began to pit the queen herself against her Lor Every one of his attacks upon Burleigh was made under cover of praise of Elizabeth.

Now what the poet thought of his sove secret of his heart is difficult to say. Most of Spenser take it for granted that his loy queen was part of his worship of all wome poetical imaginations really carried him aw addressed her; that she was to him no sainted being at the mere thought of whon self-control, all faculty of criticism, all com

It is perfectly true that she is everyw works: a queen of May, a queen of Fairy, Eliz Belphœbe, Britomart, both Diana and Ven sovereign, the ideal woman. She is the c whom his stanzas will bow down in humb It is impossible to imagine a single attribut virtue or power that is wanting to the pict youth blooms on her face. Though she is 1 forty-six when he first portrays her, she i as the lovely youthful queen of all shepherd herdesses. The white and red roses mix thei

her cheeks. Such is the radiance of her beauty that Phoebus, having put forth his golden head to see her, is all abashed. He becomes red with envy at the sight and draws back his head for fear of a comparison that would show his inferiority. Yet the splendour of her soul exceeds and eclipses the charms of her features. She is the flower of virgins, the daughter of Pan, King of Shepherds, i.e. Henry VIII., and of blameless Syrinx, i.e. Ann Boleyn. These are only a few features of the portrait drawn of her in Eclogue IV., so lavish of colours and hyperboles. Yet it is by far the simplest of the many likenesses of Elizabeth that we owe to the poet.

For as she grew older, the queen exacted more and more praise, just as she covered her face more deeply in rouge and white to hide the ravages of time, till at the last she became a sort of oriental idol frightful to behold. Besides, her courtiers vied with one another at sending up the sweetest-scented incense into her royal nostrils. Spenser had to take into account the extravagant descriptions of Elizabeth in Lily's Euphues and his England, which, after a number of surprising conceits, ended in an almost blasphemous declaration of her deity:

Divisum Elizabeth cum Jove numen habet.
(She divides the empire with God.)

For these reasons, in his Colin Clout's Come Home Again, written when Elizabeth was nearly sixty, some thirteen or fourteen years after the Calendar, the poet went to the extreme of lyrical madness either in the praise of her physical beauty or in his gratitude for a

that complexion of lilies and roses? Was h at heart that the royal coquette who public strange liberties with her favourites was of chastity? Did her court seem to him th virtues? Was she the miracle of wisdom that the benefactress of her kingdom? the religion, of letters and arts? Was he inde dazzled by her greatness that his eyes denied of truthfulness in her presence? Was there naïve, ingenuous sincerity at the bottom flattery?

After weighing everything well, and taki chivalry and patriotism into due account, ness seems improbable. All Spenser's work to be a discontented man, convinced of t the times, of the ill-administration of his the corruption of its political men and cl eyes, moreover, it was an age of iron and poetry. One can scarcely name a singl queen's Government which did not rouse stir him to wrath and indignation-real

indignation. This was so from the beginning and lasted all his life. And at the last, in the Fifth Book of his Fairy Queen, he was to vent his rancour against "the Regiment of Women," and call it contrary to the decree of God and the laws of Nature.

One cannot help noticing that his encomiums of the queen are in direct proportion to the virulence of his attacks against her reign. Of course he shifts the weight of his railings from off her person to lay it on the shoulders of her minister, Burleigh, who assumes in his poems the character of an evil genius, bearing most of the brunt. But he could not be ignorant of the source of Burleigh's power:

Ma faveur fait ta gloire et ton pouvoir en vient;
Elle seule t'élève et seule te soutient.

Obviously Spenser used his panegyrics to cover his assaults. They are part of that worldly prudence with which he showed himself so well provided in his letters to Harvey. He did not paint the queen as he knew she was, but as she liked to be painted, and he justified the enormous lie to himself by considering her as a mere figure-head of an ideal England, an ideal feminity.

That the poets' poet was in many respects a practical man, by no means unable to cope with crabbed and even ugly problems of his day, we have a different— and less controvertible-proof in his View of the Present State of Ireland, a pamphlet much in the vein of Machiavelli, which might have won full praise from the notorious Florentine historian. Whatever we may think of the system of pacification recommended by Spenser, of the conquest by sword and famine that he advocates,

the most unfeeling of men? With their eye the glorious vision that shines in the dista run towards it, never caring if they must through poor suffering human flesh. To p from its evils, Spenser would not have hes terminate the natives. Do not imagine, h he utters such ideas with the passion an of a fanatic. He remains collected and through. The contrast between the mercil schemes and the well-bred elegance of his st the most characteristic feature of his pa thoroughness of his politics was not at all for the time, but they seldom found such a courteous expression. The epithet "court as naturally to Spenser's name as "kind Chaucer's or "sweet" to Shakespeare's.

It is time for us to make a sketch of Spe with the help of these scattered and perhaps materials. The little man with little cuffs minded Renaissance scholar, infinitely s