The earth and those excellent creatures, man and woman, walking upon it, formed a spectacle worth a painter's soul. One's country was for the present not the heavenly Jerusalem, but a certain defined portion of this habitable globe; and patriotism became a virtue, and queenworship a piece of religion. Conscience was a faithful witness; an actual sense of sin, and an actual need of righteousness were individual concerns, belonging to the inmost self of each human being, and not to be dealt with by ecclesiastical mechanism, by sale of indulgence, or dispensation of a Pope. Woman was neither a satanic bait to catch the soul of man, nor was she the supernatural object of medieval chivalric devotion; she was no miracle, yet not less nor other than that endlessly interesting thing-woman. Love, friendship, marriage, the ties of parent and child, jealousy, ambition, hatred, revenge, loyalty, devotion, mercy,—these were not insignificant affairs because belonging to a world which passes away; human life being of importance, these, the blessings and curses of human life, were important also. Heaven may be very real; we have a good hope that it is so; meanwhile here is our earth, a substantial, indubitable fact.

The self-conscious ethics of the Elizabethan period find an imaginative utterance in Spenser's "Faerie Queene." Spenser's view of human life is grave and earnest; it is that of a knightly encounter with principalities and powers of evil. Yet Spenser is neither mediæval nor essentially Puritan; the design of the "Faerie Queene" is in harmony with the general Elizabethan movement. The problem which the poet

sets himself to consider is not that of our great English prose allegory," The Pilgrim's Progress "-how the soul of man may escape from earth to heaven. Nor is the quest of a mystical Grail a central point in this epic of Arthur. The general end of Spenser's poem is "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." A grand self-culture is that about which Spenser is concerned; not as with Bunyan the escape of the soul to heaven; not the attainment of supernatural grace through a point of mystical contact, like the vision which was granted to the virgin knight of the medieval allegory. Self-culture, the formation of a complete character for the uses of earth, and afterwards, if need be, for the uses of heaven-this was subject sufficient for the twenty-four books designed to form the epic of the age of Elizabeth. And the means of that self-culture are of the active kind, namely warfare,-warfare not for its own sake, but for the generous. accomplishment of unselfish ends. Godliness, selfmastery, chastity, fraternity, justice, courtesy, constancy -each of these is an element in the ideal of human character conceived by the poet; not an ascetic, not a mediæval ideal. If we are to give a name to that ideal we must call it Magnificence, Great-doing. Penitential discipline and heavenly contemplation are recognised by Spenser as needful to the perfecting of the Godward side of man's nature, and as preparing him for strenuous encounter with evil; yet it is characteristic that even Heavenly Contemplation in Spenser's allegory cannot forget the importance of those wonderful things of earth, -London and the Queen.

Nor is each of Spenser's knights (although upon his own strength and skill assisted by divine grace depends the issue of his strife), a solitary knight-errant. The poet is not without a sense of the corporate life of humanity. As the virtues are linked one to another by a golden chain, so is each noble nature bound to his fellows. Arthur is the succourer of all; all are the servants of Gloriana. Spenser would seem to have longed for some new order of lofty, corporate life, a later Round Table, suitable to the Elizabethan age. If it were a dream, more fitted for Faery-Land than for England of the sixteenth century, we may perhaps pardon Spenser for belief in incalculable possibilities of virtue; for he had known Sidney, and the character of Sidney seems forever to have lived with him inspiring him with inextinguishable faith in man. With national life Spenser owned a sympathy which we do not expect to find in the mediæval romances of Arthur, written before England had acquired an independent national character, nor in Bunyan's allegory, which does not concern itself with affairs of earthly polity, and which came into existence at a period of national depression, a time when the political enemies of England were her religious allies. But in the days of Elizabeth the nation had sprung up to a consciousness of new strength and vitality, and its political and religious antagonists, Spain and the Papacy, were identical. Faery Land with Spenser is indeed no dream world; it lies in no distant latitude. His epic

abounds with contemporary political and religious feeling. The combat with Orgoglio, the stripping of Duessa, the death of Kirkrapine could have been

written only by an Englishman and a Protestant possessed by no half-hearted hatred towards Spain and the Papal power. Spenser's views on Irish politics, which interested him so nearly, are to be discovered in the Legend of Arthegall with hardly less clearness than in his prose dialogue upon the Present State of Ireland.

Further, in his material life, Spenser appears to have had a sufficient hold upon positive fact. During the same year, in which, for the second time, he became a lover, the year during which he wooed his Elizabeth, and recorded his despairs and raptures in the Italian love-philosophy of the Amoretti, the piping and pastoral Colin Clout exhibited suit for three ploughlands, parcels of Shanballymore, and was alleged to have "converted a great deal of corn" elsewhere "to his proper use.' Neither love nor poetry made him insensible to the substantial though minor fact of ploughlands of Shanballymore. With measureless dominion in Faery Land he yet did not disdain a slice of the forfeited estate of the Earl of Desmond. Some powerful hostility hindered his court-preferment; and the grievance finds a place in Spenser's verse. His own material life he endeavoured, not altogether successfully, to render solid and prosperous. The intention of his great poetical acheivement is one which, while in a high sense religious, is at the same time eminently positive. A complete development of noble human character for active uses, not a cloistered virtue, is that which Spenser looked upon as most needed for God and man. Such a design is in harmony with the spirit of England in the days of

B

Elizabeth. To be great and to do great things seemed better than to enter the Celestial City, and forget the City of Destruction; better than to receive in ecstacy the vision of a divine mystery, or to be fed with miraculous food. In Spenser these ethics of the Elizabethan age arrived at a self-conscious existence.

Let us, remaining at the same point of view, glance now at Bacon and the scientific movement. Bacon and Shakspere stand far apart. In moral character and in gifts of intellect and soul we should find little resemblance between them. While Bacon's sense of the presence of physical law in the universe was for his time extraordinarily developed, he seems practically to have acted upon the theory that the moral laws of the world are not inexorable, but rather by tactics and dexterity may be cleverly evaded. Their supremacy was acknowledged by Shakspere in the minutest as well as in the greatest concerns of human life. Bacon's superb intellect was neither disturbed nor impelled by the promptings of his heart. Of perfect friendship or of perfect love he may, without reluctance, be pronounced incapable. Shakspere yielded his whole being to boundless and measureless devotion. Bacon's ethical writings sparkle with a frosty brilliance of fancy, playing over the worldly maxims which constituted his wisdom for the conduct of life. Shakspere reaches to the ultimate truths of human life and character through a supreme and indivisible energy of love, imagination, and thought. Yet Bacon and Shakspere belonged to one great movement of humanity. The whole endeavour of Bacon in science is to attain the fact, and to