an intimate familiarity with any particular locality. In the second period, on the other hand, he was in uninterrupted occupation of a permanent home, and enjoying a comparative leisure which would enable him to explore the whole of the neighbouring country. For although his official position must have rendered it a matter of obligation that his headquarters should be in Munster, it did not of necessity involve residence in Limerick, where the routine duties of the Secretaryship were discharged by a deputy.

These differing characteristics of the two main periods of Spenser's Irish life will be found to be closely reflected in his poetry. In the first three books of the Faery Queene,' the genius loci is indeed apparent, not only in the general setting of the imagery, but in many specific allusions; but there is no detailed description of familiar haunts. In the second portion of the poem, on the other hand, the scenery and the associations of Kilcolman and the South of Ireland colour the whole texture of his work, and the concluding books abound in passages wherein not all the poet's idealism nor the veil of his elaborate allegory can conceal the influence of his actual surroundings, both upon the trend of his fancy and the form in which that fancy found expression. And what is true of the Faery Queene' is true of Spenser's minor poetry. In the poems written between 1580 and 1590 the local allusions, though not entirely wanting, are few and far between, and they are the allusions of a stranger in a strange land; in his later pieces they are frequent and even elaborate. Thus in Astrophel' the forest of Arlo, which he afterwards celebrated so affectionately, is mentioned only to be contrasted with the more peaceful woodlands of England :

'So wide a forest and so waste as this
Nor famous Arden, nor fowl Arlo is.'

But in the fragment on 'Mutability' this synonym for the terrible is transformed by the magic of ownership into a paradise, and represented as having been anciently 'the best and fairest hill

That was in all their holy island's heights,'

though transformed by wars and the hand of man into a wilderness.

In illustration of these remarks it is worth while to examine the Faery Queene' with some attention from the point of view of its topographical allusiveness. In the first

,

three books, as already remarked, there are to be found by the careful reader reminiscences of Irish scenery and of Irish social conditions which are tolerably distinct. Thus in the Legend of Temperance, it is sufficiently obvious that in the description of the attack on Sir Guyon and his comrades we have a picture of the lawless banditti who commonly formed the bodyguard of an Irish chief, much as they are represented by Derricke in his 'Image of Ireland,' or by Spenser himself in his prose works, and as they are depicted in the almost contemporary drawings which accompany Derricke's work:

'Thus as he spoke, lo, with outrageous cry

A thousand villeins round about them swarmed
Out of the rocks and caves adjoining nigh;
Vile caitiff wretches, ragged, rude, deformed,
All threat'ning death, all in strange manner armed;
Some with unwieldy clubs, some with long spears,
Some rusty knives, some staves in fire warmed;
Stern was their look, like wild amazed stears,

Staring with hollow eyes and stiff upstanding hairs.' *

Again, in the two following quotations it is plain that the poet is drawing not from imagination but from memory: 'As when a foggy mist hath overcast

The face of heaven, and the clear air engrost,
The world in darkness dwells; till that at last
The watery south-wind, from the seaboard coast
Upblowing, doth disperse the vapour loos'd,
And pours itself forth in a stormy shower:
So the fair Britomart,' &c.t

In the lines just quoted we may have a reminiscence of Kilcolman, which lies not very far from the sea, and it is little to be doubted that in the following we have a picture of the vale of Arlo :

'Into that forest far they thence him led,

Where was their dwelling; in a pleasant glade

With mountains round about environed,

And mighty woods which did the valley shade,

And like a stately theatre it made,

Spreading itself into a spacious plain;

And in the midst a little river played

Amongst the pumy stones, which seemed to plaine

With gentle murmur that his course they did restrain.' ‡

* Book II. Canto ix. Stanza 13. + Book III. Canto iv. Stanza 13.

Book III. Canto v. Stanza 39.

VOL. CCI. NO. CCCCXI.

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The witch's cottage in the same Book is plainly reminiscent of an Irish cabin of Spenser's day:

"There in a gloomy hollow glen she found
A little cottage, built of sticks and reeds

In homely wise, and walled with sods around;
In which a witch did dwell in loathly weeds
And wilful want, all careless of her needs.' *

While the lordlier apartment, described in the Legend of 'Holiness,' may well have been drawn from the hall of one of the greater Irish castles, even if the scene depicted be not the Earl of Ormond's 'brave mansion' at Kilkenny :

'And forth he comes into the common hall;
Where early waits him many a gazing eye,
To weet what end to stranger knights may fall.
There many minstrels maken melody,

To drive away the dull melancholy;

And many

bards that to the trembling chord
Can tune their timely voices cunningly ;
And many chroniclers that can record

Old loves, and wars for ladies done by many a Lord.' †

Many similar illustrations might readily be adduced from the earlier books of the Faery Queene,' to show the degree in which Spenser's imagination was haunted by the wild charm of the salvage soil' in which he found himself, even where the context shows that he had no express concern with Ireland in the evolution of his allegory. But these must suffice. It is to be noticed, however, concerning these and all similar passages, that however obvious the reflections of the sights and scenes of Irish life which they exhibit, it is only in the earliest cited example, the description of the gnats of the fens of Allen, that any express use is made of Irish scenery or that an Irish name is used. With that exception it is only in the later books that the scenery of Ireland is avowedly introduced. In those books, however, and in those of his minor poems which can confidently be ascribed to the last decade of the poet's life, the references to the rivers, hills, and woods of Ireland are many and widely scattered, though it is curious that the account of Sir Arthegall's adventure hard' in the Legend of Justice,' in which Lord Grey de Wilton's Irish experiences are almost undisguisedly commemorated, contains no mention of the

*Book III. Canto vii. Stanza 6.
Book I. Canto v. Stanza 3.

country in which it is represented as occurring more express than the anagram Irene for Ierne, in which the parable is subtly indicated. With the exception already specified, the first clear note of Spenser's acquaintance with Ireland which is heard in the Faery Queene' occurs in Book IV, and refers appropriately to the Irish Channel. It is to be found in Canto i. Stanza 42, where the shock of the onset of the two knights in the encounter between Blandamour and Scudamour is likened to

'two billows in the Irish sounds

Forcibly driven with contráry tides.'

The next, in Canto iii. Stanza 27, of the same Book, is also an aquatic simile for a knightly duel. It will be found in the story of Cambell's fight with Triamond, and is borrowed from the tidal conflict of sea and river in the estuary of the Shannon, which Spenser must often have noted during his official visits to Limerick:

'Like as the tide, that comes fro' the ocean main,
Flows up the Shannon with contrary force,
And, over-ruling him in his own reign,
Drives back the current of his kindly course,
And makes it seem to have some other source;
But, when the flood is spent, then back again
His borrowed waters forced to redisburse,
He sends the sea his own with double gain
And tribute eke withal, as to his Soveraine.'

But by far the most famous of the Irish passages in the Faery Queene' is of course the well-known catalogue of the Irish rivers, who are represented as attending the spousals of the Thames and the Medway, which, often as it has been quoted, must be quoted here once more:

'Ne thence the Irish rivers absent were,
Sith no less famous than the rest they be.

There was the Liffey rolling down the lea;

The sandy Slane; the stony Aubrian;

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The spacious Shenan spreading like a sea;
The pleasant Boyne; the fishy, fruitful Ban ;

*The Stony Aubrian' has puzzled Dr. Joyce and all the topographical critics. May it not be the Owenbrin which flows into Lough Mask? a river certainly known to the Elizabethan captains who soldiered in Connaught and to whom Spenser was certainly indebted for some of his local knowledge. The epithet 'stony' is particularly applicable to this river.

Swift Awniduff, which of the English man
Is cal'de Blackewater, and the Liffar deepe;
Sad Trowis, that once his people overran ;
Strong Allo, tumbling from Slewlogher steep;
And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep.

And there the three renowned brethren were:

The first the gentle Shure that making way
By sweet Clonmell adorns rich Waterford;
The next the stubborn Newre, whose waters gray
By faire Kilkenny and Rossponte boord,
The third the goodly Barow, which doth hoord
Great heapes of salmons in his deepe bosome:
All which, long sundered, do at last accord
To joyne in one, ere to the sea they come;
So flowing all from one, all one at last become.

There also was the wide embayed Mayre;
The pleasant Bandon, crowned with many a wood;
The spreading Lee, that, like an island fair,
Encloseth Cork with his divided flood;

And baleful Oure, late stained with English blood,
With many more whose names no tongue can tell.' *

Dr. Joyce, in the article in Fraser's Magazine' already mentioned, has dealt, with great fulness and intimate knowledge of the local geography of Ireland, with this enumeration of the Irish rivers, as also with the detailed references to the neighbourhood of the poet's home, which are so numerous in the largely autobiographical poem of 'Colin Clout's Come Home Again,' and in the fragmentary cantos of Mutability.' We have no intention of entering here into a detailed examination of the use made by the poet of the scenery of Kilcolman. The pictures of his home in the former poem and in the 'Epithalamion' are photographic in their accuracy to anyone who has viewed the scene for himself, though its aspect to-day is of course less homely, since, of the once substantial building, only the gaunt peel tower of the castle remains, and almost all traces of its precincts are lost. For the wild solitudes of Kilcolman, with its lonely lake and barren marsh, peopled only by wild-fowl, and the desolate levels of moor and bog which stretch between the mountains and the mere are not less but more a solitude to-day than in the poet's time. Those familiar with its present appearance will hardly agree

*Book IV. Canto xi. Stanzas 40-44.