urghley and Walsingham. He had his eye on the proceedings of Deputies
and Presidents, and reported freely their misdoings or their
unpopularity. His letters form a considerable part of the Irish Papers.
He became a powerful and successful public servant. He became Sir
Geoffrey Fenton; he kept his high place for his life; he obtained grants
and lands; and he was commemorated as a great personage, in a pompous
monument in St. Patrick's Cathedral. This kind of success was not to be
Spenser's.

Lord Grey of Wilton was a man in whom his friends saw a high and heroic
spirit. He was a statesman in whose motives and actions his religion had
a dominant influence: and his religion--he is called by the vague name
of Puritan--was one which combined a strong and doubtless genuine zeal
for the truth of Christian doctrine and for purity of morals, with the
deepest and deadliest hatred of what he held to be their natural enemy,
the Anti-Christ of Rome. The "good Lord Grey," he was, if we believe
his secretary, writing many years after this time, and when he was dead,
"most gentle, affable, loving, and temperate; always known to be a most
just, sincere, godly, and right noble man, far from sternness, far from
unrighteousness." But the infelicity of his times bore hardly upon him,
and Spenser admits, what is known otherwise, that he left a terrible
name behind him. He was certainly a man of severe and unshrinking sense
of duty, and like many great Englishmen of the time, so resolute in
carrying it out to the end, that it reached, when he thought it
necessary, to the point of ferocity. Naturally, he had enemies, who did
not spare his fame; and Spenser, who came to admire and reverence him,
had to lament deeply that "that good lord was blotted with the name of a
bloody man," one who "regarded not the life of the queen's subjects no
more than dogs, and had wasted and consumed all, so as now she had
nothing almost left, but to reign in their ashes."

Lord Grey was sent over at a moment of the utmost confusion and danger.
In July, 1579, Drury wrote to Burghley to stand firmly to the helm, for
"that a great storm was at hand." The South of Ireland was in fierce
rebellion, under the Earl of Desmond and Dr. Nicolas Sanders, who was
acting under the commission of the Pope, and promising the assistance of
the King of Spain; and a band of Spanish and Italian adventurers,
unauthorized, but not uncountenanced by their Government, like Drake in
the I