One is familiar with the type of novel which only explains itself when the last chapter is reached--Stevenson's _Wrecker_ is an example.

_The Fairy Queen_ was designed on somewhat the same plan.

The last section was to relate and explain the unrelated and unexplained books which made up the poem, and at the court to which the separate knights of the separate books--the Red Cross Knight and the rest--were to bring the fruit of their adventures, everything was to be made clear.

Spenser did not live to finish his work; _The Fairy Queen_, like the _Aeneid_, is an uncompleted poem, and it is only from a prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh issued with the second published section that we know what the poem was intended to be.

Had Spenser not published this explanation, it is impossible that anybody, even the acutest minded German professor, could have guessed.
The poem, as we have seen, was composed in Ireland, in the solitude of a colonists' plantation, and the author was shut off from his fellows while he wrote.