was still a “savadge nation”[8] this, to which Mr. Richard Boyle was setting forth: an Ireland of primeval forests and papal churchlands, of vivid pastures and peel towers and untamed Erse-speaking tribes. With its ores and timber, its grasslands and salmon-fishing, its fine ports, and, above all, its proximity to Elizabethan England, it was a land teeming with industrial possibilities; but it bristled and whispered with race-hatred and creed-hatred, with persecution and conspiracy. This was the Ireland that was being eagerly peopled and exploited and parcelled out by Elizabethan Englishmen. And so, on Midsummer Eve 1588, another clever young man arrived in Dublin. He had twenty-seven pounds and three shillings[9] in his possession, and on his wrist and finger he wore the two “tokens” left him by his dead Kentish mother—the gold bracelet on his wrist, worth about £10, and the diamond ring on his finger, the “happy, lucky and fortunate stone” that was to stay there till his death, and be left an heirloom to his son’s son and successive generations of the great Boyle family. The Earl never forgot the accoutrements and the various suits of clothes with which he started in life when, at two-and-twenty, he shut the door of his chambers in the Middle Temple behind him: “A taffety doublet cut with and upon taffety; a pair of black velvet breeches laced, a new Milan fustian suit, laced and cut upon taffety, two cloaks, competent linen and necessaries, with my rapier and dagger.” And he must have carried letters of introduction also, which procured the young lawyer employment and influential friends; for Mr. Richard Boyle was very soon launched on Dublin society, and was on friendly terms with at least two men who hailed from his own county of Kent, Sir Edward Moore, of Mellifont, in Meath, and Sir Anthony St. Leger, who was living in Dublin. It is more than possible that he met also at this time the poet Spenser; for Dublin must have been Spenser’s headquarters since 1580, when he came over to Ireland as Secretary to the Lord Deputy. Spenser, who it is believed had been through all the horrors of the Desmond Rebellion, was, in 1588, after having held various appointments, leaving Dublin to take up his bachelor abode at Kilcolman, a peel tower abandoned by the Desmonds and assigned, with some thousands of acres around it, to this English poet-politician, already known as the author of the _Shepheard’s Calendar_. At Kilcolman, in this peel tower in a wild wooded glen among the Galtee Hills, about thirty miles south of Limerick, Sir Walter Raleigh came to stay with Spenser when he too was in Ireland, inspecting the vast Irish estates that had been assigned to him. It was there they read their poems aloud to each other, and that Raleigh persuaded Spenser to go back with him to London, together to offer their poems to the Queen. During the first year or two, therefore, of Boyle’s sojourn in