like every Englishman living in
Ireland, he was living amid ruins. An English home in Ireland, however
fair, was a home on the sides of AEtna or Vesuvius: it stood where the
lava flood had once passed, and upon not distant fires. Spenser has left
us his thoughts on the condition of Ireland, in a paper written between
the two rebellions, some time between 1595 and 1598, after the twelve
or thirteen years of so-called peace which followed the overthrow of
Desmond, and when Tyrone's rebellion was becoming serious. It seems to
have been much copied in manuscript, but though entered for publication
in 1598, it was not printed till long after his death in 1633. A copy of
it among the Irish papers of 1598 shows that it had come under the eyes
of the English Government. It is full of curious observations, of shrewd
political remarks, of odd and confused ethnography; but more than all
this, it is a very vivid and impressive picture of what Sir Walter
Ralegh called "the common woe of Ireland." It is a picture of a noble
realm, which its inhabitants and its masters did not know what to do
with; a picture of hopeless mistakes, misunderstandings, misrule; a
picture of piteous misery and suffering on the part of a helpless and
yet untameable and mischievous population--of unrelenting and scornful
rigour on the part of their stronger rulers, which yet was absolutely
ineffectual to reclaim or subdue them. "Men of great wisdom," Spenser
writes, "have often wished that all that land were a sea-pool."
Everything, people thought, had been tried, and tried in vain.

Marry, soe there have beene divers good plottes and wise
counsells cast alleready about reformation of that realme; but
they say, it is the fatall desteny of that land, that noe
purposes, whatsoever are meant for her good, will prosper or
take good effect, which, whether it proceede from the very
GENIUS of the soyle, or influence of the starres, or that
Allmighty God hath not yet appoynted the time of her
reformation, or that He reserveth her in this unquiett state
still for some secrett scourdge, which shall by her come unto
England, it is hard to be knowen, but yet much to be feared.

The unchanging fatalities of Ireland appear in Spenser's account in all
their well-known forms; some of them, as if they were what we were
reading of yesterday. Throughout the work there is an honest zeal for
order, an honest hatred of falsehood,