There are manuscript copies of this
tractate at Cambridge, at Dublin, at Lambeth, and in
the British Museum. It is partly antiquarian, partly
descriptive, partly political. It exhibits a profound
sense of the unsatisfactory state of the country--a
sense which was presently to be justified in a
frightful manner. Spenser had not been deaf to the
ever-growing murmurs of discontent by which he and his
countrymen had been surrounded. He was not in advance
of his time in the policy he advocates for the
administration of Ireland. He was far from
anticipating that policy of conciliation whose
triumphant application it may perhaps be the signal
honour of our own day to achieve. The measures he
proposes are all of a vigorously repressive kind; they
are such measures as belong to a military occupancy,
not to a statesmanly administration. He urges the
stationing numerous garrisons; he is for the abolishing
native customs. Such proposals won a not unfavourable
hearing at that time. They have been admired many a
time since.
It is to this work of Spenser's that Protector
Cromwell alludes in a letter to his council in Ireland,
in favour of William Spenser, grandson of Edmund
Spenser, from whom an estate of lands in the barony of
Fermoy, in the county of Cork, descended on him. 'His
grandfather,' he writes, 'was that Spenser who, by his
writings touching the reduction of the Irish to
civility, brought on him the odium of that nation; and
for those works and his other good services Queen
Elizabeth conferred on him that estate which the said
William Spenser now claims.
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