the acquaintance of Mistress Spenser
and introduce her to the American public. A slight sketch of the
poet's life, up to the period of his marriage, may afford us some
clue to the quarter from which he selected his bride; we shall
therefore give what is known of him in the fewest possible words.

Edmund Spenser, by family, was English, and by birth a cockney. In
his "Prothalamion" he thus pleads guilty to the chime of Bow-bells
in his infant ear:--

"At length they all to merrie London came,
To merrie London, my most kindly nurse,
That to me gave this life's first native source;
Though from another place I take my name
And house of ancient fame."

At what time of his life he became connected with Ireland is very
uncertain; it was probably early. At or about the time of Sir Henry
Sidney's vice-royalty, or in the interval between that and the
lieutenancy of Lord Grey De Wilton, there was a "Mr. Spenser"
actively and confidentially employed by the Irish government; and
that this may have been the poet is, from collateral circumstances,
far from improbable. Spenser was the friend and _protege_ of Sir
Philip Sidney, (son of the before-named Sir Henry,) and of his uncle,
the Earl of Leicester. Lord Grey De Wilton was by marriage connected
with both, and lived with them on terms of the closest intimacy,
social, literary, and political. In choosing an officer, then, for
so important a post as that of secretary, whom would the one select
or the others more confidently recommend than a young man of genius,
known to all the parties, and who already had some knowledge and
experience of Irish affairs? Be this as it may, we know that in 1580,
Spenser, then in his twenty-seventh year, accompanied Lord Grey De
Wilton into Ireland as secretary; and that he had been there before,
in some official capacity not undistinguished, is evidenced by the
fact, that the Lord Justice, previously to his arrival, speaks of
him as "having many ways deserved some consideration from her Majesty."

We do not care to inquire into the peculiar services for which he
was so speedily favored with a large grant of lands forfeited by the
Desmonds. Such official transactions, we fear, would reflect little
credit on the poet; no doubt he was a good man--according to the
morality of his age; and if he did suggest the poisoning of a few
thousand human beings of all ages and both sexes, (some go so far as
to allege that his fervid imagination contem