which only explains itself when the last chapter is reached—­Stevenson’s Wrecker is an example. The Fairy Queen was designed on somewhat the same plan.  The last section was to relate and explain the unrelated and unexplained books which made up the poem, and at the court to which the separate knights of the separate books—­the Red Cross Knight and the rest—­were to bring the fruit of their adventures, everything was to be made clear.  Spenser did not live to finish his work; The Fairy Queen, like the Aeneid, is an uncompleted poem, and it is only from a prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh issued with the second published section that we know what the poem was intended to be.  Had Spenser not published this explanation, it is impossible that anybody, even the acutest minded German professor, could have guessed.

The poem, as we have seen, was composed in Ireland, in the solitude of a colonists’ plantation, and the author was shut off from his fellows while he wrote.  The influence of his surroundings is visible in the writing.  The elaboration of the theme would have been impossible or at least very unlikely if its author had not been thrown in on himself during its composition.  Its intricacy and involution is the product of an over-concentration born of empty surroundings.  It lacks vigour and rapidity; it winds itself into itself.  The influence of Ireland, too, is visible in its landscapes, in its description of bogs and desolation, of dark forests in which lurk savages ready to spring out on those who are rash enough to wander within their confines.  All the scenery in it which is not imaginary is Irish and not English scenery.

Its reception in England and at the Court was enthusiastic.  Men and women read it eagerly and longed for the next section as our grandfathers longed for the next section of Pickwick.  They really liked it, really loved the intricacy and luxuriousness of it, the heavy exotic language, the thickly painted descriptions, the languorous melody of the verse.  Mainly, perhaps, that was so because they were all either in wish or in deed poets themselves.  Spenser has always been “the poets’ poet.”  Milton loved him; so did Dryden, who said that Milton confessed to him that Spenser was “his original,” a statement which has been pronounced incredible, but is, in truth, perfectly comprehensible, and most likely true.  Pope admired him; Keats learned from him the best part of his music.  You can trace echoes of him in Mr. Yeats.  What is it that gives him this hold on his peers?  Well, in the first place his defects do not detract from his purely poetic qualities.  The story is impossibly told, but that will only worry those who are looking for a story.  The allegory is hopelessly difficult; but as Hazlitt said “the allegory will not bite you”; you can let it alone.  The crudeness and bigotry of Spenser’s dealings with Catholicism, which are ridiculous when he pictures the monster Error