till, to the ordinary reader, Spenser is the poet of _The Faerie Queene_,
and for once the ordinary reader is right. Every quality found in his other
poems is found in this greatest of them in perfection; and much is found
there which is not, and indeed could not be, found anywhere else. Its
general scheme is so well known (few as may be the readers who really know
its details) that very slight notice of it may suffice. Twelve knights,
representing twelve virtues, were to have been sent on adventures from the
Court of Gloriana, Queen of Fairyland. The six finished books give the
legends (each subdivided into twelve cantos, averaging fifty or sixty
stanzas each) of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and
Courtesy; while a fragment of two splendid "Cantos on Mutability" is
supposed to have belonged to a seventh book (not necessarily seventh in
order) on Constancy. Legend has it that the poem was actually completed;
but this seems improbable, as the first three books were certainly ten
years in hand, and the second three six more. The existing poem
comprehending some four thousand stanzas, or between thirty and forty
thousand lines, exhibits so many and such varied excellences that it is
difficult to believe that the poet could have done anything new in kind. No
part of it is as a whole inferior to any other part, and the fragmentary
cantos contain not merely one of the most finished pictorial pieces--the
Procession of the Months--to be found in the whole poem, but much of the
poet's finest thought and verse. Had fortune been kinder, the volume of
delight would have been greater, but its general character would probably
not have changed much. As it is, _The Faerie Queene_ is the only long poem
that a lover of poetry can sincerely wish longer.

It deserves some critical examination here from three points of view,
regarding respectively its general scheme, its minor details of form in
metre and language, and lastly, its general poetical characteristics. The
first is simple enough in its complexity. The poem is a long _Roman
d'Aventure_ (which it is perhaps as well to say, once for all, is not the
same as a "Romance of Chivalry," or a "Romance of Adventure"), redeemed
from the aimless prolixity incident to that form by its regular plan, by
the intercommunion of the adventures of the several knights (none of whom
disappears after having achieved his own quest), and by the constant
presence of a not too obtrusive