y for some English
office or pension. By the help of Raleigh, now his neighbour at
Kilcolman, he had been promised a pension, but was kept out of it by
Lord Burleigh, who said, 'All that for a song!' From that day Lord
Burleigh became that 'rugged forehead' of the poems, whose censure of
this or that is complained of. During the last three or four years of
his life in Ireland he married a fair woman of his neighbourhood, and
about her wrote many intolerable artificial sonnets and that most
beautiful passage in the sixth book of the _Faerie Queene_, which tells
of Colin Clout piping to the Graces and to her; and he celebrated his
marriage in the most beautiful of all his poems, the _Epithalamium_. His
genius was pictorial, and these pictures of happiness were more natural
to it than any personal pride, or joy, or sorrow. His new happiness was
very brief, and just as he was rising to something of Milton's grandeur
in the fragment that has been called _Mutabilitie_, 'the wandering
companies that keep the woods,' as he called the Irish armies, drove him
to his death. Ireland, where he saw nothing but work for the Iron man,
was in the midst of the last struggle of the old Celtic order with
England, itself about to turn bottom upward, of the passion of the
Middle Ages with the craft of the Renaissance. Seven years after
Spenser's arrival in Ireland a large merchant ship had carried off from
Loch Swilly, by a very crafty device common in those days, certain
persons of importance. Red Hugh, a boy of fifteen, and the coming head
of Tirconnell, and various heads of clans had been enticed on board the
merchant ship to drink of a fine vintage, and there made prisoners. All
but Red Hugh were released, on finding substitutes among the boys of
their kindred, and the captives were hurried to Dublin and imprisoned in
the Birmingham Tower. After four years of captivity and one attempt
that failed, Red Hugh and certain of his companions escaped into the
Dublin mountains, one dying there of cold and privation, and from that
to their own country-side. Red Hugh allied himself to Hugh O'Neil, the
most powerful of the Irish leaders--'Oh, deep, dissembling heart, born
to great weal or woe of thy country!' an English historian had cried to
him--an Oxford man too, a man of the Renaissance, and for a few years
defeated English armies and shook the power of England. The Irish,
stirred by these events, and with it maybe some rumours of _The State of