rish nature, which
his verse so faithfully reflects. Not only are the material beauties of
our country--mountains, woods, and rivers--mirrored there, but its
spiritual world also. The very name of Una is Irish, and our Puca appears
in trimmed English as "the Pouke," whom Shakespeare again introduces as
Puck, just as our Gaelic Madb becomes "Queen Mab."

But it may be said that Spenser was ignorant of the literature of the
hostile Irish nation, and so could not be influenced by it. The case is
otherwise. When Eudoxus asks: "Have they any art in their compositions, or
bee they anything wittie in or well savoured as poems should be?" Spenser
(as Irenaeus) answers: "Yes, truely, I have caused divers of them to be
translated unto me, that I might understand them, and surely they savoured
of sweet wit and good invention, but skilled not of the goodly ornaments
of poetry" (rather these were lost in a prose translation); "they were
sprinkled with some pretty flowers of their naturall device, which gave
good grace and comelinesse unto them."

It is a strange thing to say that Edmund Spenser, who so deprecates their
"rebellious" love of liberty, might well have envied the position and
influence of the Irish poets. At the Queen's Court in England he had
learned "what hell it is in suing long to bide," to "eat the heart in
despair," and all the miseries of dilatory patronage:

"To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."

In Ireland he saw a different state of things. The poets might almost be
described as the patrons, for theirs it was to distribute praise or
dispraise in poems, "the which," says Spenser, "are held in so high regard
and estimation amongst them that none dare displease them, for feare to
runne into reproach through their offence, and be made infamous in the
mouths of all men."

Their compositions were sung at all feasts and meetings by other persons,
and these also, to his surprise, "receive great rewards and reputation."
Certain it is, though strange, that Edmund Spenser, had he been least bard
in the pettiest principality of Ireland, instead of being the first poet
of the monarch of Great Britain, would not have died of hunger. Neglected
and starving in Westminster, may he not have regretted his political
efforts to destroy the one national organism which above all others had
ever generously encouraged the representatives of literature?[17]

It is a study ful