We do not care to inquire into the peculiar services for which he was so speedily favored with a large grant of lands forfeited by the Desmonds. Such official transactions, we fear, would reflect little credit on the poet; no doubt he was a good man--according to the morality of his age; and if he did suggest the poisoning of a few thousand human beings of all ages and both sexes, (some go so far as to allege that his fervid imagination contemplated the utter extermination of the race,) he merely acted up to the opinions prevalent in the time and polished court of "Good Queen Bess." The beings were "mere Irishry,"--a stumbling-block in the path of British civilization, and therefore to be removed, _per fas et nefas_. Spenser took up his residence on the forfeit lands in Cork; there married, and reared a family which inherited his estate; that he subsequently died in England was as mere a casualty as that by which Swift was born in Ireland. Certain it is that the greater and the better portion of his works in prose and verse was composed during his residence in the land of his adoption. Thus, in the sonnets appended to the "Faëry Queen," the poem on which his celebrity rests, he addresses this Earl of Ormond:-- "Receive, most noble lord, a single taste Of the wilde fruit which savage soyle hath bred; Which, beeing through long wars left almost waste, With brutish barbarisme is overspred." Again, addressing himself to his patron, Lord Grey, he says,-- "Rude rimes, the which a rustick nurse did weave In savage soyle, far from Parnasso Mount." Several other of the finest productions of his brain owe their birth to the "savage soyle" of Ireland; his descriptions of the country, his dialogue on Irish affairs, his "Amoretti" and "Colin Clout's come home again," belong confessedly to this category. Having discovered thus much about the poet, we now strike out in a new direction in search of his better half. Upon this point, unfortunately, there hangs a mist,--not impenetrable, as we conceive, but yet impenetrated,--a secret to which the given clue has been neglected, and which remains to the present day the opprobrium of a careless biography. The fact and the date of his marriage in Ireland are obtained from his own writings; but, further than that her name was Elizabeth,--a fact recorded by himself,--the lady of his choice remains unknown, her maiden name and family. Mere trifles these, to be sure,--but interesting in an antiquarian point of view,--and valuable, perhaps, should the inquiry hereafter lead some more than usually acute bookworm into the real mystery and meaning, the main drift of that inexplicable "Faëry Queen."