ty years
later, his one prose work of substance, the remarkable _View of the Present
State of Ireland_; an admirable piece of prose, and a political tract, the
wisdom and grasp of which only those who have had to give close attention
to Irish politics can fully estimate. It is probably the most valuable
document on any given period of Irish history that exists, and is certainly
superior in matter, no less than in style, to any political tract in
English, published before the days of Halifax eighty years after.

It has been said that _The Shepherd's Calendar_ placed Spenser at once at
the head of the English poets of his day; and it did so. But had he written
nothing more, he would not (as is the case with not a few distinguished
poets) have occupied as high or nearly as high a position in quality, if
not in quantity, as he now does. He was a young man when he published it;
he was not indeed an old man when he died; and it would not appear that he
had had much experience of life beyond college walls. His choice of
models--the artificial pastorals in which the Renaissance had modelled
itself on Virgil and Theocritus, rather than Virgil and Theocritus
themselves--was not altogether happy. He showed, indeed, already his
extraordinary metrical skill, experimenting with rhyme-royal and other
stanzas, fourteeners or eights and sixes, anapaests more or less irregular,
and an exceedingly important variety of octosyllable which, whatever may
have been his own idea in practising it, looked back to early Middle
English rhythms and forward to the metre of _Christabel_, as Coleridge was
to start it afresh. He also transgressed into religious politics, taking
(as indeed he always took, strange as it may seem in so fanatical a
worshipper of beauty) the Puritan side. Nor is his work improved as poetry,
though it acquires something in point of quaint attractiveness, by good Mr.
"E. K.'s" elaborate annotations, introductions, explanations, and general
gentleman-usherings--the first in English, but most wofully not the last by
hundreds, of such overlayings of gold with copper. Yet with all these
drawbacks _The Shepherd's Calendar_ is delightful. Already we can see in it
that double command, at once of the pictorial and the musical elements of
poetry, in which no English poet is Spenser's superior, if any is his
equal. Already the unmatched power of vigorous allegory, which he was to
display later, shows in such pieces as _The Oak and the Bri