d left Ireland, and had found the true field for his
ambition, in the English court. From 1582 to 1589, he had shared with
Leicester and Hatton and afterwards with Essex, the special favour of
the Queen. He had become Warden of the Stannaries and Captain of the
Guard. He had undertaken the adventure of founding a new realm in
America under the name of Virginia. He had obtained grants of
monopolies, farms of wines, Babington's forfeited estates. His own great
ship, which he had built, the Ark Ralegh, had carried the flag of the
High Admiral of England in the glorious but terrible summer of 1588. He
joined in that tremendous sea-chase from Plymouth to the North Sea,
when, as Spenser wrote to Lord Howard of Effingham--

Those huge castles of Castilian King,
That vainly threatened kingdoms to displace,
Like flying doves, ye did before you chase.

In the summer of 1589, Ralegh had been busy, as men of the sea were
then, half Queen's servants, half buccaneers, in gathering the abundant
spoils to be found on the high seas; and he had been with Sir John
Norreys and Sir Francis Drake in a bootless but not unprofitable
expedition to Lisbon. On his return from the Portugal voyage his court
fortunes underwent a change. Essex, who had long scorned "that knave
Ralegh," was in the ascendant. Ralegh found the Queen, for some reason
or another, and reasons were not hard to find, offended and dangerous.
He bent before the storm. In the end of the summer of 1589, he was in
Ireland, looking after his large seignories, his law-suits with the old
proprietors, his castle at Lismore, and his schemes for turning to
account his woods for the manufacture of pipe staves for the French and
Spanish wine trade.

He visited Spenser, who was his neighbour, at Kilcolman, and the visit
led to important consequences. The record of it and of the events which
followed, is preserved in a curious poem of Spenser's written two or
three years later, and of much interest in regard to Spenser's personal
history. Taking up the old pastoral form of the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
with the familiar rustic names of the swains who figured in its
dialogues,--Hobbinol, Cuddie, Rosalind, and his own Colin Clout,--he
described under the usual poetical disguise, the circumstances which
once more took him back from Ireland to the court. The court was the
place to which all persons wishing to push their way in the world were
attracted. It was not only the ce