returned to Ireland, to reside upon his estate, as he was bound to do by the terms of the grant. It was a beautiful sylvan domain, in every way fit for the retreat of a poet. The dwelling-house, which was named Kilcolman castle, had been an old seat of the earls of Desinond, and was sheltered within an amphitheatre of woody hills, while the beautiful stream of the Mulla meandered through the pastoral fields on which it looked down in front. Here he was visited, probably in the summer of 1589, by the afterwards celebrated Sir Walter Raleigh then newly returned from his expedition to Portugal. Raleigh, himself a poet, was charmed with the society of a kindred spirit like Spenser, and the two spent some happy days together, which Spenser has not forgotten to celebrate. To Raleigh, Spenser read his manuscript poem of the Fairy Queen, so far as it was finished, and his guest was so much delighted, that he earnestly entreated his new friend no longer to delay giving the work, even incomplete as it was, to the world. The consequence was that Spenser accompanied Raleigh to England, and the first three books of the Fairy Queen were published at London, in a quarto volume, in the year 1590. On his arrival in the English metropolis also, Spenser had immediately been introduced by Raleigh to the queen, who, in February, 1590-1, bestowed upon him a pension of fifty pounds. A tradition is mentioned by Fuller in his English Worthies respecting Spenser's treatment at court, which hardly accords with these ascertained facts. Spenser's merits, we are told, remained unrewarded by her majesty till she had read or heard a portion of the Fairy Queen, when she was so highly pleased that she ordered the poet to be presented with a hundred pounds. This largess, however, was considered too munificent for the occasion by her minister, Burleigh; and, on his objecting, she desired him to give whatever was reasonable. Burleigh took a very easy way of obeying this command of his royal mistress, and declined giving the poet any thing. Spenser long endeavoured to move the obdurate minister, but without success; and Fuller gives us the following doggrel as the effusion in which he finally expressed his sense of the usage he had met with :— "I was promised, on a time, The patent for the pension of fifty pounds, which we have mentioned, seems to refute this story, at least in the shape which it has assumed in the popular tradition. At the same time, like other such fictions, it probably had some foundation in truth; and indeed there are various passages in the writings of Spenser himself which seem to refer distinctly enough as to his own experience as an unsuccessful, or, at least, long disappointed suitor for court favour. One remarkable passage of this description is in his 'Mother Hubbard's Tale :'— 11. Full little knowest thou that hast not tried, To have thy asking, yet wait many years; That doth his life in so long tendance spend." In other places the allusion to the circumstance of the royal bounty being intercepted on its way to him by the opposition of some individual minister, is even more direct than it is in the couplet which we have printed in Italics. Soon after the publication of his poem, if not before it had actually issued from the press, Spenser appears to have returned to Ireland. The Fairy Queen was admirably suited to the taste of that splendid and romantic age, and, as soon as it appeared, was everywhere read with enthusiasm. Such was the popularity of the author, that Ponsonby, nis publisher, immediately exerted himself to collect all the other poetical pieces he could any where find written by the same pen, and, in 1591, published the Ruins of Time,'' Mother Hubbard's Tale,' and several other compositions of Spenser's together, in a quarto volume, under the title of The Complaints.' It is not ascertained that any of these poems, with the exception of that entitled 'Muispotmos,' had appeared in print before. They rather seem, indeed, to have been collected by Ponsonby from various individuals in whose hands they remained in manuscript. He regrets that he had not been able to recover a considerable number more of the author's productions, which he was desirous of adding to his collection. Spenser seems to have paid another visit to London about the close of this year or the commencement of the following. The dedication prefixed to his 'Daphnaida' is dated London, January, 1591-2. That of his 'Colin Clout's come Home Again,' addressed to Raleigh, is also dated the 27th of December, 1591; but this is acknowledged on all hands to be an error of the press. The poem in question, which was accompanied by an elegy on Sidney, under the name of Astrophel, certainly did not appear till 1595, and the dedication should no doubt be dated either in that year or in 1594. In 1595, also, appeared a collection of sonnets, entitled 'Amoretti,' by our author, which he had sent over for publication from Ireland. They are eighty-eight in number, and contain the history of his courtship of his wife, an Irish girl of great beauty, but humble birth, whom he had just married. There is great uncertainty as to the date of Spenser's marriage; and some of the writers of his life indeed tell us that he had been married for the first time long before this, and that the person celebrated in the sonnets-of whom little more is known, except that her christian name, like that of his mother, was Elizabeth—was, in fact, his second wife. This statement, however, rests upon very insufficient evidence, and has been generally rejected as incorrect. Mr Todd's conclusion is, that the sonnets were written during the years 1592 and 1593; and that the nuptials of the poet and his bride were probably celebrated at Cork on St Barnabas' day, 1594, as seems to be intimated in the poem entitled 'The Epithalamion,' which appeared along with the 'Amoretti.' Be this as it may, we find Spenser again in England in the latter part of the year 1596; the dedication to the queen of his four hymns on Love and Beauty, being dated at Greenwich in September of that year. Soon after appeared his Prothalamion,' a poem on the marriage of the ladies Elizabeth and Catherine Somerset; and, in the same year, the second part, consisting of three more books of his Fairy Queen, together with a new edition of the first. It was during this visit also that he presented to the Queen his prose dialogue, entitled, 'A View of the State of Ireland; and the work seems to have been written while he was in England. The View of Ireland' remained in manuscript till it was printed in Dublin in 1633, under the superintendence of Sir James Ware. It is in the preface of this work, by the editor, that the story was first given to the world of the loss of the concluding six books of the Fairy Queen, by the carelessness of a servant to whom the author had committed them to be conveyed to England for publication. The truth of this anecdote has been much doubted. The only fragments of the remainder of the Fairy Queen that ever appeared are the two unfinished cantos on Mutability, being a part of the Legend of Constancy, which was first published in the folio edition of 1609. Spenser returned to Ireland in 1597, and such was the political credit which he had now attained, that it appears he was in 1598 recommended by the crown to be sheriff of Cork for the following year. But before this dignity had been conferred upon him a convulsion occurred in his adopted country, which suddenly laid all his prosperity in the dust. In October 1598, the famous insurrection against the English authorities, known by the name of Tyrone's rebellion, broke out, and instantly covered a great part of the land with confusion and desolation. Spenser was one of the chief sufferers. Drummond of Hawthornden, in his notes of his conversation with Ben Jonson, has preserved the account which the latter gave him of the great poet's misfortunes. According to Jonson, all his property being plundered or destroyed, and his house set on fire, he narrowly escaped with his wife and his two eldest sons from the flames. An infant was left behind and burned to death among the ruins. The homeless fugitives contrived to make their way to England, and arriving in London took up their lodgings at an inn in King-street, Westminster. But the unhappy poet's heart was broken by the terrible blow he had received. It can hardly be supposed that in this emergency, he was altogether deserted either by his numerous and powerful friends, or by the government by which his political importance had been lately so distinctly acknowledged. We cannot therefore give credit to the story which has been told, that he was actually allowed to perish of want, and that when at last the earl of Essex sent him a sum of money, he declined accepting it on the ground that he could not now live to spend it—as if, had he and his family been in this necessity, it would not have been of use to his wife and his children whom he was to leave behind him. He died however at the inn above-mentioned, in January 1598. However much he may have been neglected during the last days of his life, no sooner had his breath departed than rank and genius pressed forward together to honour his memory. The earl of Essex charged himself with the expenses of his funeral; and he was interred in Westminster Abbey, in a grave excavated close to that of Chaucer, the principal poetical writers of the day attended the solemn ceremony, and threw upon the coffin copies of elegies which they had composed upon the death of their great departed chief. Spenser was thus only about forty-five years of age when he died—although the epitaph on his monument, which says that he was born in 1510, and died in 1596, would give him a life of not much less than twice that extent. This monument, however, was not erected till more than thirty years after the death of the poet, at the expense of the countess of Dorset, who, as well in this case as in that of her other monument which she caused to be placed over the remains of the poet Daniel, at Beckington in Somersetshire, seems to have left both the composition and the cutting of the inscription to the stone mason she employed, who, although possessed of great skill in the latter art, was but an indifferent hand at the former. This blunder, we believe, was first noticed and corrected by Fenton in his notes to Waller's poems.1 Spenser's wife is understood to have survived him for some time: and both his sons, Sylvanus and Peregrine had descendants. Mr Todd, writing in 1805, states that a lady lineally descended from the poet was understood to be then alive, and to be married to a gentleman named Bunne, who held or had recently held some situation in the custom-house at London. Some years before this, others of his descendants are ascertained to have been living in Ireland. The Fairy Queen, unfinished as it is, will ever be regarded as one of the noblest productions of the English muse. You cannot peruse a page of it without perceiving by the hues of gold and forms of loveliness that are around you, that you have left far behind this prosaic earth, and are wandering in an elysium beautified with the glow and perfumed with the fragrance of brighter flowers than those of this world. The creations of Spenser have all of them a sunshine of their own, whose flush could have been born only of a soul that was all poesy. The reader of Spenser always feels that it is a poet who speaks to him, and that it is the muse's purest inspiration wherewith his soul is holding her high companionship. But he only who has perused the whole of the Fairy Queen, can apprehend the full dimensions of that gigantic genius which has lavished upon it so unsparingly the strength of all its attributes, and overloaded it, not in a few painfully elaborate passages, but throughout almost the whole of its dazzling extent, with such insuperable magnificence and beauty. It is thus only that we can appreciate the boundless fertility of that invention which almost seems to us scarcely to have left a single phantom in the whole universe of allegory unsketched, and which not merely in those delineations, but in all its other achievements, piles up its circumstances of novelty and variety with a liberality which it were injustice to call any thing else than altogether inexhaustible, and a grandeur of design and gorgeousness of colouring which it almost tires the eye and fatigues the imagination to contemplate. It is this creative sorcery, we repeat, which constitutes Spenser's loftiest endowment. 1 See p. 51, edit. of 1750. Reginald Scott. DIED A. D. 1599. REGINALD OF REYNOLD SCOTT, was the son of John Scott, Esq. of Scott's hall near Smeeth in the county of Kent, where it is probable he was born about the middle of the sixteenth century, but the precise date of his birth does not appear. He is chiefly remarkable in the history of his country for having effectually counteracted the popular notions which prevailed till his time concerning witchcraft,—a service which justly entitles him to the respect and gratitude of all who feel interested in the civilization and improvement of human society. At the age of seventeen he was sent to Hart hall, Oxford, where he continued to pursue his studies for some time, but without taking any degree. Upon leaving the university, he returned to his native place and continued to devote himself to the pursuits of science and literature. After his marriage, which took place early, he turned his attention to agriculture and gardening. The growth of the hop had about that time excited much attention, and had been successfully introduced into the county of Kent. The first work which Mr Scott published was upon its culture, and was entitled, ' A perfect Platform of a Hop-garden.' But his thoughts were soon after directed to a widely different and more important subject. The frequent charges brought against unhappy and misguided persons for witchcraft,-the prevalence of most pernicious errors, not only among the vulgar, but some of the learned,—and the absurdity and cruelty of the laws upon this subject, powerfully drew his mind to an examination of the origin and history of the prevalent opinions. His great and useful work, entitled 'Discoveries of Witchcraft,' first appeared in 1584, and had a few years after the rare honour of calling forth, as its opponent and refuter, the high and mighty Prince James I. whose Demonologie' was printed at Edinburgh, in 1597, and directed, as the preface states, against the damnable opinions of Wierus and Scott. The Discoveries of Witchcraft' produced a deep and powerful impression. The author appealed both to the reason and benevolence of the Christian world, and alleged that his object was by his work to prevent the abasement of God's glory, the rescue of the gospel from an alliance with such peevish trumpery, and to advocate favour and Christian compassion towards the poor souls accused of witchcraft, rather than rigour and extremity. But the popularity of the doctrine assailed, continued for a time to bid defiance to the attack. The author drew upon himself universal scorn and odium. Several learned and skilful champions stepped forth to rescue the popular notions from the destruction to which they were doomed. Meric Casaubon, Joseph Glanvil, and Dr John Raynolds, became strenuous defenders of the prevalent opinions, and revivers of them from time to time as they appeared to be gradually decaying. But all in vain. Even the charge of being Sadducees soon wore itself out. The motives and the fears of such writers as Glanvil are to be respected. He saw, or thought he saw in the doctrine of Scott, covert atheism, and therefore fought in this controversy less against the scepticism which denied witchcraft, than against that disbelief in spiritual agency which he thought implicated the im |