rey soon left
it. Except a few bare dates and doubtful allusions, little or nothing is
heard of him between 1580 and 1590. On the eve of the latter year (the 1st
of December 1589) the first three books of _The Faerie Queene_ were entered
at Stationers' Hall, and were published in the spring of the next year. He
had been already established at Kilcolman in the county Cork on a grant of
more than three thousand acres of land out of the forfeited Desmond
estates. And henceforward his literary activity, at least in publication,
became more considerable, and he seems to have been much backwards and
forwards between England and Ireland. In 1590 appeared a volume of minor
poems (_The Ruins of Time_, _The Tears of the Muses_, _Virgil's Gnat_,
_Mother Hubbard's Tale_, _The Ruins of Rome_, _Muiopotmos_, and the
_Visions_), with an address to the reader in which another list of
forthcoming works is promised. These, like the former list of Kirke, seem
oddly enough to have also perished. The whole collection was called
_Complaints_, and a somewhat similar poem, _Daphnaida_, is thought to have
appeared in the same year. On the 11th of June 1594 the poet married
(strangely enough it was not known whom, until Dr. Grosart ingeniously
identified her with a certain Elizabeth Boyle _alias_ Seckerstone), and in
1595 were published the beautiful _Amoretti_ or love sonnets, and the still
more beautiful _Epithalamion_ describing his courtship and marriage, with
the interesting poem of _Colin Clout's Come Home Again_; while in the same
year (old style; in January 1596, new style) the fourth, fifth, and sixth
books of _The Faerie Queene_ were entered for publication and soon
appeared. The supposed allusions to Mary Stuart greatly offended her son
James. The _Hymns_ and the _Prothalamion_ followed in the same year.
Spenser met with difficulties at Court (though he had obtained a small
pension of fifty pounds a year), and had like other Englishmen troubles
with his neighbours in Ireland; yet he seemed to be becoming more
prosperous, and in 1598 he was named Sheriff of Cork. A few weeks later the
Irish Rebellion broke out; his house was sacked and burnt with one of his
children; he fled to England and died on the 16th of January 1599 at King
Street, Westminster, perhaps not "for lack of bread," as Jonson says, but
certainly in no fortunate circumstances. In the year of his misfortune had
been registered, though it was never printed till more than thir