keepeth the wound green, and formalizeth both sides to further opposition, and worketh an indisposition in men's minds to be reunited." "And, first of all," he said, "it is more than time that there were an end and surcease made of this immodest and deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage." Bitter and earnest writing came, he said, of an enthusiasm not to be hastily condemned; but to leave all reverent and religious compassion towards evils, to intermix Scripture and scurrility sometimes in one sentence, was far from the manner of a Christian.

It was an evil, too, "that there is not an indifferent hand carried towards these pamphlets as they deserve. For the one sort flieth in the dark, the other is uttered openly. And we see it ever falleth out that the forbidden writing is thought to be certain sparks of a truth that fly up in the faces of those that seek to choke and tread it out; whereas a book authorised is thought to be but the language of the time." Bacon thought that, except Bishop Cooper's, the pamphlets were equally bad on both sides.

As to the occasion of the controversies, if any bishops be as all are said to be, let them amend; men might abate some of their vanities of controversial zeal, think less of measuring the value of religion by its distance from the error last condemned as heresy, and care less about introducing new forms from abroad. Bacon, whose mother sympathised with the Nonconformists, avowed in this paper his own adherence to the established system in the Church, but he desired to urge on both parties moderation, a spirit of concession in discussing externals, and a better sense of Christian brotherhood; for "the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God." "A contentious retaining of custom," he urged, "is a turbulent thing, as well as innovation." He agreed "that a character of love is more proper for

debates of this nature than that of zeal," and trusted that what he said should "find a correspondence in their minds which are not embarked in partiality, and which love the whole better than a part."

The Spirit

of the Time.

In August, 1589, the rule of the house of Valois came to an end in France by the assassination of Henry III. The king in the preceding December had by assassination got rid of his powerful opponents, the Duke of Guise, head of the Catholic League, and the Duke's brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine. The League was therefore in open revolt against him; the Sorbonne released Frenchmen from their oath of allegiance to him; the Pope excommunicated him; and he was driven into alliance with Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots for the recovery of his capital. At the beginning of these days Catherine de' Medici died. While the King of France and the King of Navarre, whom the League wished to exclude from the succession, were besieging Paris, Henry III. was stabbed by an enthusiastic young Dominican. Before he died he acknowledged the King of Navarre his successor. Henry IV. thus became King of France, with a promise to maintain the Catholic faith and the property and rights of the Church. Many of his Huguenot followers fell from him, because they looked on this as an engagement to protect idolatry. But the League opposed him. Queen Elizabeth sent succour of men, and £22,000 in money. In September Henry IV. repulsed the Leaguers at Arques. At the end of October he carried the suburbs of Paris. He then retired on Tours, making that his capital. On the fourteenth of March, 1590, he obtained a signal victory over the Leaguers and the Spanish auxiliaries at the battle of Ivry, in which "the divine Bartas" fought.

Against England, Spain was yet gathering force. He would persevere, Philip said, even if he sold the silver candlesticks on his table. But England had risen to the occasion.

The golden time of Athens was the time when the soul of the people was stirred nobly in contest for liberty against the power of the Persians. The Netherlands were so much the better for their life-struggle on behalf of all that men should hold most dear, that while the southern unemancipated provinces were declining, the Dutch were adding to the streets of their old towns, new towns were erected by the industries that flocked in, and in the year 1586-7 eight hundred ships entered their ports. So England, trained for generations in the path of duty, faced the great peril of these days, held in the world of thought the ground which she had thus far conquered, and, gathering all her energies, went strongly forward.

CHAPTER IX.

The Faerie Queene.

OF SPENSER AND RALEIGH FROM 1590 UNTIL 1596.

Spenser leaves

Dublin.

EDMUND SPENSER, while busy in Dublin with official work as Clerk of Decrees and Recognizances in the Irish Court of Chancery-being, like Chaucer, in the service of the Government-employed himself also, in the service of God, upon the shaping of his poem of "The Faerie Queene." He was still unmarried. He had a sister, Sarah, who seems to have kept house for him before her marriage with a Lancashire man, settled in Ireland. On the twenty-second of June, 1588, Spenser resigned his office of Clerk in the Irish Chancery. His six years' lease of the forfeited house of Lord Baltinglas in Dublin, granted in 1582, expired in 1588, and Spenser then left Dublin to establish himself in a new home, with new duties, in the county of Cork, where he had become an undertaker for the settlement of some of the six hundred thousand acres of land forfeited by the Desmonds and their adherents. Spenser undertook for 3,028 acres, with the Castle of Kilcolman as a residence attached to them.

Spenser bought his title from a first purchaser named Reade, and the undertaking of those who obtained such Settlement at "seignories" was to develope their resources by the industry of "well-affected Englishmen planted upon them in a certain proportion of men to acres,

Kilcolman.

with freedom from taxes. The Government, on its part, undertook to maintain soldiers enough for their security. The largest grants for "seignories" were of twelve thousand acres, the smallest four thousand. Spenser's lands were an original grant of four thousand, reduced because conditions of plantation were not fully satisfied. In that respect, indeed, such lands were held subject to forfeiture. There were grants also of manors. Spenser, when he left Dublin in 1588, paid attention to the conditions on which he held the land. In 1589 he reported that he had six English householders settled under him. There was a low rent payable to the Crown, for Kilcolman and its lands, of £8 13s. 4d., which was to be doubled after Michaelmas, 1594. But the cost of bringing over English families, with other outlay upon tracts of land that constant warfare had thrown out of cultivation, was tacitly allowed, at first, to excuse rent-paying. John Hooker, writing of Munster in his supplement to Holinshed's "Chronicle,” says that "the curse of God was so great and the land so barren, both of man and beast, that whosoever did travel from one end to the other of all Munster, from Waterford to Smerwick, about six score miles, he should not meet man, woman, or child, saving in cities or towns, nor yet see any beasts save foxes, wolves, or other ravening beasts." Sir Walter Raleigh had about twelve thousand acres granted to him in the counties of Cork, Waterford, and Tipperary, to which he added, in 1587, as his principal residence, Lismore Castle, rented from the See of Lismore, at 13 6s. 8d. a year. He had also a manor-house at Youghal. Raleigh's lands were, like Spenser's, thickly wooded where there are now no woods to be seen. Raleigh's vigorous mind was active also on his Irish property. He set a hundred and fifty men to work felling woods and making pipe-staves, barrel-boards, and hogsheads from the timber, for export to the wine-growers

Raleigh in
Ireland.