Spenser:--Shakspeare is never coloured by the customs of his age; what
appears of contemporary character in him is merely negative; it is just
not something else. He has none of the fictitious realities of the
classics, none of the grotesquenesses of chivalry, none of the allegory
of the middle ages; there is no sectarianism either of politics or
religion, no miser, no witch,--no common witch,--no astrology--nothing
impermanent of however long duration; but he stands like the yew tree in
Lorton vale, which has known so many ages that it belongs to none in
particular; a living image of endless self-reproduction, like the
immortal tree of Malabar. In Spenser the spirit of chivalry is entirely
predominant, although with a much greater infusion of the poet's own
individual self into it than is found in any other writer. He has the
wit of the southern with the deeper inwardness of the northern genius.

No one can appreciate Spenser without some reflection on the nature of
allegorical writing. The mere etymological meaning of the word,
allegory,--to talk of one thing and thereby convey another,--is too
wide. The true sense is this,--the employment of one set of agents and
images to convey in disguise a moral meaning, with a likeness to the
imagination, but with a difference to the understanding,--those agents
and images being so combined as to form a homogeneous whole. This
distinguishes it from metaphor, which is part of an allegory. But
allegory is not properly distinguishable from fable, otherwise than as
the first includes the second, as a genus its species; for in a fable
there must be nothing but what is universally known and acknowledged,
but in an allegory there may be that which is new and not previously
admitted. The pictures of the great masters, especially of the Italian
schools, are genuine allegories. Amongst the classics, the multitude of
their gods either precluded allegory altogether, or else made every
thing allegory, as in the Hesiodic Theogonia; for you can scarcely