by marriage connected with both, and lived with them on terms of the closest intimacy, social, literary, and political.  In choosing an officer, then, for so important a post as that of secretary, whom would the one select or the others more confidently recommend than a young man of genius, known to all the parties, and who already had some knowledge and experience of Irish affairs?  Be this as it may, we know that in 1580, Spenser, then in his twenty-seventh year, accompanied Lord Grey De Wilton into Ireland as secretary; and that he had been there before, in some official capacity not undistinguished, is evidenced by the fact, that the Lord Justice, previously to his arrival, speaks of him as “having many ways deserved some consideration from her Majesty.”

We do not care to inquire into the peculiar services for which he was so speedily favored with a large grant of lands forfeited by the Desmonds.  Such official transactions, we fear, would reflect little credit on the poet; no doubt he was a good man—­according to the morality of his age; and if he did suggest the poisoning of a few thousand human beings of all ages and both sexes, (some go so far as to allege that his fervid imagination contemplated the utter extermination of the race,) he merely acted up to the opinions prevalent in the time and polished court of “Good Queen Bess.”  The beings were “mere Irishry,”—­a stumbling-block in the path of British civilization, and therefore to be removed, per fas et nefas.

Spenser took up his residence on the forfeit lands in Cork; there married, and reared a family which inherited his estate; that he subsequently died in England was as mere a casualty as that by which Swift was born in Ireland.  Certain it is that the greater and the better portion of his works in prose and verse was composed during his residence in the land of his adoption.  Thus, in the sonnets appended to the “Faery Queen,” the poem on which his celebrity rests, he addresses this Earl of Ormond:—­

  “Receive, most noble lord, a single taste
  Of the wilde fruit which savage soyle hath bred;
  Which, beeing through long wars left almost waste,
  With brutish barbarisme is overspred.”

Again, addressing himself to his patron, Lord Grey, he says,—­

  “Rude rimes, the which a rustick nurse did weave
  In savage soyle, far from Parnasso Mount.”

Several other of the finest productions of his brain owe their birth to the “savage soyle” of Ireland; his descriptions of the country, his dialogue on Irish affairs, his “Amoretti” and “Colin Clout’s come home again,” belong confessedly to this category.