ntre of all power, the source of
favours and honours, the seat of all that swayed the destiny of the
nation. It was the home of refinement, and wit, and cultivation, the
place where eminence of all kinds was supposed to be collected, and to
which all ambitions, literary as much as political, aspired. It was not
only a royal court; it was also a great club. Spenser's poem shows us
how he had sped there, and the impressions made on his mind by a closer
view of the persons and the ways of that awful and dazzling scene,
which exercised such a spell upon Englishmen, and which seemed to
combine or concentrate in itself the glory and the goodness of heaven,
and all the baseness and malignity of earth. The occasion deserved a
full celebration; it was indeed a turning-point in his life, for it led
to the publication of the _Faery Queen_, and to the immediate and
enthusiastic recognition by the Englishmen of the time of his unrivalled
pre-eminence as a poet. In this poetical record, _Colin Clout's come
home again_, containing in it history, criticism, satire, personal
recollections, love passages, we have the picture of his recollections
of the flush and excitement of those months which saw the first
appearance of the _Faery Queen_. He describes the interruption of his
retired and, as he paints it, peaceful and pastoral life in his Irish
home, by the appearance of Ralegh, the "Shepherd of the Ocean," from
"the main sea deep." They may have been thrown together before. Both had
been patronized by Leicester. Both had been together at Smerwick, and
probably in other passages of the Munster war; both had served under
Lord Grey, Spenser's master, though he had been no lover of Ralegh. In
their different degrees, Ralegh with his two or three Seignories of half
a county, and Spenser with his more modest estate, they were embarked in
the same enterprise, the plantation of Munster. But Ralegh now appeared
before Spenser in all the glory of a brilliant favourite, the soldier,
the explorer, the daring sea-captain, the founder of plantations across
the ocean, and withal, the poet, the ready and eloquent discourser, the
true judge and measurer of what was great or beautiful.

The time, too, was one at once of excitement and repose. Men felt as
they feel after a great peril, a great effort, a great relief; as the
Greeks did after Salamis and Plataea, as our fathers did after Waterloo.
In the struggle in the Channel with the might of Spain, Engl