and privation, and from that to their own country-side. Red Hugh allied himself to Hugh O’Neil, the most powerful of the Irish leaders—‘Oh, deep, dissembling heart, born to great weal or woe of thy country!’ an English historian had cried to him—an Oxford man too, a man of the Renaissance, and for a few years defeated English armies and shook the power of England. The Irish, stirred by these events, and with it maybe some rumours of _The State of Ireland_ sticking in their stomachs, drove Spenser out of doors and burnt his house, one of his children, as tradition has it, dying in the fire. He fled to England, and died some three months later in January, 1599, as Ben Jonson says, ‘of lack of bread.’ During the last four or five years of his life he had seen, without knowing that he saw it, the beginning of the great Elizabethan poetical movement. In 1598 he had pictured the Nine Muses lamenting each one over the evil state in England, of the things that she had in charge, but, like William Blake’s more beautiful _Whether on Ida’s shady brow_, their lamentations should have been a cradle-song. When he died _Romeo and Juliet_, _Richard III._, and _Richard II._, and the plays of Marlowe had all been acted, and in stately houses were sung madrigals and love songs whose like has not been in the world since. Italian influence had strengthened the old French joy that had never died out among the upper classes, and an art was being created for the last time in England which had half its beauty from continually suggesting a life hardly less beautiful than itself. III