In May, 1579, they landed at Dingle, after having on their voyage taken a small Bristol vessel, the sailors and captain of which they pitched into the sea. The landing at Dingle was impressive as the ceremony, which inaugurated the coming of the true religion, must needs be. "Two friars stepped first on shore; a bishop followed, mitre on head and crosier in hand, then Sanders, with the consecrated banner, and after him Fitzmaurice." But the expedition did not rise to the level of its inauguration. It served only to stir up a savage rebellion in Munster, and to bring devastation upon the country. It was to help quell the insurrection that Ralegh came to Ireland as captain of a company of one hundred foot-soldiers at the end of 1579, or the beginning of 1580. The war--if war it can be called--was carried on with savage cruelty on both sides. Less could not be expected. The times were not gentle, when little girls in London might see men hung and quartered, and limbs stared down from the chief gates of most cities. Nor would mercy be expected from generals who came to Ireland as Pelham came, and as Lord Grey de Wilton came, regarding Ireland as the grave of reputation. To Ralegh, too, the service was itself distasteful. He writes with characteristic vigour of phrase to the Earl of Leicester, "I would disdayn it as mich to keap sheepe. I will not trouble your honor with the busyness of this loste land; for that Sir Warram Sentleger can best of any man deliver unto your lordshipe the good, the bad, the mischief, the means to amende, and all in all of this common welthe or rather common woe." The English soldiery regarded the Irish as savages who would not live at peace, and must be exterminated, with the exception of the actual tillers of the ground or churls as they were called. And this point of view was encouraged by those in authority, who had neither men nor money to spare for guarding and feeding prisoners. "Death," as Froude says, "was the only gaoler their finances could support." Nothing can extenuate cruelty; but it is well to face the fact that cruelty, and cruelty not greatly less atrocious than this, was an absolute attribute of the Elizabethan age. The one quality, which runs through all the pages of every history of every man and every movement, is vitality--intense, burning vitality; and this vitality illumined the literature, chaotic as much of it is, and beat pulsing through the veins of the nation, explaining its magnificent advance, and enthusiasm and greatness, even as it explains its brutality. England was like a boy who is suddenly conscious of being strong and of being free, with all the capacity of some young Hercules and all his reckless faults.