"under the sea-god's seal autentical," commanding Proteus instantly to set at liberty the Maid he had lately taken captive while wandering on the seas; and Proteus, as soon as he reads the order, which Cymodoce straightway takes to him, is reluctantly compelled to obey, and to give up Florimel :—

Whom she receiving by the lily hand,

Admired her beauty much, as she mote well,
For she all living creatures did excel,
And was right joyous that she gotten had
So fair a wife for her son Marinel.

66

As for Marinel himself, as soon as he beheld that angel's face," his heart revived, even as a withered flower at the return of warm and genial weather

Lifts up his head that did before decline,

And gins to spread his leaf before the fair sunshine. Nor did Florimel want her share of the blessedness :

Ne less was she in secret heart affected,

But that she masked it with modesty,

For fear she should of lightness be detected.

BOOK FIFTH.

THE Fifth Book of the Fairy Queen is entitled The Legend of Artegal, or of Justice. The introductory address is of greater length than usual, and is very fine. It begins,

So oft as I with state of present time

The image of the antique world compare,
Whenas man's age was in his freshest prime,
And the first blossom of fair virtue bare;
Such odds I find twixt those, and these which are,
As that, through long continuance of his course,
Me seems the world is run quite out of square
From the first point of his appointed source;
And being once amiss grows daily worse and worse:
For from the golden age, that first was named,
It's now at erst a become a stony one;

And men themselves, the which at first were framed
Of earthly mould, and formed of flesh and bone,
Are now transformed into hardest stone;
Such as behind their backs (so backward bred)
Were thrown by Pyrrha and Deucalion:
And, if than those may any worse be read,
They into that ere long will be degendered.

Let none then blame me, if, in discipline
Of virtue and of civil use's lore,

I do not form them to the common line
Of present days which are corrupted sore;
But to the antique use which was of yore,
When good was only for itself desired,

And all men sought their own, and none no more;
When justice was not for most meed outhired,
But simple truth did reign, and was of all admired.

a At length.

For what all men then used to call virtue is now called
vice, and the name of virtue is given to what was then
esteemed vicious; right is now wrong, and wrong is
right; and all other things are similarly changed. Nor,
proceeds our author, is this to be wondered at, seeing
that the revolving heavens themselves (he alludes to the
precession of the equinoxes) are wandered far
away from
where they first were fixed, as plainly appears;

For that same golden fleecy Ram, which bore
Phryxus and Helle from their stepdame's fears,
Hath now forgot where he was placed of yore,
And shouldered hath the Bull which fair Europa bore:
And eke the Bull hath with his bow-bent horn
So hardly butted those two Twins of Jove,

That they have crushed the Crab, and quite him borne
Into the great Nemean Lion's grove.

Even the Sun, in these fourteen hundred years that have elapsed since the time "that learned Ptolomy his height did take," is declined nigh thirty minutes to the south, so that it may be feared we shall in time lose his light altogether. Indeed, if credit may be given to the old Egyptian sages, he had, since they first began to take his height (a space, according to Herodotus, whose account is here referred to, of 11,340 years) four times changed his place, and twice risen where he now sets and set where he now rises.

But most is Mars amiss of all the rest;

And next to him old Saturn, that was wont be best.

For during Saturn's ancient reign it's said

That all the world with goodness did abound;
All loved virtue, no man was afraid

Of force, ne fraud in wight was to be found;
No war was known, no dreadful trumpet's sound;
Peace universal reigned mongst men and beasts:
And all things freely grew out of the ground:
Justice sat high adored with solemn feasts,
And to all people did divide her dread bebeasts: b

b Commands.

Most sacred virtue she of all the rest,
Resembling God in his imperial might;
Whose sovereign power is herein most exprest,
That both to good and bad he dealeth right,
And all his works with justice hath bedight.c
That power he also doth to princes lend,
And makes them like himself in glorious sight
To sit in his own seat, his cause to end,

And rule his people right, as he doth recommend.

This leads naturally to the customary appeal to Elizabeth, who is addressed as "dread sovereign goddess," and requested to pardon the boldness of her "basest thrall" who dares discourse of so high a theme as her great jus"the instrument whereof," the eleven stanzas conclude, "lo, here thy Artegal."

tice;

Canto I. (30 stanzas). It has already been stated that Sir Artegal (or Arthegal, as he is called in the earlier part of the poem) is understood to stand for Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, who was sent over as Lord Lieutenant to Ireland in July 1580, when Spenser accompanied him as his secretary. In the present Book he appears more distinctly than heretofore in his historical character; and his Irish government, which lasted for about two years, and comprised the suppression of the great rebellion headed by the Earl of Desmond, is especially shadowed forth in the allegory.

The present Canto opens with the praise of Bacchus and Hercules, who first, we are told, in the ancient world gave example of the repression of wrong and the establishment of right under the rule and by the power of Justice, the former in the East, the latter in the West; and then we are carried back to the story of Artegal, and the great adventure upon which we left him proceeding after his marriage with Britomart, at the end of the Sixth Canto of the preceding Book. The object upon which he was bound was to succour a distressed lady, Irena (that is, Ireland, anciently Ierne), against the tyrant Grantorto, who withheld from her her heritage;

c Adorned.

Irena had come and besought redress from the Fairy Queen, and that mighty empress, whose glory it is to be the patroness and helper of all who are poor and oppressed, had selected Artegal for the enterprise. For he from his infancy had been brought up and instructed in all good and right by Astræa herself, who one day while she lived among men and walked about over the earth, "found this gentle child amongst his peers playing his childish sport," and, having allured him "with gifts and speeches mild to wend with her," brought him to a distant cave, where she nursed him till he came of years, "and all the discipline of justice there him taught." She taught him to weigh right and wrong in equal balance, and to measure out equity

According to the line of conscience,

Whenso it needs with rigour to dispense:

Of all the which, for want there of mankind,
She caused him to make experience

Upon wild beasts, which she in woods did find, With wrongful power oppressing others of their kind. Thus educated, when he came to the ripeness of his age he was both the terror of the brute creation and the admiration of men;

Ne any lived on ground that durst withstand

His dreadful hest, much less him match in fight,
Or bide the horror of his wreakful hand,

Whenso he list in wrath lift up his steely brand.

This brand, or sword, she had procured for him " by her sleight and earnest search," from the eternal house of Jove, where it lay, "unwist of wight,"

Since he himself it used in that great fight

Against the Titans, that whilome rebelled

Gainst highest heaven; Chrysaor it was hight;

Chrysaor, that all other swords excelled,

Well proved in that same day when Jove those giants quelled :

d Command.