The Earl of Leicester seems to have undertaken to provide for Spenser by sending him abroad. A letter to Gabriel Harvey from Leicester House fixes this to the year 1579; but either there is a mistake in the date, or the scheme must have been abandoned; for in 1580 he was appointed secretary to Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, who was sent as lord-deputy to Ireland. While in that country he wrote his ‘Discourse on the State of Ireland,’ a judicious treatise on the policy then best suited to the condition of that country. His services were rewarded with a grant of 3028 acres in the county of Cork, out of the forfeited lands of Gerald Fitz Gerald Earl of Desmond. Spenser’s residence was at the castle of Kilcolman, near Doneraile. The river Mulla, which he has more than once introduced into his poems, ran through his grounds. Here he contracted an intimacy with Sir Walter Raleigh, who was then a captain under Lord Grey. ‘Colin Clout’s come Home again,’ in which Sir Walter is described as the Shepherd of the Ocean, is a beautiful memorial of this friendship, founded on a similarity of taste for the polite arts, and described with equal delicacy and strength of feeling. The author acknowledges services at court rendered to him by Raleigh; probably the confirmation of the grant of land, which he obtained in 1586. The friends returned to England together, and Spenser wished to have obtained a settlement at home, rather than to have continued in a country at that time little better than barbarous. To mortifications, and ultimate disappointment in his attendance at court, we probably owe the well-known lines in ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale.’ If his forced return to Ireland was the cause of his writing the ‘Faery Queene,’ his country was benefited, and his fame immeasurably enhanced by the disappointment of his wishes. On the publication of the first three books the Queen rewarded him with a pension of fifty pounds a year; and in him the office of Laureate may be considered to have commenced, although not conferred under that title. Spenser’s marriage is placed by most biographers in 1593; by Mr. Church in 1596: the year of his death, if we could rest our faith in the monument. All we know of the lady is, that her Christian name was Elizabeth: a name, he says in his 74th sonnet, which has given him three graces, in his mother, his queen, and his mistress. In his ‘Epithalamion’ he says, “Tell me, ye merchants’ daughters, did ye see So fair a creature in your town before? So sweet, so lovely, and so mild as she, Adorn’d with beauty’s grace and virtue’s store: Her goodly eyes, like sapphire, shining bright. * * * * * Her long loose yellow locks, like golden wire, Sprinkled with pearl, and pearling flow’rs atween, Do, like a golden mantle, her attire.”