t Florence, where he defied the world
to produce her equal. He was victorious, and the palm was awarded the
Irish beauty. Again, he is found resorting to a famous alchemist of
the day to enable him to peer into the future, that he might know what
disposition of her heart would be made by the lady of his affections.
The only satisfaction he obtained was the seeing of Geraldine
recumbent upon a couch reading one of his sonnets. This must have
stirred his blood and have strengthened his faith in the ultimate
success of his wooing. Had he obtained the revelation he sought, he
would have seen the adored beauty, with that curious inconsistency of
her sex, bestowing herself upon Sir Anthony Brown, a man sixty years
of age, and who was forty-four years her senior. After his death
she married the Earl of Lincoln, whom she also survived. There is
no further record of the beauty whose fame extended over England and
Ireland. The circumstance of Surrey's visit to the alchemist has been
preserved in Scott's _Lay of the Last Minstrel_:

"Fair all the pageant--but how passing fair
The slender form that lay on couch of Ind!
O'er her white bosom strayed her hazel hair,
Pale her dear cheek, as if for love she pined;
All in her night-robe loose she lay reclined
And, pensive, read from tablet eburine
Some strain that seemed her inmost soul to find;
That favored strain was Surrey's raptured line,
That fair and lovely form, the Ladye Geraldine."

In the picturesque annals of the piracy of the sixteenth century,
when England was getting that sea training which was to make her the
undisputed naval power of the world, when the Turkish corsair spread
the terror of his savage brutality through the hearts of the brave
seamen who manned the craft of legitimate commerce, at a time when the
trade routes of the sea were the paths of piracy, and the sabre,
the cutlass, and the newly invented gunpowder were depended upon to
establish the right of way for the ships of the nations, there appears
no more daring character than Grainne O'Malley. Many stories of her
prowess are still current in the west of Ireland, and the political
ballads of her time make frequent allusion to the sea queen. For the
greater part of the sixteenth century she lived, an example of that
splendid virility which is yet characteristic of the hardy Irish
peasantry, when not under the shadow of famine.

She came of right by her seafaring proclivities, fo