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former mistress, recording his passion, but concealing its ob- 

 ject, by means of the anagram ; and if we can fix upon any dis- 

 tinctive epithet, common to the several poems celebrating her 

 person, and solvable into the name of a person whose residence 

 and circumstances correspond with those ascribed to her by 

 her worshipper, we obtain a distinct clue to the long-lost 

 secret. 



In the Amoretti, the Epithalamion, and the Colin Clout's 

 Come Home Again, we find the object of the poet's most pas- 

 sionate cares distinctively and energetically, with all the em- 

 phasis of Italic letters and Capital initials (in all the original 

 editions at least), addressed or spoken of as " an Angel," as 

 of one 



Divinely wrought, 

 And of the brood of Angels heavenly born. 

 And with the crere of blessed saints up brought, 



in no less than thirteen or fourteen remarkable passages. 



But the perpetual recurrence to the same epithet would be 

 too trite and common-place for the invention, or the rich vo- 

 cabulary, of such a poet as Spenser, if " no more were meant 

 than meets the eye ;" and probably the reader anticipates, by 

 this time, that the true name concealed under this anagram is 

 Nagle, or (as in a subsequent sonnet — Ixxiv. — we are in- 

 formed of her christian name) Elizabeth Nagle. 



What seems to confirm this conjecture almost into a cer- 

 tainty is, that in the immediate neighbourhood of Kilcol- 

 man there resided a family whose name and circumstances 

 correspond precisely with those which have now been elicited 

 from the poems written by Spenser on the occasion of his 

 courtship and marriage. The Nagles or Nangles were a very 

 ancient sept in the counties of Cork and Waterford. There 

 were two races of them, distinguished by the colour of their 

 hair into the iJerf and the iJ/ac/r. Of the former, the chief or head 

 resided at Moneannymy, an ancient preceptory of the Knights 



