Spenser elaborated it beyond the wildest dreams of those students of Holy Writ who had first conceived it.

His stories were to be interesting in themselves as tales of adventure, but within them they were to conceal an intricate treatment of the conflict of truth and falsehood in morals and religion.

A character might typify at once Protestantism and England and Elizabeth and chastity and half the cardinal virtues, and it would have all the while the objective interest attaching to it as part of a story of adventure.

All this must have made the poem difficult enough.

Spenser's manner of writing it made it worse still.