eir
scholarship; and the poet or man of letters only trusted that his work,
by attracting the favour of the great, might open to him the door of
advancement. Spenser was probably expecting to push his fortunes in some
public employment under the patronage of two such powerful favourites as
Sidney and his uncle Leicester. Spenser's heart was set on poetry: but
what leisure he might have for it would depend on the course his life
might take. To have hung on Sidney's protection, or gone with him as his
secretary to the wars, to have been employed at home or abroad in
Leicester's intrigues, to have stayed in London filling by Leicester's
favour some government office, to have had his habits moulded and his
thoughts affected by the brilliant and unscrupulous society of the
court, or by the powerful and daring minds which were fast thronging the
political and literary scene--any of these contingencies might have
given his poetical faculty a different direction; nay, might have even
abridged its exercise or suppressed it. But his life was otherwise
ordered. A new opening presented itself. He had, and he accepted, the
chance of making his fortune another way. And to his new manner of life,
with its peculiar conditions, may be ascribed, not indeed the original
idea of that which was to be his great work, but the circumstances under
which the work was carried out, and which not merely coloured it, but
gave it some of its special and characteristic features.

That which turned the course of his career, and exercised a decisive
influence, certainly on its events and fate, probably also on the turn
of his thoughts and the shape and moulding of his work, was his
migration to Ireland, and his settlement there for the greater part of
the remaining eighteen years of his life. We know little more than the
main facts of this change from the court and the growing intellectual
activity of England, to the fierce and narrow interests of a cruel and
unsuccessful struggle for colonization, in a country which was to
England much what Algeria was to France some thirty years ago. Ireland,
always unquiet, had became a serious danger to Elizabeth's Government.
It was its "bleeding ulcer." Lord Essex's great colonizing scheme, with
his unscrupulous severity, had failed. Sir Henry Sidney, wise, firm, and
wishing to be just, had tried his hand as Deputy for the third time in
the thankless charge of keeping order; he, too, after a short gleam of
peace,