cost of some L200 a
year, a lively litigation with his Lismore neighbours, of which he wrote
in a few months to his cousin: 'I will shortly send over an order from
the Queen for a dismiss of their cavillations.' It was the short way of
composing law proceedings against Court favourites. He was planning the
confusion by similar means of the unfriendly Fitzwilliam's 'connivances
with usurpers of his land.' Yet a cloud there seems to have been, if
only a passing one. A memorable incident of literary history, connected
with this sojourn in Ireland, verifies the talk of the Court, and lends
it importance. It may even point to a relation between the haze dimly
discernible now, and the tempest which burst three years later.

[Sidenote: _Edmund Spenser._]

[Sidenote: _The Faerie Queene._]

Edmund Spenser had been with Lord Deputy Grey when Ralegh was a Munster
captain. But, if the poet be taken literally, they were not acquainted
before 1589. His Irish services, as Ralegh's, were rewarded out of the
Desmond forfeitures. He received 3028 acres in Cork, with Kilcolman
Castle, two miles from Doneraile. The estate formed part of a wide
plain, well watered, and, in the sixteenth century, well wooded. The
castle is now a roofless ivy-clad ruin. The poet was turning it into a
pleasant residence. Ralegh came to see it and him. Spenser has described
the visit in the tenderest and least artificial of his poems. _Colin
Clout's Come Home Again_, printed in 1595, was inscribed to his friend
in 1591. The dedication was expressed to be in part payment of an
infinite debt. The poet declared it unworthy of Sir Walter's higher
conceit for the meanness of the style, but agreeable to the truth in
circumstance and matter. Lines in the poem corroborate the hypothesis
that Elizabeth had for a time, perhaps in the summer of 1589, been
estranged from Ralegh:--

His song was all a lamentable lay
Of great unkindness, and of usage hard,
Of Cynthia, the Ladie of the Sea,
Which from her presence faultlesse him debard.

They equally imply that, before Colin Clout's lay was indited, great
Cynthia had been induced by his complainings to abate her sore
displeasure--

And moved to take him to her grace againe.

The circumstances of Spenser's own introduction to Court indicate that
Ralegh had recovered favour. He read or lent to Ralegh during the visit
to Kilcolman the first three books of the _Faerie Queene_. According to
Ben Jonso