English Crown." This appointment was of great moment to Spenser, for, probably at the advice of Philip Sidney, Lord Grey made choice of the "New Poet" as his secretary.

For the remainder of Spenser's life we have to think of him as an exile. There were, it is true, as will be seen, several visits home, each undertaken apparently in the hope of "more preferment" on English soil, but those visits are the only relief in the picture. Probably it is quite reasonable to suppose that the poet distilled some enjoyment out of his life in Ireland, but it is impossible to ignore the fact that his absence from London in those days of intense life in literature and politics robbed him of much keen pleasure. He was in the golden era of English letters and yet not of it; it was his fate to "live in the Elizabethan age, and to be severed from those brilliant spirits to which the fame of that age is due.”

Socially, too, his new life presented a sad contrast to the environment he had left behind: instead of the settled comfort of Elizabethan England, the perturbed life of rebellious Ireland. His verse reflects the change in many passages, some of which are charged with that pensive feeling which even to-day besets the traveller

in some parts of Ireland. Once, while freshly remembering the sights and sounds which had greeted him on a brief visit to his native land, and contrasting them with the common events of daily life in the land of his exile, he poured out his spirit in these plaintive lines:

"For there all happie peace and plenteous store
Conspire in one to make contented blisse.

No wayling there nor wretchedness is heard,
No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,

No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard,

No nightly bordrags, nor no hue and cries;
The shepheards there abroad may safely lie,

On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger."

Our conception of what exactly were Spenser's official occupations in Ireland is by no means so clear as might be wished. He went thither as the new deputy's secretary, and when that office took end he seems to have passed from one clerkship to another until his days were numbered. Various grants were made to him from time to time. Now he receives a lease of the Abbey of Enniscorthy, and a year later a six years' lease of a house in Dublin. When Munster was settled, he shared with many others in the grants of land then made, his portion being the Castle of Kilcolman and an estate of three thousand acres. This was the most

considerable prize that ever fell to his lot, and Kilcolman, as it became his home, is the one definite mark on the map of Ireland which Spenser's name suggests. But none of these grants made him a wealthy man. So far as worldly goods go, the line of Giles Fletcher sums up his

case:

"Poorly, poor man, he lived; poorly, poor man, he died."

When Spenser went to Ireland he carried the scheme of the "Faerie Queene" with him. He may have shaped it into some form during his college or north of England days; there can be little doubt that he talked it over with Sidney at Penshurst. But, admitting that the idea of the poem took early root in his mind, the fashioning of it into its final form was accomplished almost wholly on Irish soil. In a curious and very scarce pamphlet, bearing the title of "A Discourse of Civil Life," there is given a description of a meeting of literary men, which took place in a cottage near Dublin somewhere between the years 1584 and 1588. The author, Ludowick Bryskett, explains that a debate took place at that meeting on ethics, and he describes himself as asking one member of the company, very well read in Philosophy, both moral and natural,”

to favour the rest with his conclusions on the matter. The one so appealed to was Edmund Spenser. His answer, as reported by Bryskett, inasmuch as it is practically our only Boswellian glimpse of the poet, is worth transcribing : "Though it may seem hard for me, to refuse the request made by you all, whom every one alone, I should for many respects be willing to gratify; yet as the case standeth, I doubt not but with the consent of the most part of you, I shall be excused at this time of this task which would be laid upon me; for sure I am, that it is not unknown unto you, that I have already undertaken a work tending to the same effect, which is in heroical verse under the title of a Faery Queen' to represent all the moral virtues, assigning to every virtue a Knight to be the patron and defender of the same, in whose actions and feats of arms and chivalry the operations of that virtue, whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against the same, to be beaten down and overcome. Which work, as I have already well entered into, if God shall please to spare me life that I may finish it according to my mind, your wish will be in some sort accomplished, though perhaps not so effectually as you could desire."

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