From the shock of this frightful experience Spenser never recovered.  He returned to England heartbroken, and in the following year (1599) he died in an inn at Westminster.  According to Ben Jonson he died “for want of bread”; but whether that is a poetic way of saying that he had lost his property or that he actually died of destitution, will probably never be known.  He was buried beside his master Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, the poets of that age thronging to his funeral and, according to Camden, “casting their elegies and the pens that had written them into his tomb.”

SPENSER’S WORKS. The Faery Queen is the great work upon which the poet’s fame chiefly rests.  The original plan of the poem included twenty-four books, each of which was to recount the adventure and triumph of a knight who represented a moral virtue.  Spenser’s purpose, as indicated in a letter to Raleigh which introduces the poem, is as follows: 

To pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave Knight, perfected in the twelve private Morall Vertues, as Aristotle hath devised; which is the purpose of these first twelve bookes:  which if I finde to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encoraged to frame the other part of Polliticke Vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king.

Each of the Virtues appears as a knight, fighting his opposing Vice, and the poem tells the story of the conflicts.  It is therefore purely allegorical, not only in its personified virtues but also in its representation of life as a struggle between good and evil.  In its strong moral element the poem differs radically from Orlando Furioso, upon which it was modeled.  Spenser completed only six books, celebrating Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy.  We have also a fragment of the seventh, treating of Constancy; but the rest of this book was not written, or else was lost in the fire at Kilcolman.  The first three books are by far the best; and judging by the way the interest lags and the allegory grows incomprehensible, it is perhaps as well for Spenser’s reputation that the other eighteen books remained a dream.

ARGUMENT OF THE FAERY QUEEN.  From the introductory letter we learn that the hero visits the queen’s court in Fairy Land, while she is holding a twelve-days festival.  On each day some distressed person appears unexpectedly, tells a woful story of dragons, of enchantresses, or of distressed beauty or virtue, and asks for a champion to right the wrong and to let the oppressed go free.  Sometimes a knight volunteers or begs for the dangerous mission; again the duty is assigned by the queen; and the journeys and adventures of these knights are the subjects of the several books.  The first recounts the adventures of the Redcross Knight, representing Holiness, and the lady Una, representing Religion.  Their contests are symbolical of the world-wide struggle between virtue and faith on the