mmediate
popularity. How keenly these references were
appreciated appears from the anxiety of the Scotch King
to have the poet prosecuted for his picture of Duessa,
in whom Mary Queen of Scots was generally recognised.
'Robert Bowes, the English ambassador in Scotland,
writing to Lord Burghley from Edinburgh 12th November,
1596, states that great offence was conceived by the
King against Edmund Spenser for publishing in print, in
the second part of the _Faery Queen_, ch. 9, some
dishonourable effects, as the King deemed, against
himself and his mother deceased. Mr. Bowes states that
he had satisfied the King as to the privilege under
which the book was published, yet he still desired that
Edmund Spenser for this fault might be tried and
punished. It further appears, from a letter from
George Nicolson to Sir Robert Cecil, dated Edinburgh,
25 February, 1597-8, that Walter Quin, an Irishman, was
answering Spenser's book, whereat the King was
offended.'{4}

The _View of the Present State of Ireland_,
written dialogue-wise between Eudoxus and Iren{ae}us,
though not printed, as has been said, till 1633, seems
to have enjoyed a considerable circulation in a
manuscript form. There are manuscript copies of this
tractate at Cambridge, at Dublin, at Lambeth, and in
the British Museum. It is partly antiquarian, partly
descriptive, partly political. It exhibits a profound
sense of the unsatisfactory state of the country--a
sense which was presently to be justified in a
frightful manner. Spenser had not been deaf to the
ever-growing murmurs of discontent by which he and his
countrymen had been surrounded. He was not in advance
of his time in the policy he advocates for the
administration of Ireland. He was far from
anticipating that policy of conciliation whose
triumphant application it may perhaps be the signal
honour of our own day to achieve. The measures he
proposes are all of a vigorously repressive kind; they
are such measures as belong to a military occupancy,
not to a statesmanly administration. He urges the
stationing numerous garrisons; he is for the abolishing
native customs. Such proposals won a not unfavourable
hearing at that time. They have been admired many a
time since.

It is to this work of Spenser's that Protector
Cromwell alludes in a letter to his council in Ireland,
in favour of William Spenser, grandson of Edmund
Spenser, from whom an estate of lands in the barony of
Fermoy