ith
the Irish chieftains, his challenges and single combats, his escapes at
fords and woods, is like reading bits of the _Faery Queen_ in prose.'
The two men, in many respects the most remarkable Englishmen of
imagination then before the notice of their country, did not, however,
really come into mutual relation until the time we have now reached.

In 1586 Edmund Spenser had been rewarded for his arduous services as
Clerk of the Council of Munster by the gift of a manor and ruined castle
of the Desmonds, Kilcolman, near the Galtee hills. This little
peel-tower, with its tiny rooms, overlooked a county that is desolate
enough now, but which then was finely wooded, and watered by the river
Awbeg, to which the poet gave the softer name of Mulla. Here, in the
midst of terrors by night and day, at the edge of the dreadful Wood,
where 'outlaws fell affray the forest ranger,' Spenser had been settled
for three years, describing the adventures of knights and ladies in a
wild world of faery that was but too like Munster, when the Shepherd of
the Ocean came over to Ireland to be his neighbour. Raleigh settled
himself in his own house at Youghal, and found society in visiting his
cousin, Sir George Carew, at Lismore, and Spenser at Kilcolman. Of the
latter association we possess a most interesting record. In 1591,
reviewing the life of two years before, Spenser says:

One day I sat, (as was my trade),
Under the foot of Mole, that mountain hoar,
Keeping my sheep among the cooly shade
Of the green alders, by the Mulla's shore;
There a strange shepherd chanced to find me out;
Whether allured with my pipe's delight,
Whose pleasing sound yshrilled far about,

(the secret of the authorship of the _Shepherd's Calender_ having by
this time oozed out in the praises of Webbe in 1586 and of Puttenham in
1589,)

Or thither led by chance, I know not right,--
Whom, when I asked from what place he came
And how he hight, himself he did ycleepe
The _Shepherd of the Ocean_ by name,
And said he came far from the main-sea deep;
He, sitting me beside in that same shade,
Provoked me to play some pleasant fit,

(that is to say, to read the MS. of the _Faery Queen_, now approaching
completion,)

And, when he heard the music which I made,
He found himself full greatly pleased at it;
Yet aemuling my pipe, he took in hond
My pipe,--before that, aemuled of m