tried their hands at everything, imitated everything, and in all were brilliant, sparkling, and decorative; they got a kind of entrance to the circle of the Court.  Then Spenser published his Shepherd’s Calendar, a series of pastoral eclogues for every month of the year, after a manner taken from French and Italian pastoral writers, but coming ultimately from Vergil, and Edward Kirke furnished it with an elaborate prose commentary.  Spenser took the same liberties with the pastoral form as did Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a vehicle for satire and allegory, made it carry political and social allusions, and planted in it references to his friends.  By its publication Spenser became the first poet of the day.  It was followed by some of his finest and most beautiful things—­by the Platonic hymns, by the Amoretti, a series of sonnets inspired by his love for his wife; by the Epithalamium, on the occasion of his marriage to her; by Mother Hubbard’s Tale, a satire written when despair at the coldness of the Queen and the enmity of Burleigh was beginning to take hold on the poet and endowed with a plainness and vigour foreign to most of his other work—­and then by The Fairy Queen.

The poets of the Renaissance were not afraid of big things; every one of them had in his mind as the goal of poetic endeavour the idea of the heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country what Vergil had intended to do for Rome in the Aeneid, to celebrate it—­its origin, its prowess, its greatness, and the causes of it, in epic verse.  Milton, three-quarters of a century later, turned over in his mind the plan of an English epic on the wars of Arthur, and when he left it was only to forsake the singing of English origins for the more ultimate theme of the origins of mankind.  Spenser designed to celebrate the character, the qualities and the training of the English gentleman.  And because poetry, unlike philosophy, cannot deal with abstractions but must be vivid and concrete, he was forced to embody his virtues and foes to virtue and to use the way of allegory.  His outward plan, with its knights and dragons and desperate adventures, he procured from Ariosto.  As for the use of allegory, it was one of the discoveries of the Middle Ages which the Renaissance condescended to retain.  Spenser elaborated it beyond the wildest dreams of those students of Holy Writ who had first conceived it.  His stories were to be interesting in themselves as tales of adventure, but within them they were to conceal an intricate treatment of the conflict of truth and falsehood in morals and religion.  A character might typify at once Protestantism and England and Elizabeth and chastity and half the cardinal virtues, and it would have all the while the objective interest attaching to it as part of a story of adventure.  All this must have made the poem difficult enough.  Spenser’s manner of writing it made it worse still.  One is familiar with the type of novel