to Cynthia_, and this was
probably the full name of it. Spenser's name for Raleigh, the Shepherd,
or pastoral hero, of the Ocean, is therefore for the first time
explained. This twenty-first book suffers from the fact that stanzas,
but apparently not very many, have dropped out, in four places. With
these losses, the canto still contains 130 stanzas, or 526 lines.
Supposing the average length of the twenty preceding books to have been
the same, _The Ocean's Love to Cynthia_ must have contained at least ten
thousand lines. Spenser, therefore, was not exaggerating, or using the
language of flattery towards a few elegies or a group of sonnets, when
he spoke of _Cynthia_ as a poem of great importance. As a matter of
fact, no poem of the like ambition had been written in England for a
century past, and if it had been published, it would perhaps have taken
a place only second to its immediate contemporary, _The Faery Queen_.

At this very time, and in the midst of his poetical holiday, Raleigh was
actively engaged in defending the rights of the merchants of Waterford
and Wexford to carry on their trade in pipe-staves for casks. Raleigh
himself encouraged and took part in this exportation, having two ships
regularly engaged between Waterford and the Canaries. Traces of his
peaceful work in Munster still remain. Sir John Pope Hennessy says:

The richly perfumed yellow wallflowers that he brought to
Ireland from the Azores, and the Affane cherry, are still found
where he first planted them by the Blackwater. Some cedars he
brought to Cork are to this day growing, according to the local
historian, Mr. J. G. MacCarthy, at a place called Tivoli. The
four venerable yew-trees, whose branches have grown and
intermingled into a sort of summer-house thatch, are pointed out
as having sheltered Raleigh when he first smoked tobacco in his
Youghal garden. In that garden he also planted tobacco.... A few
steps further on, where the town-wall of the thirteenth century
bounds the garden of the Warden's house, is the famous spot
where the first Irish potato was planted by him. In that garden
he gave the tubers to the ancestor of the present Lord
Southwell, by whom they were spread throughout the province of
Munster.

These were boons to mankind which the zeal of Raleigh's agents had
brought back from across the western seas, gifts of more account in the
end than could be contained i