men doing by swift