to England with Raleigh, published his first three books of the Faerie Queene, and was presented by Raleigh to Elizabeth, who at this time conferred on him his pension. Spenser, it seems, now returned to Ireland, wrote his second three cantos, and, bringing them over in 1596, published them; and also printed and published his Discourse on the State of Ireland, as a defence of his patron Lord Grey's policy there. From the condition of Ireland at that time, and the sense of insecurity which Spenser felt at his lonely castle of Kilcolman, it is not to be wondered at that his plan abounds with earnest recommendations of a coercive nature, and especially for the stationing of strong garrisons numerously. In 1597, he returned to Ireland, where almost immediately the great rebellion of Tyrone breaking out, he was chased from his castle, and retiring to London, died there heart-broken in 1598.

Such is a brief outline of the life of Spenser. Let us now take a nearer view of his Irish home. One of the best accounts of it is contained in the Dublin University Magazine of November 1843. The writer, evidently not only a genuine lover of the poetry of Spenser, but well acquainted with the scene he describes, goes at much length into the characters and allusions of the poem of the Faerie Queene. He shows us that Spenser draws a noble portrait of his benefactor, Lord Grey, in the second book of that poem. It is the warrior seen by Britomart in the mirror of Merlin, as her future husband.

"A comely knight, all armed in complete wize,
Through whose bright ventayle lifted up on hye
His manly face, that did his foes agrize,
And friends to termes of gentle truce entize,
Looked forth, as Phobus' face out of the east
Betwixt two shady mountaynes doth arise," &c.

The portrait is certainly a noble one, and limned with the colours of divine poetry. The anonymous but able author leads us justly to notice that, in the Legend of Artegall, the thirteen stanzas opening the first canto of the fifth book "relate to the hapless condition of the Ladye Irena-her tears and her troubles; tears that, alas! have not yet ceased to flow down, and troubles that to the present hour are convulsing her bosom. For Irena is Ireland; and she sends her supplications across the ocean to Gloriana, the Queen of Faerie, the great and good Elizabeth of England, beseeching her to come over and help her. Artegall is the personification of equity and justice; and this is the boon which poor Irena looks for, and hopes to receive at her sister's hand."

Artegall, or, in other words, Lord Grey, passes over to Ireland, and encounters Pollentè, or Gerald, Earl of Desmond, “who was in rebellion against Elizabeth at the time of Lord Grey's appointment to the chief authority in Ireland, and perished miserably in consequence. His prodigious wealth and power would amply bear out such an appellation. His lands extended one hundred and fifty miles in the south of the kingdom, stretching from sea to sea, and comprising the greater portion of the counties of Waterford, Cork, Kerry, and Limerick. We read of his being able to bring together,

by his summons, six hundred cavalry, and two thousand footmen; and of these, nearly five hundred were gentlemen of his own kindred and surname. His castles were numerous, and scattered over this large tract of country in well-chosen places, for its defence and protection; and it is curious that attached to one of them is a tale of blood not unlike what you will find Spenser describing. A few miles above the sea, on a bold cliff overhanging one of the Jeepest parts of the beautiful river Blackwater, stand the battered remains of the earl's castle of Strancally. Attached to this stronghold is a murderous device, which we had often previously heard of, but never till then beheld. The solid rock had been pierced with a large well-like aperture, communicating with the river; and the neighbouring peasants will tell you, that the unwary, when decoyed within the castle, were tied hand and foot, and flung down the murder-hole-the rapid river hurried by, and soon carried away their gasping shrieks, and the dead told no tales. We have every respect for these local traditions; notwithstanding, we place no faith in the present horrible legend, which is wholly at variance with the received character of the Earl of Desmond. It may be that such things were told of him, even in Spenser's days; and it is certain that about the close of the year 1579, his castle of Strancally was taken by the Earl of Ormond, the President of Munster; a capture which could be easily transferred to the poet's hero, Artegall."

Lord Grey was recalled, in consequence of representations of cruelty and oppression in his administration. "With this event the fifth book of the Faerie Queene concludes: and the poet there enters at large into the facts of the case. Artegall is summoned away to Faerie Court, and on his way thither meets with two illfavoured hags,-'superannuated vipers,' as Lord Brougham would term them,-whom he knows to be Envy and Detraction. These are painted in language that makes the grisly creatures live before you. Every hue and feature of their vile countenances is preservedtheir slavering lips, their tireless tongues, their foul and claw-like hands. We remember nothing in Milton or Dante that surpasses this powerful personification."

Spenser, as we have already stated, accompanied Lord Grey home, and here came in for a share in the partition of the vast estates of the vanquished Earl of Desmond. The plan now devised for more securely attaching Ireland to the British Crown was called the Plantation of Munster. The scheme, which was first put in operation on this vast confiscated territory of the Earl of Desmond, is thus described in Smith's History of Cork:

"All forfeited lands to be divided into manors and seigniories, containing 12,000, 8,000, 6,000, and 4,000 acres each, according to a plot laid down. The undertakers (those who got these grants) to have an estate in fee-farm, yielding for each seigniory of 12,000 acres, for the first three years, 331. 6s. 8d. sterling, viz. from 1590 to 1593, and from Michaelmas, 1593, 66l. 13s. 4d. sterling, and rateably for every inferior seigniory, yielding upon the death of the undertaker the best beast as an heriot. To be discharged of all taxes

whatsoever, except subsidies levied by parliament. Bogs, mountains, &c. not to be included, till improved, and then to pay a halfpenny for each English acre. Licence to the undertakers to transport all commodities, duty free, into England for five years. That none be admitted to have more than 12,000 acres. No English planter to be permitted to convey to any mere Irish. The head of each plantation to be English; and the heirs female to marry none but of English birth; and none of the mere Irish to be maintained in any family there.

"Each freeholder, from the year 1590, to furnish one horse and horseman, armed; each principal undertaker for 12,000 acres, to supply three horsemen and six footmen, armed; and so rateably for the other seigniories; and each copyholder one footman, armed. That, for seven years to come, they shall not be obliged to travel out of Munster, upon any service; and after that time, no more than ten horsemen and twenty footmen out of one seigniory of 12,000 acres, and so rateably; and such as serve out of Munster to be paid by the queen.

“That the queen will protect and defend the said seigniories, at her own charge, for seven years to come. All commodities brought from England for the use of the same seigniories to be duty free for seven years."

There was to be a complete English population established on these lands in this manner: "For any seigniory containing 12,000 acres, the gentleman was to have for his own domain 2,100 acres ; six farmers, 400 acres each; six freeholders, 100 acres each; and lands to be appropriated for mean tenures of 50, 25, and 10 acres, to the amount of 1,500 acres; whereon thirty-six families, at least, must be established. The other seigniories to be laid out in like proportion. Each undertaker was to people his seigniory in seven years." These articles received the royal signature on the 27th of June, 1586. The following list of undertakers presents some curious particulars. In the first place, Sir Walter Raleigh and Arthur Robbins by some means managed at once to overleap the grand provision, that no undertaker should be permitted to have more than 12,000 acres: Sir Walter getting 42,000, and poor Spenser, poet-like, only 3,029! He is just tacked on at the end like an after-thought

The difference did not consist merely in the quantity either. Some of their lands, like Sir Walter's at Youghal on the Blackwater, were splendid lands; those of Spenser were wild moorlands, facing

the wilder mountains, where the Irish, yet smarting under defeat and expulsion, the destruction of their great chief, and this plan, which was to continue that expulsion for ever, and plant on their own soil the hated Saxon, were looking down ready to descend, and take sanguinary vengeance. Such was the lot which Spenser chose in preference to the degrading slavery of court dependence. No doubt he pleased himself with the idea of a new English state, established in this newly-conquered region; where, one of the lords of the soil, surrounded by English gentlemen, he should live a life of content and happiness, and hand down to his children a fair estate. But in this fond belief how much of the poet's self-delusive property was mixed! Hear what the authority I have already made such use of says: "It was a wild and lonesome banishment at best for one who had lived so much in courts, and in companionship with the rich and high-born. Mountains on all sides shut in the retreat, and in the midst of the long and level plain between them stood a strong fortalice of the Earl of Desmond, which was to be the poet's resi dence, Kilcolman Castle. Hard by the castle was a small lake, and a mile or two distant, on either side, a river descended from the hills. In position, likewise, it was insecure; forming, as it did, the frontier of the English line in the south, and the contiguous hills affording lurking-places for the Irish kerns, whence they could pour down in multitudes to plunder. In the insurrectionary warfare that shortly succeeded, these mountain-passes became the scene of many a skirmish; and the first object of the commander of the English forces, when he heard of any partial outbreak, was to send off a detachment of light-armed troops to occupy them in the name of the Queen."

But overlooking all these hazards, Spenser came hither full of bright views of the future. "The sunshine of the years to come," says the author we have been quoting, "were to atone for the darkness and the gloom of life's morning. His poetry, which had been previously of a pastoral cast, became now embued with the wildness of the sylvan solitude around him: wood-nymphs and fairies were inhabitants he could summon up at will, and with them the hill-tops about him were peopled. Such names of places and things as his musical ear pronounced inharmonious, were exchanged for others which quaint fancy suggested, and which read more sweetly in his He sang sweet strains of the bridal or separation of told how their stern sires, the mountains, ofttimes forced their unwilling inclinations, and brought about a union which the water-nymph detested; and how sometimes she, in her faithful attachment to the one she loved, effected her wish by a circuitous course, or even sought beneath the earth's surface the waters dear to her bosom. Before an imagination so vivid the iron desolateness of Kilcolman vanished; and in its stead a fairy world arose to gladden the eyes of the dreamer with its bowers of bliss, and enchanted palaces, and magnificence more gorgeous than the luxuries of Ind. "The Ballyhowra hills, which formed the northern boundary of poet's retreat, appeared in this new world under the feigned

tender verse.

his rivers;

the

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title of the Mountains of Mole; while the highest of them, which, like Parnassus, has a double summit, was dignified by the name of 'Father.' Sometimes Spenser seems to have extended the name of Mole to the entire range of hills which run along the northern and eastern limits of the county of Cork, and divide it from Limerick and Tipperary. In one place he speaks of a river rising from the Mole, and thence styled by him Molana; which undoubtedly takes its origin from the Tipperary hills. The plain in which his castle stood was rebaptized in Helicon by the name of Armulla Dale. Of his two streamlets, one was suffered, for a special purpose, to retain its original name of Bregoge, i. e. false, or deceitful

and the other, the Awbeg, was specially appropriated to himself by the name of Mulla

'And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep."

"The rivers here mentioned flowed at some distance on each side of Spenser's castle. The Bregoge on the east, at the distance of a mile; the Mulla on the west, at about two miles. Both rise, as the poet sings, in the Mole Mountain. They spring from wells, in glens about a mile and a half asunder, on the opposite sides of Corringlas, the highest mountain in the range. The Bregoge proceeds, in a winding course, to the south-west, and falls into the Mulla a mile above the town of Doneraile. It is a very inconsiderable stream, forcing itself with difficulty amongst the rocks with which its channel is encumbered; and, like many mountain rivulets, is dry during the summer heats. When we saw it, in the course of the present year, its bed was a mass of dusty sand.

"The Mulla rises on the remote side of the hill from the Castle of Kilcolman, but has a more northerly head in Annagh bog, five miles from Anster's birth-place, Charleville, which perhaps in strictness should be deemed its source. Spenser, in the foregoing passage, describes it as springing out of Mole. It proceeds to Buttevant, and receives a branch a little above that town, at Ardskeagh; it then winds away towards Kilcolman, and meets the Bregoge near Doneraile. Directing its course thence, it turns to the south, and flows through a deep romantic glen to Castletown Roche, after which it enters the Blackwater at Bridgetown Abbey. It is now called the Awbeg, in contradistinction to the Awmore or Avonmore, one of the names of the Blackwater."

I have been the more particular in quoting from one well acquainted with the scene, the geography of Spenser's domain, because those who have not been on the spot can really form no idea of the proportion of matter drawn hence, and from Ireland generally, in his poems. The Faerie Queene, Colin Clout, and his two cantos on Mutabilitie," abound with allegorical or actual descriptions of his Irish life, and of the scenery, and especially the rivers, about his estate here. I must now trace my own visit to it.

Starting from Fermoy with a car, I ascended the valley of the