x. 158.

[58:2] Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1574-1585. Mr. H. C. Hamilton's
Pref. p. lxxi-lxxiii. Nov. 12, 1580.

[62:3] Cox, Hist. of Ireland, 354.

[63:4] Irish Papers, March 29, 1587.

[79:5] Carew MSS. Calendar, 1587, p. 449. Cf. Irish Papers; Calendar,
1587, p. 309, 450.

CHAPTER IV.

THE FAERY QUEEN--THE FIRST PART.

[1580-1590.]

The _Faery Queen_ is heard of very early in Spenser's literary course.
We know that in the beginning of 1580, the year in which Spenser went to
Ireland, something under that title had been already begun and submitted
to Gabriel Harvey's judgment; and that among other literary projects,
Spenser was intending to proceed with it. But beyond the mere name, we
know nothing, at this time, of Spenser's proposed _Faery Queen_.
Harvey's criticisms on it tell us nothing of its general plan or its
numbers. Whether the first sketch had been decided upon, whether the new
stanza, Spenser's original creation, and its peculiar beauty and
instrument, had yet been invented by him, while he had been trying
experiments in metre in the _Shepherd's Calendar_, we have no means of
determining. But he took the idea with him to Ireland; and in Ireland he
pursued it and carried it out.

The first authentic account which we have of the composition of the
_Faery Queen_, is in a pamphlet written by Spenser's friend and
predecessor in the service of the Council of Munster, Ludowick Bryskett,
and inscribed to Lord Grey of Wilton: a _Discourse of Civil Life_,
published in 1606. He describes a meeting of friends at his cottage
near Dublin, and a conversation that took place on the "ethical" part of
moral philosophy. The company consisted of some of the principal
Englishmen employed in Irish affairs, men whose names occur continually
in the copious correspondence in the Rolls and at Lambeth. There was
Long, the Primate of Armagh; there were Sir Robert Dillon, the Chief
Justice of the Common Pleas, and Dormer, the Queen's Solicitor; and
there were soldiers, like Thomas Norreys, then Vice-President of
Munster, under his brother John Norreys; Sir Warham Sentleger, on whom
had fallen so much of the work in the South of Ireland, and who at last,
like Thomas Norreys, fell in Tyrone's rebellion; Captain Christopher
Carleil, Walsingham's son-in-law, a man who had gained great distinction
on land and sea, not only in Ireland, but in the Low Countries, in
France, and at Carthagena and San Domingo; and Capt