The professed end of The Faerie Queene, as set out in the Letter to Ralegh, is ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’ (p.737). The verb ‘to fashion’ suggests a continuing process of reshaping and of education, which might extend both to characters within the text and to its readers. The Faerie Queene does not simply instantiate moral virtues, since its form of allegory continually complicates our perceptions of what a given virtue is. Rather, the poem invites its readers to reflect on the relations between the chief virtue on trial in the book, and the episode before them. Each book is headed ‘The Legend of Sir [name]. Or of [virtue]’, and this syntactic form does not explicitly state that, say, Guyon is identified with Temperance, or Arthegall with Justice (although in the Letter to Ralegh Spenser comes much closer to making that identification). Each book relates a set of stories about a knight, which explore a virtue. And the knights often explore the virtue through negative, or testingly near negative, example. Guyon, the hero of the Book of Temperance, is tempted to descend into the Cave of Mamon. He manifests one version of temperance by abstaining from the food he is offered by his rust-covered host, and by refusing the hand of the proud Philotime (whose name means love of glory). But when he emerges back into ‘this vitall aire’ he faints at once (II. vii. 66). Guyon's faint cannot be simply decoded, but it suggests that the hero has manifested a kind of temperance which is perilously close to self-destructive abstinence. Guyon is particularly prone to interpret his virtue narrowly. In the climactic episode of Book II he voyages to the Bowre of Blisse, past a mass of temptations to digress from his task. He ignores pitiful ladies who cry for his help – and whom a traditional chivalric hero from Ariosto would have instinctively paused to assist – and sternly, and more than a shade discourteously, hurls to the ground the cup which Excesse offers to him. ‘Temperance’ is a complex term. It can signify ‘the ability to moderate the appetite’, which brings it close in meaning to ‘abstinence’.