ing to lack of strenuous methods, or any squeamish consideration for the feelings of the natives. The first Earl of Essex, who made almost desperate attempts to "plant" Ulster, inquired of Burghley in 1574 whether "Her Majesty will have the people of Ulster inhabit there for rent or extirpate them and plant other. ''35 The same nobleman, in a brief campaign against Scottish invaders, trapped the women and children of the clan, to the number of several hundred, on an island and slaughtered them without mercy. He afterwards wrote to Burghley about his exploit, expressing great satisfaction at his success against his country's enemies. And Essex, according to his associates, represented all that was best in Christian manhood, and his death was held up as an example of how a Christian should die.

The rest of Spenser's tract is a strange mixture of prac tical wisdom and visionary theorizing. According to his plan, after the country is thoroughly pacified, he will bring in his "reformation." This does not apply to any general change in the laws, which "should breede a greate trouble and confusion," wherefore he will "apply" the people to the laws, not the laws to the people. In order to insure satisfactory legislation, the English must contrive to obtain control of the Irish parliament. For the assurance of peace in the country, the whole land is to be divided and subdivided into shires and hundreds or wapentakes, like England in the time of Alfred, and the inhabitants are to be "booked" and must find sureties for good behavior, or suffer the penalty inflicted upon vagabonds. Furthermore, every man "that is not able to live of his free-holde," will have appointed to him "a certayne trade of life," which he is to be compelled to follow. Education must receive its due share of attention. Schools must be established in every parish. Religion must not be neglected. In order to bring the Irish to the true faith, religion must not be forcibly "impressed into them with terrour and sharpe penalties," but

Ibid., p. 29.

"rather delivered and intimated with mildness and gentleness." As an aid to the preaching of sound doctrine, the decayed churches must be repaired and rebuilt, and suitable pastors obtained. In order to foster commerce and civilization generally the country must be cleared up, and towns and markets established. But nothing can be done satisfactorily unless the lord deputy is given a freer hand, and not continually crossed and criticized. In a number of particulars, however, he is to be restrained, in order to prevent a continuance of the abuses in the rule of former governors. Over the lord deputy is to be placed a lord lieutenant, an English nobleman of high rank, whose presence would command respect and obedience. Here Spenser pretty clearly indicates that Essex, in his opinion, should have the place.

Precisely how much of the View represents Spenser's private opinions; and how much the opinion of English officials in Ireland it seems impossible to say. Certainly the tract did not meet with favor in England, for although written in 1596 it was not licensed until 1598, and then only provi sionally. In spite of the practical suggestions it contained, it offered a scheme that was on the face of it far too expensive to meet with Elizabeth's approval. Yet it is interesting to note that Lord Mountjoy, the first deputy who thoroughly subjugated Ireland, employed, a few years after Spenser wrote his tract, some of the same methods that Spenser recommends. And it is not likely that his campaigns were less expensive in the end than the cost of Spenser's program.

But Ireland would not stay subjugated, and England apparently could not profit from her disastrous mistakes. She had not learned the secret of governing her dependency when Cromwell stained his fame with the massacre of Drogheda; she had not learned when Swift wrote his Drapier Letters; at the present, while the fires of insurrection are again raging from one end of Ireland to the other, all those who are concerned about the future of civilization are wondering if she has yet learned.

OTHERWISE

BY STANLEY T. WILLIAMS

The Blessed Damozel is now aetat. seventy-three, yet she holds her youth. She is a schoolgirl's preference. I have heard her chanted, like a "carol, mournful holy," at commencement parties of young ladies' seminaries. Older porsons, of like education, are wont to speak of her sweetly. You gather that the poem is very touching and was, perhaps, by the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb? Betray interest; conceal the odium of being a professor; you will assuredly hear that "the stars in her hair were seven," and more, too, exact enough to remind you of Mrs. Malaprop's regurgitations from Hamlet. I once heard the poem delicately moaned (with surprising variants) by a lady who professed an unconquerable love for "the noble thoughts of poetry." She had it out in the gloaming of the Vermont porch, and we were powerless. Well, suffering purifies the spirit.

Certainly the Damozel has put on immortality of a dubious kind. She lives among the half-educated. Wretched hardware merchants stare up at versions of her in oils. She leans over the notorious gold bar, flippantly, as from an airplane cockpit, threatening to throw her lilies at a New England sampler, hanging just below her, like a misplaced landing field. Her air is buoyant, flirty. This time, surely, I "saw her smile."

What! has the twentieth century brought her to this pass? The Blessed Damozel is a unique poem by a great Victorian poet. Yet it is the hand-maiden of the Philistines. Alas, all of Rossetti's poems have fallen on evil days; they seem. quite forgotten. The general reader-or person of lower rank-gets on very well without them. The maker of modern poetry does not read the masterpieces of the past; he is too busy writing those of the present. So that the college teacher has Rossetti for his own. He is one of a triune: Ros

setti, himself, and the student,-who is usually from Missouri. The teacher can recall some dark hours in the class-room with Rossetti. To the red-blooded student (especially if the red blood avoids the brain) D. G. R. is merely comic. Fancy teaching the "sick burthen of love" of The Portrait to an allAmerican half-back. The jonquil-student yearns over the supersweetness, but his mentor hates him for it. Teaching Rossetti, even on brisk days, drapes the room in a mauve mist. In point of fact, the "yellow nineties" are salt air compared to the Rossetti eighties. One is reminded of Robert Nicolls' parody of the aesthetic poet in gestation: purple hanging, dim candles, exotic fragrance, cigarettes of decadent Turkish. "I," sneered a healthy intruder, "am going out to get some fresh air." "Well," came the languid retort, as the Turkish ash was flicked to the Persian rug, "don't bring any of it back with you."

Yet Rossetti is not disliked by students of English literature because he occasionally smells of tube-roses. To call Rossetti "morbid" is a platitude as inadequate as any other popular truism about the Victorians. So to characterize him is to mistake an aspect for the whole. Nor is he distasteful because critics, like Hall Caine, have shrouded Rossetti in sable. Thanks to them the word Rossetti is an anagram for chloral, coffins, and outrageous beasts. What irritates the college student is that Rossetti seems comparatively guiltless of ideas. This young person is resigned to long hair in poets, but if he is studying the thought of the nineteenth century, with a critical glance towards the twentieth, he does not forgive indifference to his pet problems. "Rossetti may have kept a wombat and a zebra," a student once vouchsafed, amid applause from the class, "but he was an ostrich, he buried his head in Art!"

However, as the imagists remind us, the point of view is the thing. Is it Rossetti's fault if we are not thrilled by such phrases as "brimming midnight," or "angel-greeted door?" Or are we still children, aesthetically? Browning's obscuri

ty is excused on the ground that he possessed a superior intellect which would not trouble itself to be alphabetical. It may be so with Rossetti's delicate register of feeling. Perhaps his poetry has unheard melodies and colours unseen. Swinburne thought this, and forthwith worshipped Rossetti. Such humility puts the reader in the position of the lady who objected that she failed to see in a painting colours admired by a friend. "Ah," said the other, "don't you wish you could?" Yet in this attitude towards Rossetti there is truth. His sensibility to colour and to esoteric emotion was more pronounced than that of any other Victorian poet. In such arcana he was the beau ideal of his circle and the beau sabreur of the larger world. For Rossetti was causative; he definitely affected the aims of English poetry. Because of him it became more opulent, more melodious, more subtle. And the sesame to Rossetti is this glibly recited Blessed Damozel-and one other poem.

The Blessed Damozel has been called the most remarkable poem ever written by a boy of twenty. It is stamped with three characteristics which will always be associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Movement in painting and poetry: photographic realism, as in the etching of the three lilies and the seven stars; symbolism, as in the ungirt robe of the Virgin; and mysticism, as in the lover's emotion at the "shrine, occult, withheld, untrod." But the poem was written by Rossetti before the beginning of the Movement. Patently then, the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement had their genesis in the mind of Rossetti. The poem is anticipative, not reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites. The chief ideas of the Brotherhood were Rossetti's.

In another way the Blessed Damozel illumines Rossetti's mind. The lady of the Vermont piazza assured us that the poem was an elegy for Rossetti's dead wife. Premature, since the poet had not yet met Miss Siddall. But the Blessed Damozel is biographical, though not autobiographical. "Albeit," Rossetti chants of the damozel, "to them she left, her day had