resort a spendthrift or a scapegrace might perhaps venture to repair, to restore his shattered fortunes in the vast area of its confiscated lands, or to win reputation in its incessant wars. It is of such an one that Bishop Hall speaks, in his 'Virgidemiarum,' in the lines

'So slips he to the wolvish western isle
Among the savage kerne in sad exile.'

And it is of a piece with this conception of Ireland that in the fourth book of the Faery Queene' Sir Arthegall, the knight who is afterwards charged with the task of succouring Irena, the fair princess in whom Ireland is personified in the allegory, is introduced under the designation of 'the Salvage Knight,' all whose armour

With woody moss bedight, and all his steed
With oaken leaves attrapped, that seemed fit
For salvage wight.'

To realise adequately the extent to which the poetry of the 'Faery Queene' was influenced by Spenser's surroundings in Ireland, it is necessary to examine a little carefully the course of his career as a servant of the Crown in that country, and to compare his successive migrations with the stages of the composition of his great poem. The poet's connexion with Ireland certainly began as early as 1577, when, as already noted, he was appointed to the position of Secretary to Sir Henry Sidney. Neither then, nor later under Lord Grey de Wilton's viceroyalty, does Spenser's name appear in the lists of viceregal officers; the Secretary of State under both Sidney and Grey being John Chaloner, who in 1581 was succeeded by the well-known Sir Geoffrey Fenton. Evidently Spenser's position was only that of private Secretary. Sidney left Ireland in August 1578, and Spenser did not remain behind him; so that the poet's first connexion with Ireland must have been of the briefest. Some of his biographers have even doubted whether he came over. But though no document of any sort survives to attest the fact, it is impossible to doubt the poet's own statement in his View of the State of Ireland,' that he was present at Limerick at the execution of a notable traitor Murrough O'Brien,' an event which is known to have taken place in July 1577.

This first brief visit to Ireland can have given Spenser but few opportunities of learning his way about the country. He

was certainly absent from Ireland between 1578 and 1580, that is, from the retirement of Sidney to the appointment of Grey. He may, indeed, have acquired just such an impression of the country as an untutored wilderness, filled with wild and semi-civilised people, as would suggest his making its solitudes of wood and waste and mountain the background or scenery of the action of the great allegory he was already meditating. But it was impossible that he could learn enough in so short a stay to enable him to give those intimate descriptions of familiar scenes which are abundant in the later books of the Faery Queene' and elsewhere in his later poetry. In the summer of 1580, however, Spenser entered definitely upon that Irish career which was to last until his death. Except for occasional visits, sometimes lengthened, but still never more than visits, to England, Ireland was henceforth his continuous, though no doubt uncongenial, residence, and in the fullest sense his home. We know from a letter to Gabriel Harvey, written in April 1580-four months, that is, before his coming to Ireland for the second time-that before that date he had already begun work on the Faery Queene.' Some portions of the poem had been drafted, though probably not precisely in the form in which they ultimately appeared. But evidently no great progress had been made; for he writes to his literary confidant and critic, I will in hand forthwith with my "Faery 'Queene," which I pray you heartily send me with all ' expedition.' In the years immediately following his appointment, and in fact throughout his chief's tenure of the Viceroyalty, Spenser can have had little leisure to cultivate the Muse. The Deputy was constantly moving about, and for the first six months his secretary had abundant opportunities of seeing rural Ireland. He was present with Grey at Smerwick, and as is evident from the View of the State of Ireland,' was perpetually at his chief's elbow until his duties were terminated by the Viceroy's recall, precisely two years after his coming over. Meantime, he had been appointed, in March 1580-81, to the office of Registrar or Clerk of the Faculties in the Court of Chancery, a position of considerable importance, and probably proportionate emolument, in Dublin. He was succeeded in this office in 1588 by Arland Ussher, father of the great Primate, and it may have been in this connexion that the latter formed the acquaintance to which he testified heartily many years afterwards, as Aubrey relates, by his indignation at Sir William Davenant's slighting remarks on his old friend

6.66

'Edmund Spenser.'* For six years from this date, until he took over from his brother poet, Ludovic Bryskett, the office of Clerk to the Council of the Munster Presidency, Spenser's headquarters must have been in Dublin. In the same year in which he acquired his Chancery post he received his first grant of Irish property, procuring a lease of 'the house ' of Friars of Enniscortie, the Manor of Enniscortie, and a ' ruinous castle and weir there.' Of this he was only three days the master, parting with it to one Richard Synot, who some years later transferred the lands to Sir Henry Wallop, ancestor of the Earls of Portsmouth, by whose descendants they are still held. But he was not long in acquiring a similar interest in property more conveniently situated, being granted in August 1581 a lease of the site of the House of Friars called the New Abbey, co. Kildare,' which had lapsed to the Crown through the attainder of Rowland Eustace,

* None of Spenser's biographers, not even the industrious Dr. Grosart, have been at much pains to investigate the nature of the office in the Irish Court of Chancery to which Spenser was appointed, shortly after his arrival in Ireland. There is certainly nothing in the title of that office or the enumeration of its duties which suggests that it can have had much attraction for the poet. It was, however, a position of considerable importance and substantial emolument; and so far as regards this office, and his later post in Munster, Mr. Lee's remark that 'the record of Spenser's worldly struggles is sordid and The office of Registrar or 'insignificant' is hardly warranted. 'Clerk in Chancery for the Faculties' was constituted by the Act of Faculties, 28th Henry VIII., Chapter 19. This statute was levelled against the 'intollerable exaction of great sums of money by the Bishop of Rome' for dispensations, licences, and faculties. After repudiating the Pope's authority it deelared the authority of the King and Parliament to dispense upon due occasion with the laws, it provided that such dispensations should be given under faculties to be obtained under the Great Seal, or the seal of the Archbishop of Dublin. For the due performance of its prescribed functions, the Act further provided for the appointment of one sufficient Clerk, being learned in the 'course of Chancery, which shall always be attendant on the Lord 'Chancellor or the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and shall make, 'write and enroll the confirmations of all such licences, dispensations, 'instruments and other writings as shall be brought under the Arch'bishop's seal, there to be confirmed or enrolled, taking for his pains 'such reasonable sums of money as hereafter, by this Act, shall be limited ' for the same.' What the precise remuneration amounted to does not appear, as it was paid out of the fees charged on the faculties. With this office was united the cognate office of Registrar of Ecclesiastical Appeals, constituted as a separate post under the Act, but which in practice was amalgamated with the Registrarship of Faculties.

Lord Baltinglass, the head of a family whose distinction it has been to supply at a distance of two centuries two eminent occupants of the Irish Woolsack. He likewise acquired the custodiam of the lands of Newlands in the same neighbourhood, and a lease for six years of the same nobleman's Dublin residence. New Abbey was a house of the Franciscans which had been founded by the ancestors of Lord Baltinglass in 1460, and had been regranted to that peer on the dissolution of the monasteries. Seven years later this property had passed out of Spenser's hands, being leased to one Thomas Lambyn, from whom it passed within a few years to Sir Henry Harington. The poet had by that time settled in Munster, and had no further need of it. But there is evidence that it remained for some years in his hands, and must often have been visited by him, even if he did not actually reside there. In 1583 and 1584 Spenser is named in successive commissions to the principal gentry of Kildare as one of the commissioners of musters for that county. New Abbey lay within riding distance of the metropolis, the river Liffey flowing through its grounds, and adjacent to the north-eastern border of the great Bog of Allen. At least two passages in the Faery Queene' are reminiscent of its surroundings. The well-known line in the description of the Irish rivers in the Fourth Book

'There was the Liffey rolling down the lea,'

And

is strictly applicable to the aspect of the river at this part of
its course, where, having left its mountain sources, it assumes
the proportions and the vigour of an ample stream.
a passage in the ninth canto of the second book, which may
be presumed to have been written about the period of his
residence in this district, and prior to his residence at
Kilcolman, bears still stronger testimony to the poet's
familiarity with the neighbourhood.

'As when a swarme of gnats at eventide
Out of the fennes of Allan do arise,

Their murmuring small trompets sounden wide,
Whiles in the air their clustring army flies,
That as a cloud doth seeme to dim the skies;
Ne man nor beast may rest nor take repast
For their sharpe wounds, and noyous injuries,
Till the fierce northerne wind with blustring blast
Doth blow them quite away and in the ocean cast.' *

* Book II. Canto ix. Stanza 16,

Spenser's earlier biographers seem to have considered that his connexion with Ireland ceased for some years with his patron's withdrawal from the country. But this suggestion is unwarranted by what we now know of the facts. The documents just referred to in connexion with New Abbey show him to have been resident in Ireland in the summer of 1584, and the fact that he retained his appointment as Registrar of the Court of Chancery till 1588, only resigning it within a week of his being gazetted Clerk of the Munster Council, affords a strong presumption that he remained continuously resident in or near Dublin. The date of the well-known meeting of Spenser and other friends, many of them persons of distinction, at Bryskett's cottage near Dublin, at which time the poet is known to have been busily at work upon his poem, cannot have been earlier than July 1584, and may have been a year later. Spenser must manifestly have been resident in Ireland when, in June 1586 in the articles for the Munster undertakers, he was set down for the lands of Kilcolman, for in this year he addressed a sonnet from Dublin to his old friend Harvey. From the date of the poet's acceptance of the Munster Secretaryship, and actual settlement at Kilcolman, our knowledge of Spenser's career is sufficient to enable us to say that he was almost continuously in the South of Ireland. From 1588, when he succeeded Ludovic Bryskett, until about 1593, when he appears to have surrendered his office to a deputy, he must have passed his time between Limerick, the official seat of the Presidency, and his own home at Kilcolman, his only absences being occasioned by his visits to London with Raleigh in 1589 or 1590, when he arranged for the publication of the first three books of the 'Faery Queene,' and again in 1595, in connexion with the publication of the last books of the same work.

It is plain from the foregoing analysis of the known facts of Spenser's official career in Ireland that his residence there falls into two clearly marked periods. In the first, which extended from his arrival in August 1580 to his acceptance of the office in Munster in 1588, he was in general resident in Dublin, though his duties took him frequently into the country. During a part and perhaps the greater part of this period he had an alternative residence in a country seat not far from Dublin, in which he could at times enjoy the sylvan scenery in which he delighted. But it is evident that while he would thus have acquired an excellent general knowledge of Ireland, he was not in a position to acquire