It is not aside from the point to refer here to the few poems in which the subject-matter of the Metrical Romance is used, strangely enough, as a means of teaching moral ideas. Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ presents such an anomaly. In it conventional chivalric heroes undergo surprising and impossible adventures, battling and loving as in the legends of Charlemagne and Arthur. Indeed, in the _Faerie Queene_, Arthur himself appears as the protagonist. But these knights and ladies are, we learn, merely animated vices and virtues and are such, because, as Spenser takes pains to tell us, the poem, though romantic in mood, is allegorical in intention, its aim being "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." The author in using his characters as agents of moral instruction creates a type as much by itself as _Pilgrim's Progress_ is in prose. Modern examples less conspicuous for visible allegorical intention are Tennyson's _Idylls of the King_, in which Arthurian material is once more revived with something of an ethical purpose. There is still to be taken up a large body of poems, usually, though not always, shorter than the Metrical Romances, which deal with the situations of common life and with the humbler members of society. By some authorities the term Metrical Tale has been applied to such compositions; though it is hardly exact or specific, since the word "tale" is usually made synonymous with "story" and therefore does not connote a limited subject-matter. We may accept it in a provisional way as a convenient technical term for our purposes. The Metrical Tale, then, as contrasted with the Metrical Romance, attempts a realistic portrayal of the natural sorrows, losses, or pains which belong to our everyday experience. The emotions of which it treats are fundamentally strong and keep the style and versification from becoming overelaborated. The Metrical Tale may be humorous as in Chaucer's _The Miller's Tale_, or may be pathetic and tragic as in Tennyson's _Enoch Arden_ or Wordsworth's _Michael_. In these poems it will be observed that the diction and phraseology are exceedingly simple. But here, too, candor requires the admission that the alleged difference between the Romance and the Tale is likely to bring on a charge of inconsistency. _Enoch Arden_, just now mentioned, abounds in romantic episodes, though Enoch and Philip and Annie dwell in a little fishing village. Why, if Chaucer chose to call his masterpiece the _Canterbury Tales_, should any one take the liberty of questioning his nomenclature? The query is well founded; and yet the reader must recognize a wide gulf in tone and spirit between _The Knight's Tale_ and _The Reeve's Tale_. Call it, if you will, the distinction between idealism and realism; at any rate it exists, and ought to be made plain even at the risk of confronting dilemmas of another sort.