The author of the "Faerie Queene," who had taken an active part in the horrible butcheries of the Geraldine war, when all the Irish of Munster were indiscriminately slaughtered, insisted that a similar policy should be adopted for the whole island. In his work "On the State of Ireland," he asks for "large masses of troops to tread down all that standeth before them on foot, and lay on the ground all the stiff-necked people of that land." He urges that the war be carried on not only in the summer but in the winter; "for then, the trees are bare and naked, which use both to hold and house the kerne; the ground is cold and wet, which useth to be his bedding; the air is sharp and bitter, to blow through his naked sides and legs; the kine are barren and without milk, which useth to be his food, besides being all with calf (for the most part), they will through much chasing and driving cast all their calf, and lose all their milk, which should relieve him in the next summer." Spenser here employs his splendid imagination to present gloatingly such details as the most effective means for the destruction of the hated race. All he demands is, that "the end should be very short," and he gives us an example of the effectiveness and beauty of his system "in the late wars in Munster." For, "notwithstanding that the same" (Munster) "was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corne and cattle, . . . yet ere one yeare and a half they" (the Irish) "were brought to such wretchednesse as that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of woods and glynnes, they came creeping forthe upon their hands, for their legges could not beare them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like ghosts crying out of their graves . . . . that in short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and beast." Such is a picture, horribly graphic, of the state to which Munster had been reduced by the policy of England as carried out by a Gilbert, a Peter Carew, and a Cosby; and to this pass the "gentle" Spenser would have wished to see the whole country come. Even Mr. Froude is compelled to denounce in scathing terms the monsters employed by the queen, and his facts are all derived, he tells us, from existing "state papers." Writing of the end of the Geraldine war, he says: "The English nation was at that time shuddering over the atrocities of the Duke of Alva. The children in the nurseries were being inflamed to patriotic rage and madness by the tales of Spanish tyranny. Yet, Alva's bloody sword never touched the young, defenceless, or those whose sex even dogs can recognize and respect.