No one can appreciate Spenser without some reflection on the nature of allegorical writing. The mere etymological meaning of the word, allegory, to talk of one thing and thereby convey another, is too wide. The true sense is this, the employment of one set of agents and images to convey in disguise a moral meaning, with a likeness to the imagination, but with a difference to the understanding, those agents and images being so combined as to form a homogeneous whole. This distinguishes it from metaphor, which is part of an allegory. But allegory is not properly distinguishable from fable, otherwise than as the first includes the second, as a genus its species; for in a fable there must be nothing but what is universally known and acknowledged, but in an allegory there may be that which is new and not previously admitted. The pictures of the great masters, especially of the Italian schools, are genuine allegories.
Amongst the classics, the multitude of their gods either precluded allegory altogether, or else made every thing allegory, as in the Hesiodic
Theogonia
; for you can scarcely distinguish between power and the personification of power.
The Cupid and Psyche
of, or found in, Apuleius, is a phenomenon. It is the Platonic mode of accounting for the fall of man. The
Battle of the Soul
by Prudentius is an early instance of Christian allegory.