passages which answer best to it and to no other. For example, we take the description in the Third Book of the Faerie Queene :— At last, as nigh out of the wood she came, To which her steps directly she did frame. And plac'd for pleasure nigh that forrest syde: Mantled with greene, itself did spredden wide. Sidney's death and that of Sidney's father, Sir Henry, President of Wales and Viceroy of Ireland, occurred in the same year, 1586. A portion of Penshurst is still named the President's Court. The death of the friend of his youth, after lingering long from a wound received at Zutphen, must have been a sad blow to Spenser. Sidney never saw the printed Faerie Queene, although, like Raleigh, he may have seen such parts as were written out four years before, that is before Raleigh's journey to Ireland, when he visited Spenser at Kilcolman. Much of the poet's life there must have been pure exile, though the Blackwater, which he calls "swift Awin Duff," is, at Lismore especially, reckoned one of the most beautiful rivers in Ireland. Munster was about as far from Kent in those days as New Zealand is now, reckoning by days' journeys. When the end of all his hopes came, when his castle had been burnt and his child murdered, he and his wife escaped to London, and we, strictly speaking, hear no more of him. According to the strange legend ascribed to Ben Jonson, he died "for lake of bread" at King Street, Westminster, in January 1599, a story absolutely refused by Dean Church in his admirable biography. The Dean, however, sums up the facts thus: "The first of English poets perished miserably and prematurely." Jonson added to the first part of his tale one which we may accept. The Earl of Essex sent him "twenty pieces," which the dying poet rejected, saying bitterly he had no time to spend them. He was buried near the tomb of Chaucer in what is now known as the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, and the assembly of literary men and poets gathered at the funeral wrote elegies and epitaphs which they threw with their pens into his grave. Spenser's family was undoubtedly connected with the Northamptonshire family of Spencer. The difference of a single letter in the uncertain spelling of the sixteenth century did not signify much. They were wealthy graziers in the midland counties; two of them, who would seem to have been in the great staple wool trade, were Lord Mayors in 1527 and 1594. The poet's branch was long before of some local consideration in East Lancashire; but, though Edmund was acquainted with heraldry, we are not informed as to his coat of arms. This has lately been a matter of some controversy, the two Lord Mayors using coats not in the least resembling those now borne by the Spencers of Althorpe. The sixteenth century heralds assigned to this family the arms of the long extinct Despencers. Mr. Round in his Peerage Studies shows plainly that in 1504 a coat more or less varied from that of the London aldermen was granted to John Spencer of Althorpe; and as Mr. Round remarks, "the fess between six seamews' heads" is hostile to the claim that the family was already entitled to the arms of the baronial Despencers. "The first effigy on which is found the differenced coat of the baronial Despencers is that of Sir John Spencer, who died in 1586." It is therefore unlikely that Edmund, though he claimed close affinity with the subsequently ennobled Spencers of Althorpe, had any more right than they to the curious and complicated shield of the Earls of Winchester and of Gloucester in the fourteenth century. Descendants of the poet still exist, and the Dictionary of National Biography mentions Mr. Edmund Spenser Tiddeman, rector of West Hanningfield, as the present representative of the family. THOMAS MOORE IN WICKLOW THOMAS MOORE was born to a grocer and his wife in Aungier Street, Dublin, in 1779. In 1794 he entered Trinity College, the penal laws against the Roman Catholics having at this time been somewhat relaxed, though he was not allowed to hold the scholarship he had won. Five years later he was entered at the Middle Temple, but cannot be said to have ever seriously studied law. He had begun to make himself known as a lyric poet while he was still little more than a boy. His friendship with Robert Emmet is celebrated in such verses as O breathe not his Name and Let Erin remember the Days of Old. But his poetical powers showed themselves more clearly when he came to speak of Emmet's love for Sarah Curran, and probably never rose higher than in the touching lines: She sings the wild songs of her dear native plains, Ah! little they think who delight in her strains Moore's fame was flagged while he lived. sudden and early, but never His verses are easily criticised, and their fall into oblivion has been prophesied from the first; but many of them still live, and others, like Oft in the Stilly Night and Flow on, thou Shining River, seem to wake up at irregular intervals, when perhaps some famous musician revives their popularity, or they are found, like The Last Rose of Summer, forming the motive of a fashionable opera. He was fortunate in his prolonged friendship with Lord Moira, afterwards Marquis of Hastings, who favoured him for many years and practically caused him to settle in England; but by obtaining for the poet the uncongenial office of Admiralty Registrar of Bermuda he gave Moore an opportunity of seeing the world. The profits of this office were considerable, especially in time of but when Moore obtained leave to appoint a deputy and to return home himself, he took a step which involved him in endless complications, and the money troubles which ensued were most galling to his punctilious sense of honour. They served one purpose, however, which is not to be wholly regretted, namely, by showing how independent and exact even a poet could be; while, though himself at the height of his fame, earning sums which vie with those offered to Scott or Byron, he was living almost in penury to pay off his debts to the Treasury. It would scarcely be correct to describe Thomas Moore as a great poet. It would be at least equally incorrect to call him a great musician. Yet his poetry and his music have reached and influenced, and, above all, given pleasure to thousands whose lives might other |