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suit the wider application of his plan's other and more important half,
Spenser made all his characters double their parts, and appear in his allegory as the impersonations of abstract moral qualities.
When the cardinal and theological virtues tell
Dante,
Noi siam qui ninfe e in ciel siamo stelle,
the sweetness of the verse enables the fancy, by a slight gulp, to swallow without solution the problem of being in two places at the same time.
But there is something fairly ludicrous in such a duality as that of Prince Arthur and the
Earl of
Leicester, Arthegall and Lord Grey, and Belphoebe and Elizabeth.
In this same interlude it doth befall
That I, one Snout by name, present a wall.
The reality seems to heighten the improbability, already hard enough to manage.
But
Spenser had fortunately almost as little sense of humor as
Wordsworth,
1 or he could never have carried his poem on with enthusiastic good faith so far as he did. It is evident that to him the Land of Faery was an unreal world of picture and illusion,
The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil,
