r lack of bread in King Street
[Westminster], and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of
Essex, saying that he had no time to spend them." He was buried in the
Abbey, near the grave of Chaucer, and his funeral was at the charge of
the Earl of Essex. Beyond this we know nothing; nothing about the
details of his escape, nothing of the fate of his manuscripts, or the
condition in which he left his work, nothing about the suffering he went
through in England. All conjecture is idle waste of time. We only know
that the first of English poets perished miserably and prematurely, one
of the many heavy sacrifices which the evil fortune of Ireland has cost
to England; one of many illustrious victims to the madness, the evil
customs, the vengeance of an ill-treated and ill-governed people.

One Irish rebellion brought him to Ireland, another drove him out of it.
Desmond's brought him to pass his life there, and to fill his mind with
the images of what was then Irish life, with its scenery, its
antipathies, its tempers, its chances, and necessities. Tyrone's swept
him from Ireland, beggared and hopeless. Ten years after his death, a
bookseller, reprinting the six books of the _Faery Queen_, added two
cantos and a fragment, _On Mutability_, supposed to be part of the
_Legend of Constancy_. Where and how he got them he has not told us. It
is a strange and solemn meditation, on the universal subjection of all
things to the inexorable conditions of change. It is strange, with its
odd episode and fable which Spenser cannot resist about his neighbouring
streams, its borrowings from Chaucer, and its quaint mixture of
mythology with sacred and with Irish scenery, Olympus and Tabor, and his
own rivers and mountains. But it is full of his power over thought and
imagery; and it is quite in a different key from anything in the first
six books. It has an undertone of awe-struck and pathetic sadness.

What man that sees the ever whirling wheel
Of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway,
But that thereby doth find and plainly feel
How Mutability in them doth play
Her cruel sports to many men's decay.

He imagines a mighty Titaness, sister of Hecate and Bellona, most
beautiful and most terrible, who challenges universal dominion over all
things in earth and heaven, sun and moon, planets and stars, times and
seasons, life and death; and finally over the wills and thoughts and
natures of the gods, even of J