ts, the defeats, the final victory of the Red Cross Knight of Holiness, the champion of the Virgin Una with her milk-white lamb,and that which all this shadowed, the struggle of true religion and godliness with its foes, its vicissitudes, and its triumph, both in the visible scene of the worlds history, and in the heart of man, are both carried on clearly and consecutively. The Second Book, which takes the Knight of Temperance through his contest with violence, with the falsehood of extremes, with the madness of uncontrolled temper, with the temptations of Mammon, of riches and ambition, to the closing achievement, the conquest over all that Pleasure could present to allure and fascinate him, is straightforward and distinct in its construction. But after this the poets hold over his story relaxes. The legend of Chastity in the next book presents the same idea as that of the second, but exhibited in the persons of the lady knight Britomart, and the virgin huntress Belphbe, both of them in various aspects imaging the sacred saint of the poets worship. In the three later books, the legend of Justice is marked by its strong and definite representations of some great historical events of Spensers age, the administration of Lord Grey of Wilton in Ireland, the blows dealt at the Spanish power in the Channel and in the Netherlands, the fate of Mary Queen of Scots. The legends of Friendship and Courtesy certainly exhibit examples of friendship and courtesy. But when we think of what friendship is, we wonder that Spenser has so little to say about it, and that his imagination found nothing more to work upon than the companionship in love or war, sometimes loyal, sometimes false, of men-at-arms: and so many other interests and incidents come in besides, that it seems rather arbitrary to assign the legends specially to these virtues. And then, with the exception of the fragment on Mutability, which is part of a projected legend of Constancy, the poem stops, and with it all our knowledge of the way in which it was to be carried forward.
The moral picture is of the ideal of noble manliness in Elizabeths time. Besides the writers and the thinkers, the statesmen and the plotters, the traders and the commons, of that fruitful and vigorous age, there were the men of action: the men who fought in France and the Netherlands and Ireland, the men who created the English navy, and showed how it could be used: the men who tried for the north-west passage with Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and sailed round the world with Sir Francis Drake, and planted colonies in America with Sir Walter Ralegh: the men who chased the Armada to destruction, and dealt the return buffet to Spanish pride in the harbour of Cadiz; men who treated the sea as the rightful dominion of their mistress, and seeking adventures on it far and near, with or without her leave, reaped its rich harvests of plunder, from Spanish treasure ships and West Indian islands, or from the exposed towns and churches of the Spanish coast. They were at once men of daring enterprise and sometimes very rough execution; and yet men with all the cultivation and refinement of the time, courtiers, scholars, penmen, poets. These are the men whom Spenser had before his eyes in drawing his knightstheir ideas of loyalty, of gallantry, of the worth and use of life,their aims, their enthusiasm, their temptations, their foes, their defeats, their triumphs. In his tales of perpetual warfare, of perpetual resistance to evil, of the snares and desperate dangers through which they have to fight their way, there is a picture of the conditions which affect the whole life of man. The allegory may be applied, and was intended to be applied generally, to the difficulties which beset his course and the qualities necessary to overcome them. But it specially exhibits the ideals and standards and aspirationsthe characteristic virtues and the characteristic imperfections, the simple loyalty and the frank selfishness, of the brilliant and high-tempered generation, who are represented by men like Philip Sidney and Walter Ralegh, 