Henceforward
his visits to London and the Court were few; sometimes a lover of travel
would visit him in his house in Ireland as Raleigh did, but for the most
he was left alone. It was in this atmosphere of loneliness and
separation, hostile tribes pinning him in on every side, murder lurking
in the woods and marshes round him, that he composed his greatest work.
In it at last he died, on the heels of a sudden rising in which his
house was burnt and his lands over-run by the wild Irish whom the
tyranny of the English planters had driven to vengeance. Spenser was not
without interest in his public duties; his _View of the State of
Ireland_ shows that. But it shows, too, that he brought to them
singularly little sympathy or imagination. Throughout his tone is that
of the worst kind of English officialdom; rigid subjection and in the
last resort massacre are the remedies he would apply to Irish
discontent. He would be a fine text--which might be enforced by modern
examples--for a discourse on the evil effects of immersion in the
government of a subject race upon men of letters. No man of action can
be so consistently and cynically an advocate of brutalism as your man of
letters, Spenser, of course, had his excuses; the problem of Ireland
was new and it was something remote and difficult; in all but the mere
distance for travel, Dublin was as far from London as Bombay is to-day.
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