This delicacy may create problems for the reader who demands more straightforward vigor; it can best be appreciated by noting how the sonnets’ unusual rhyme scheme produces a graceful modulation between and within lines. Although each of Spenser’s sonnets closes with a ringing couplet, traditional in the sonnet in English, its scheme as a whole is tighter and subtler than that of the more ordinary form. Ending each quatrain with the rhyme that will begin the next, Spenser achieves a remarkably smooth, graceful, and highly unified effect. While some critics have criticized this rhyme scheme as overly artificial, it is very well suited to the fine modulation of emotions expressed by a forty-year-old poet seeking the hand of a beautiful and socially superior young lady. Similarly, while the character of this lady tends toward the ideal, Spenser ably sketches the personality of a real woman. His Elizabeth Boyle is not the inaccessible mistress of Petrarchan tradition, nor is her lover its traditional victim. Each partner to this courtship exhibits strengths and weaknesses, each ultimately being referred back to the perfecting grace of God. Spenser’s sonnet sequence is a remarkable achievement: It is one of the first fully realized attempts in lyric poetry to represent an actual, rather than an ideal, human relationship. The Amoretti creates one of the earliest and greatest tributes to the Protestant virtues of married love and domestic tranquillity.