e he is Arthur Grey de Wilton.
Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney,
Henry IV. of France, etc.; and such public events as the revolt of the
Spanish Netherlands, the Irish rebellion, the execution of Mary Stuart,
and the rising of the northern Catholic houses against Elizabeth are
told in parable. In this way the poem reflects the spiritual struggle of
the time, the warfare of young England against popery and Spain.

The allegory is not always easy to follow. It is kept up most carefully
in the first two books, but it sat rather lightly on Spenser's
conscience, and is not of the essence of the poem. It is an ornament put
on from the outside and detachable at pleasure. The "Spenserian stanza,"
in which the _Faerie Queene_ was written, was adapted from the _ottava
rima_ of Ariosto. Spenser changed somewhat the order of the rimes in
the first eight lines and added a ninth line of twelve syllables, thus
affording more space to the copious luxuriance of his style and the
long-drawn sweetness of his verse. It was his instinct to dilate and
elaborate every image to the utmost, and his similies, especially--each
of which usually fills a whole stanza--have the pictorial amplitude of
Homer's. Spenser was, in fact, a great painter. His poetry is almost
purely sensuous. The personages in the _Faerie Queene_ are not
characters, but richly colored figures, moving to the accompaniment of
delicious music, in an atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth.
Charles Lamb said that he was the poet's poet, that is, he appealed
wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of beauty. Not until Keats
did another English poet appear so filled with the passion for outward
shapes of beauty, so exquisitively alive to all impressions of the
senses. Spenser was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English
poet. It is said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of
Tasso's _Gerusalemme Liberata_. It is not easy to imagine the Thames
bargees chanting passages from the _Faerie Queene_. Those English poets
who have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their
profound interpretation of our common life. But Spenser escaped
altogether from reality into a region of pure imagination. His aerial
creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no
root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the
air.

_Their_ birth was of the womb of morning dew,