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"With so high reverence and observance, As well in speeche as in countenance, That Gawain, with his olde curtesie, Though he were come agen out of faerie, Ne coude him not amenden with a word." Gawain's brothers were Agrivain, Gahariet, and Gareth. Once upon a time King Arthur held his court in merry Carlisle, when a damsel came before him and craved a boon.

It was not in the "Faerie Queen" only, but in the world which it pourtrayed, that the religious mysticism of the Middle Ages stood face to face with the intellectual freedom of the Revival of Letters, that asceticism and self-denial cast their spell on imaginations glowing with the sense of varied and inexhaustible existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of feeling which expressed itself in the fanciful unrealities of chivalry co-existed with the rough practical energy that sprang from an awakening sense of human power, or the lawless extravagance of an idealized friendship and love lived side by side with the moral sternness and elevation which England was drawing from the Reformation and the Bible.

These things take people differently. What I want here is literary opium. I want something about fauns and nymphs in broad low glades. I would like to read Spenser's 'Faerie Queen. I don't think I have read it, and yet I have a very distinct impression of knights and dragons and sorcerers and wicked magic ladies moving through a sort of Pre-Raphaelite tapestry scenery only with a light on them.

Celia ate her dinner and returned to the library, where she worked for a couple of hours to make up for the time she had lost in the afternoon; then she took up an exquisitely-bound copy of Spenser's "Faerie Queene" and settled herself in a chair for half an hour's quiet reading.

And in that plain, every day at the sun-rising, begin to grow small trees, and they grow till mid-day, bearing fruit; but no man dare take of that fruit, for it is a thing of faerie. And after mid-day, they decrease and enter again into the earth, so that at the going down of the sun they appear no more. And so they do, every day. And that is a great marvel.

GHAMBA, By William Charles Scully The darksome cave they enter, where they find That cursed man, low sitting on the ground, Musing full sadly in his sullen mind. The Faerie Queene.

In the same year his reputation as a poet was vastly augmented by the publication of the first three books of the Faerie Queen, dedicated to Elizabeth. Having seen these ventures launched, S. returned to Kilcolman and wrote Colin Clout's come Home Again, one of the brightest and most vigorous of his poems, not, however, pub. until 1595.

In 1591 he received in the south of Ireland a grant of three thousand acres, a part of the confiscated estate of an Irish earl. Sir Walter Raleigh was also given forty-two thousand acres near Spenser. Ireland was then in a state of continuous turmoil. In such a country Spenser lived and wrote his Faerie Queene. Of course, this environment powerfully affected the character of that poem.

=The Second Stage.= Somewhat later in the history of fiction, as in the history of figure painting, we find instances in which the element of setting is used for a decorative purpose, and is brought into an artistic relation with the elements of action and character. Such a use is made of landscape, for example, in the "Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto and the "Faerie Queene" of Spenser.

Edmund Spenser and his friend, Sir Philip Sidney, had closed their work before the King James version appeared, yet the Faerie Queene in its religious theory is Puritan to the core, and Sidney is best remembered by his paraphrases of Scripture. The influence of both was even greater in the Jacobean than in their own period.