and discipline could not lead men beyond the point of perfection and of bliss, from which, as he viewed the history of the human race, man had started, and which he had, in the very day of his creation, forfeited. For those who were saved in Christ there was reserved some better thing-the communion of the soul with God, the beatific vision of the saints, attainable only through the Incarnation."

For the symbolism of the Earthly Paradise I must again take Dean Plumptre as my guide :

"In Matilda, well-nigh all interpreters have seen the representative of active, as distinct from contemplative, holiness. Her hands are full of flowers, and her eyes are bright with the brightness of a benign and sympathising love. That he may understand what he sees, she bids him remember Psalm xcii., of which he gives but the key-note word, but of which at least one whole verse must have been present to his thoughts

'Quia delectasti me, Domine, in factura Tua,

Et in Operibus manuum Tuarum exultabo'.

Here was the supreme sanction for man's delight in the works of God, for the witness borne by all forms of visible beauty to that which is invisible and eternal."

We next meet Leah and Rachel,' types of the unglorified, active and contemplative powers of man, as Matilda and Beatrice of the same powers glorified. Leah took delight in her own labour, she gathers flowers to decorate herself, but Matilda in Operibus manuum Tuarum. Rachel contemplates herself, and delights in her own image, Beatrice in the vision of God.

"Then there comes," says Plumptre, "the final revelation of Beatrice, Madonna-like in her beauty, and arrayed in the symbolic colours, the white, green and crimson, with which early Italian art clothed its ideal of that Madonna. . . . It is not till the soul has been cleansed from its last baseness, and conquered its last besetting sin, and passed through the agonising fire, that it learns to comprehend fully the root evil of which the seven deadly sins were but the manifold outgrowth.

1 Ruskin's Modern Painters, iii., 222.
2 Faith, Hope, Love.

"Then at last it sees that there has been throughout an unfaithfulness to God. Disloyalty to her who had first wakened in him the sense of a higher life, of an eternal good, had been disloyalty to Him Who, through her, had sought to lead him to Himself. When that confession had been made, then, and not till then, the time has come for the baptism of a new regeneration, in what for him is as the passage of a new Jordan. The river which he thus crossed was none other than the stream of Lethe, which Dante with a profound insight, though in defiance of all Christian tradition, thus places as all but the final stage of purification. He had felt, as all souls that have passed through the crisis of conversion have felt, that what is needed for the soul is that its memory may be cleansed from all the evil of the past; that as God 'blots out as a thick cloud its transgressions, and as a cloud its sins,' so it too may forget the past, or remember it only as belonging to an alien and a vanished self. . . . Well may Beatrice tell him that his Lethe draught has been free and full, and feel that the time has come for it to be followed by that from the other mystic river-absolutely the pure creation of the poet's mind, which revives the memory of every good deed done, and so completing the transformation wrought out by Lethe, gives to the new man the true self, the continuity of life which had seemed before to belong to the old, the false, the evil, self."

Has any other poet imagined a nature so pure and lofty as that of Beatrice? Never is there a touch of that baseness which is the essence of all sin, the desire to attain some selfish end; her love sought not to please but to perfect. She "prints her footstep in Hell" that she may bring Dante out of it, she brings him through the purifying fire, and when the joyful moment of meeting in Paradise arrives, she forces him to endure that final agony of seeing his past life as the angels of God see it, as the enlightened conscience sees it, with all its unrealised possibilities and its wasted opportunities, to see himself as he is, and as he might have been to "look on this picture and on that". It is not in the first instance to Dante but to the angels that Beatrice addresses her reproaches. At the Gate of Purgatory and on entering Paradise he had seen

himself mirrored in the polished marble and in the clear stream-now he is to have a vision of himself as seen by the heavenly intelligences.

At last Beatrice turns to him and draws from him his confession. It is not till he has passed through this last fire, and stands without excuse, self-convicted, that he is allowed to drink of the waters of Lethe-to forget the sins of which he has repented; and then of Euno-to remember all the blessings of the earthly life; then Divine Wisdom unveils her second, her spiritual beauty, so that he is able to behold her face, and we leave her gazing upward and the poet standing in the sunshine.

From the Paradiso we give only the concluding picture; when the poet is about to return once more to earth, he sees her from afar, and she

"Smiled as it seemed, and looked once more at me,

Then unto the eternal fountain turned ".

Let me, in conclusion, quote the words of a prophet to whom a like vision was granted

"I prayed, and understanding was given me; I called upon God, and the Spirit of Wisdom came to me. She is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty. She is the brightness of the everlasting light, the mirror of the power of God, the image of His goodness. She is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of the stars. She teacheth temperance and prudence, justice and fortitude. She sweetly ordereth all things. I loved her from my youth, I desired to make her my spouse, I was a lover of her beauty. By means of her I shall obtain immortality, and leave behind me a memorial to them that come after me." 1

I Wisdom vii. and viii.

Britomart,
or Spenser's Ideal of Woman.

I SUPPOSE that few, even of us who love the Faery Queene, have read it right through. We set out joyfully in the early morning with the Knight and Una; we wandered with them through the Wood of Error, entered the House of Pride, accompanied Una and her lion into the Home of Superstition, and lived with her amongst the woodland folk. We entered the Cavern of Despair, dwelt in the House of Celestial Discipline, and climbing the heavenly hill, saw the path which led ever upwards to the gate of Heaven. If the fight with the Dragon became a little tedious, we were gladdened by passages of exquisite beauty and deep spiritual teaching. Delighted with the first book, we passed onwards: but, alas! in the second our interest began to flag. We could not feel for Sir Guyon the sympathy we did for the Red Cross Knight. We got sleepy in the House of Goldenmean. Pyrochles and Cymochles, et id genus omne, were somewhat tiresome. True, we passed a pleasant time on the lake and in the Bower of Blisse, and descended gladly into the Cave of Mammon, but we cared not for the details of Alma's kitchen, and we confess to having skipped the Chronicles of Brute. And as we went on the interest was less and less sustained-we seemed shut up in a labyrinthine forest, in which we were ever meeting knights and ladies, pursued or pursuing; the dramatis persona became too numerous and too impersonal.

Milton rightly classes Spenser with Scotus and

Aquinas,1 for into the spirit of the Renaissance, into alien lives and modes of thought he cannot enter; he wants the large scope and insight of his contemporary Shakespeare, and so he idealises exclusively his own (personal experiences, the lives of those he knew, and the history of his own time, and he makes us giddy at last, by leading us round and round in a confined space; as Dean Church says: "The poem became an elastic framework, into which the poet could fit whatever interested him, and tempted him to composition ". "So multifarious is it, so full of all that he thought, or observed, or felt; a receptacle without much care to avoid repetition, or to prune, correct and condense all the abundance of his ideas, as they welled forth in his mind day by day. It is a collection of separate tales and allegories, as much as the Arabian Nights, and so as a whole it is confusing, and its continued interest breaks down. We can hardly lose our way in it, for there is no way to lose. It is a wilderness in which we are left to wander, but there may be interest and pleasure in a wilderness." "

Yes, there is abundance of interest and pleasure; the Faery Queene is a rich treasure-house of beautiful imagery, the poet's feeling makes all nature live, the music of his verse charms the ear, and the lofty thoughts, the high spiritual teaching make men aspire to lead a nobler life. He felt, as his friend Sidney taught, that one function of a poet is to show us, not what we are, but what we ought to be, for "whatsoever the philosopher sayeth should be done, the poet giveth a perfect picture of it in some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done," and thus he doth "possess the sight of the Areopagitica.

2 Men of Letters-Spenser (Dean Church).
3 Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie.