his first
poetic name, was faithful to his ideal. But in the stern Proconsul,
under whom he had become hardened into a keen and resolute colonist, he
had come in contact with a new type of character; a governor under the
sense of duty, doing the roughest of work in the roughest of ways. In
Lord Grey, he had this character, not as he might read of it in books,
but acting out its qualities in present life, amid the unexpected
emergencies, the desperate alternatives, the calls for instant decision,
the pressing necessities and the anxious hazards, of a course full of
uncertainty and peril. He had before his eyes day by day, fearless,
unshrinking determination, in a hateful and most unpromising task. He
believed that he saw a living example of strength, manliness, and
nobleness; of unsparing and unswerving zeal for order and religion, and
good government; of single-hearted devotion to truth and right, and to
the Queen. Lord Grey grew at last, in the poet's imagination, into the
image and representative of perfect and masculine justice. When Spenser
began to enshrine in a great allegory his ideas of human life and
character, Lord Grey supplied the moral features, and almost the name,
of one of its chief heroes. Spenser did more than embody his memory in
poetical allegories. In Spenser's _View of the present State of
Ireland_, written some years after Lord Grey's death, he gives his
mature, and then at any rate, disinterested approbation of Lord Grey's
administration, and his opinion of the causes of its failure. He kindles
into indignation when "most untruely and maliciously, those evil tongues
backbite and slander the sacred ashes of that most just and honourable
personage, whose least virtue, of many most excellent, which abounded in
his heroical spirit, they were never able to aspire unto."

Lord Grey's patronage had brought Spenser into the public service;
perhaps that patronage, the patronage of a man who had powerful enemies,
was the cause that Spenser's preferments, after Lord Grey's recall, were
on so moderate a scale. The notices which we glean from indirect sources
about Spenser's employment in Ireland are meagre enough, but they are
distinct. They show him as a subordinate public servant, of no great
account, but yet, like other public servants in Ireland, profiting, in
his degree, by the opportunities of the time. In the spring following
Lord Grey's arrival (March 22, 1581), Spenser was appointed Clerk of
Decree