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