ion and in the
last resort massacre are the remedies he would apply to Irish
discontent. He would be a fine text--which might be enforced by modern
examples--for a discourse on the evil effects of immersion in the
government of a subject race upon men of letters. No man of action can
be so consistently and cynically an advocate of brutalism as your man of
letters, Spenser, of course, had his excuses; the problem of Ireland
was new and it was something remote and difficult; in all but the mere
distance for travel, Dublin was as far from London as Bombay is to-day.
But to him and his like we must lay down partly the fact that to-day we
have still an Irish problem.

But though fate and the necessity of a livelihood drove him to Ireland
and the life of a colonist, poetry was his main business. He had been
the centre of a brilliant set at Cambridge, one of those coteries whose
fame, if they are brilliant and vivacious enough and have enough
self-confidence, penetrates to the outer world before they leave the
University. The thing happens in our own day, as the case of Oscar Wilde
is witness; it happened in the case of Spenser; and when he and his
friends Gabriel Harvey and Edward Kirke came "down" it was to immediate
fame amongst amateurs of the arts. They corresponded with each other
about literary matters, and Harvey published his part of the
correspondence; they played like Du Bellay in France, with the idea of
writing English verse in the quantitative measures of classical poetry;
Spenser had a love affair in Yorkshire and wrote poetry about it,
letting just enough be known to stimulate the imagination of the public.
They tried their hands at everything, imitated everything, and in all
were brilliant, sparkling, and decorative; they got a kind of entrance
to the circle of the Court. Then Spenser published his _Shepherd's
Calendar_, a series of pastoral eclogues for every month of the year,
after a manner taken from French and Italian pastoral writers, but
coming ultimately from Vergil, and Edward Kirke furnished it with an
elaborate prose commentary. Spenser took the same liberties with the
pastoral form as did Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a
vehicle for satire and allegory, made it carry political and social
allusions, and planted in it references to his friends. By its
publication Spenser became the first poet of the day. It was followed by
some of his finest and most beautiful things--by the Platonic hy