on and Ulysses, Virgil meant the same in Aeneas, Ariosto in Orlando. Tasso dissevered them, representing the Ethical part of Moral Philosophy, or the virtues of a private man, in Rinaldo; the other, named Politicé, the public virtues of a governor in Goffredo. In King Arthur, Spenser meant once more to join both. By example of which excellent poets, he says, I labour to pourtray in Arthur, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the XII private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised; the which is the purpose of these first twelve books; which if I find to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encouraged to frame the other part of politick virtues in his person, after that he came to be king.
Of this large design of twenty-four books, each of twelve cantos, little more than a fourth part was accomplished, or at any rate has survived. The first three books were published in 1590; three more, books iv, v, vi, were added to them in a second edition in 1596. Two cantos, with a couple of stray stanzas, were published after his death. The political part of the design does not seem to have even come into sight of the poet.
The poem was designed in England, but it was mostly written in Ireland, amid scenes of disorder and wretchedness, which sorely tested not only the courage, but the justice, the wisdom, and the humanity of the Englishmen who had any share in the government of the most unfortunate of the Queens dominions. It needed indeed to be a knight as perfect in strength and goodness as the ideal Arthur, to deal with the evils of Ireland. Spenser, as men do in trying times, thought he saw the virtues partially realised in the friends engaged in the difficult tasks round him: we, at our point of view, are obliged to see how far the best and noblest of them was from the poets ideal. But the presence and actual sight of all this energy, struggle, danger, courage, doubtless gave life to Spensers conception of the life of warfare which he proposed to portray. It was before him on the spot; and The Faery Queen is the reflection of it, tempered and sobered by the poets purpose, to make it represent his conception of all that makes a man great and true in his resistance to the vices and evils of the world.
The Faery Queen purports to be a story, and the outline of the story, which was to bind it together, is given in the poets explanatory letter to Sir Walter Ralegh, now prefixed to the poem. He imagines the Faery Queen, by whom he shadows forth Elizabeth, holding a great festival, on occasion of which twelve of her knights, each the example and champion of some particular virtue, undertake separate enterprises at her appointment and in her honour; while Prince Arthur, in whom is represented the comprehensive Aristotelic virtue of magnificence, or greatness of soul, is to fall in with them one by one in his quest of his fated bride the Faery Queen, helping and saving them by the superior power of his virtue and his knightly skill. The adventures of the twelve knights were to furnish the Legends of the twelve books of the first portion of his design, the ethical portion. He thought it inartificial for a poet to begin from the occasion and starting-point of these various adventures: A Poet, he said, thrusteth himself into the middest, even when it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the things forepast, and divining of things to come, maketh a pleasant analysis of all. So he starts in the middle of one of the adventures, reserving his poetical account of the origin of them all, till he should have brought all his Knights back again to the Faery Queens Court in the last book. The arrangement was an awkward one, and the Twelfth Book was never reached. Though we know the framework of the story, we do not know it from the poem itself. And as he went on with his work, the main story is soon lost in the separate ones, and the poem becomes a succession of adventures, stories, pictures, and allegories, with little attempt to keep them together.
In the First Book, the story and the allegory,the dangers, the comba