(6) I must glance at another, though a rare, source of error. Our sage and serious Spenser was a thoughtful, even a philosophic writer; but his thought is large, simple, contemplative, not acute and analytic. When he has to deal with a subtle or complex situation he sometimes involves himself inextricably. If any lover of Spenser resent this judgement, let him apply his devotion to explain or emend II. v. 12, ll. 8 and 9; V. vi. 5, ll. 6 and 7; V. vi. 26, ll. 5 and 6: to me these passages appear incorrigible. III. The first mention of the _Faerie Queene_ occurs in a letter of Spenser’s to Gabriel Harvey, dated _Quarto Nonas Aprilis_ 1580. ‘I wil in hande forthwith,’ he writes, ‘with my _Faery Queene_, whyche I praye you hartily send me with al expedition: and your frendly Letters, and long expected Judgement wythal.’ ‘I haue nowe sent hir home at the laste,’ writes Harvey in reply. These phrases show that the parcel of the _Faerie Queene_ had been in Harvey’s hands for some considerable time. The poem must therefore have been begun not later than 1579. Now in 1579 Spenser was an inmate of Leicester House, and the constant associate of Sir Philip Sidney. There is therefore no reason to doubt the assertion of W. L. in his commendatory verses that by Sidney the poem was originally inspired. Harvey’s long-expected judgement, when it came, was far from favourable. But the poet was not discouraged, and doubtless took the manuscript with him when he went to Ireland with Lord Grey in August, 1580. Though he afterwards spoke of the poem as ‘wilde fruit which salvage soyl hath bred’, there is some reason to think that he had actually written as much as a book and a half before he left England. For though allusions to Ireland are not rare in the _Faerie Queene_, the first of them occurs in II. ix. 16.[3] Moreover, the industry of commentators has discovered in Book I only one imitation of Tasso’s _Gierusalemme Liberata_, and that doubtful[4] (I. vii. 31); undoubted imitations begin to appear in II. v, vi, vii, viii, and II. xii blazes with spoils from the Garden of Armida. Now the _Gierusalemme Liberata_ was published in 1581; an imperfect edition had been issued surreptitiously in 1580. Our next glimpse of the _Faerie Queene_ we owe to Lodovick Bryskett, whose _Discourse of Civill Life_, though not published till 1606, purports to record a conversation held in his cottage near Dublin as early, it would seem, as the spring of 1583. Spenser is one of the interlocutors. He is made to say that he has already undertaken a work ‘which is in _heroical verse_ under the title of a _Faerie Queene_’; which work he has ‘already well entered into’. The company express an ‘extreme longing’ after this _Faerie Queene_, ‘whereof some parcels had been by some of them seene’.