He came up to London, as I said, about the year 1578, at the invitation of a prig of a classmate, who makes him known to Philip Sidney: Sidney is the very man to recognize and appreciate the tender beauty of those woful plaints in the _Shepherd’s Calendar_, and invites the poet down to Penshurst, that charming home of the Sidneys, in Kent. There, such interest is made for him that he is appointed to a secretaryship in Ireland, where the Queen’s lieutenants are stamping out revolt. Spenser sees much of this fiery work; and its blaze reddens some of the pages of the _Faery Queen_. In the distribution of spoils, after the Irish revolt was put down, the poet has bestowed upon him, amongst other plums, some three thousand acres of wild land, with Kilcolman Castle, which stands upon a valley spur of this domain. This castle is represented as an uninteresting fortress--like Johnnie Armstrong’s tower in Scotland--upon the borders of a small lake or mere, and the landscape--stretching in unlovely waste around it--savage and low and tame. Yet he finds rich rural pictures there--this idealist and dreamer: let him see only so much of sky as comes between the roofs of a city alley, and he will pluck out of it a multitude of twinkling stars; let him look upon a rood square of brown grass-land, and he will set it alight with scores of daisies and of primroses. _The Faery Queen._ And it is in this easy way he plants the men and women, the hags and demons, the wizards and dragons that figure in the phantasmagoria of the _Faery Queen_; they come and go like twilight shadows; they have no root of realism. There is reason to believe that the first cantos of this poem were blocked out in his mind before leaving England; perhaps the scheme had been talked over with his friend Sidney; in any event, it is quite certain that they underwent elaboration at Kilcolman Castle, and some portions doubtless took color from the dreary days of rapine and of war he saw there. I will not ask if you have read the _Faery Queen_: I fear that a great many dishonest speeches are made on that score; I am afraid that I equivocated myself in youngish days; but now I will be honest in saying--I never read it through continuously and of set purpose; I have tried it--on winter nights, and gone to sleep in my chair: I have tried it, under trees in summer, and have gone to sleep on the turf: I have tried it, in the first blush of a spring morning, and have gone--to breakfast.