The original scheme is that of the "Morte d'Arthur," moralized, and intermingled with allegory. The poem is an allegorical romance adapted to the state of England, Ireland, and the Continent under Elizabeth, and to the war of the Reformation against the dragon of Rome and the Scarlet Woman of the Seven Hills, the seeming fair and inwardly filthy Duessa, who is occasionally meant for Mary Stuart. Such unity as the poem possesses is given by the conflict of Good, as Spenser understood it, against Evil, private and public, the vices, and the Church of Rome. The Red Cross Knight wears the armour which St. Paul describes, and in which Bunyan equipped Christian and Greatheart. There are people, says Spenser, who prefer to have Virtue "sermoned at large, as they use". But while Spenser insists on being taken as a moral preacher in his way, his true ideal is Beauty, and it is the gleam of Beauty that he follows as he wanders with knights and ladies through enchanted forests, and "awtres dire". Like the knights in the "Morte d'Arthur" he "rides at adventure"; in every page a new adventure opens, and leads to others endlessly, through conflicts with Saracens,--_Sansfoy, Sansloy, Sansjoy_,--with the wily Magician, Archimage, and his glamour; with Despair, in a wonderful passage; with dragons and dragonettes, with Acrasia and all the charms of her abode of wanton bliss, which is depicted with great enthusiasm (Book II, Canto XII). This canto is remote indeed from the puritan taste, despite its moral ending Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish mind, But let us hence depart, whilst weather serves and wind. The whole is derived, in the last resort, from the palace of Circe in the Tenth book of the "Odyssey," and it is curious to compare the severe and classic charm of the Greek with the boundless luxury of the Italian Renaissance in Spenser. The "Faery Queen," indeed, despite the moral intention, which is perfectly sincere, is the very Lotusland of poetry. It is a garden of endless varieties of delight, endless but not prolix, for there is a perpetual change of scene and of characters and nothing is constant but the long and ever-varying music of the verse, Spenser's own measure, in which each stanza is a poem, while the strong stream of melody carries the half-dreaming reader down the enchanted river, and forth into the fairy seas. The Spenserian measure with the Alexandrine that ends the stanza may not be the best vehicle for narrative. But Spenser's stream does flow from the mountains of Lotusland, and the air of Lotusland occasionally lulls the vigilance of the poet as well as of the the reader. The stanza (Book VI, Canto X) which opens One day, as they all three together went To the greene wood to gather strawberries, There chaunst to them'a dangerous accident: A Tigre forth out of the wood did rise,