uered and desolated wastes of wild and
barbarous Ireland. It is a feature of his work on which Spenser himself
dwells. In the verses which usher in his poem, addressed to the great
men of Elizabeth's court, he presents his work to the Earl of Ormond, as

The wild fruit which salvage soil hath bred;
Which being through long wars left almost waste,
With brutish barbarism is overspread;--

and in the same strain to Lord Grey, he speaks of his "rude rimes, the
which a rustic muse did weave, in salvage soil." It is idle to speculate
what difference of form the _Faery Queen_ might have received, if the
design had been carried out in the peace of England and in the society
of London. But it is certain that the scene of trouble and danger in
which it grew up greatly affected it. This may possibly account, though
it is questionable, for the looseness of texture, and the want of
accuracy and finish which is sometimes to be seen in it. Spenser was a
learned poet; and his poem has the character of the work of a man of
wide reading, but without books to verify or correct. It cannot be
doubted that his life in Ireland added to the force and vividness with
which Spenser wrote. In Ireland, he had before his eyes continually, the
dreary world which the poet of knight errantry imagines. There men might
in good truth travel long through wildernesses and "great woods" given
over to the outlaw and the ruffian. There the avenger of wrong need
seldom want for perilous adventure and the occasion for quelling the
oppressor. There the armed and unrelenting hand of right was but too
truly the only substitute for law. There might be found in most certain
and prosaic reality, the ambushes, the disguises, the treacheries, the
deceits and temptations, even the supposed witchcrafts and enchantments,
against which the fairy champions of the virtues have to be on their
guard. In Ireland, Englishmen saw, or at any rate thought they saw, a
universal conspiracy of fraud against righteousness, a universal battle
going on between error and religion, between justice and the most
insolent selfishness. They found there every type of what was cruel,
brutal, loathsome. They saw everywhere men whose business it was to
betray and destroy, women whose business it was to tempt and ensnare and
corrupt. They thought that they saw too, in those who waged the Queen's
wars, all forms of manly and devoted gallantry, of noble generosity, of
gentle strength,