The moon shines brightly upon the terraced garden of the Grange. The mill-wheel is at rest. The ripple of the stream over the dam pleasantly breaks the silence which is around. There is merriment within the house, whose open casements welcome the gentle night-breeze. The chorus of a jovial song has just ceased. Suddenly a lute is struck upon the terrace of the garden, and three voices beneath the window command a mute attention. They are singing one of those lovely compositions which were just then becoming popular in England-the Madrigal, which the Flemings invented, the Italians cultivated, and which a few years after reached its perfection in our own country. The beautiful interlacings of the harmony, its "fine bindings and strange closes,"* its points, each emulating the other, but each in its due place and proportion, required scientific skill as well as voice and ear. But the young men who sang the madrigal were equal to their task. There was one who listened till his heart throbbed and his eyes were wet with tears; for he was lifted above the earth by thoughts which he afterwards expressed in lines of wondrous loveli

ness:

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night,
Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st,
But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins:

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it." †

The madrigal ceased; but the spirit of harmony which had been thus evoked was not allowed to be overlaid by ruder merriment. Watkin's Ale,' and 'The Carman's Whistle,' 'Peg-a-Ramsay,' 'Three merry men we be,' and 'Heartease,' were reserved for another occasion, when a fresh "stoup of wine" might be loudly called for, and the jolly company might roar out their "coziers' catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice." But there was many an "old and antique song," full of elegance and tenderness, to be heard that night. We were a musical people in the age of Elizabeth; but our music was no new fashion of the "brisk and giddy-paced times." There was abundant music with which the people were familiar, whether sad or lively, quaint or simple. There was many an air not to be despised by the nicest taste, of which it might be said,

"It is old and plain :

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,

And the free maids that weave their thread with bones,

Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth,

And dallies with the innocence of love,

Like the old age." §

Such was the plaintive air of Robin Hood is to the Greenwood gone,' a line of which has been snatched from oblivion by Ophelia :

"For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.""

Such was the 'Light o' Love,'-the favourite of poets, if we may judge from its repeated mention in the old dramas. Such was the graceful tune which the young Shakspere heard that night with words which he had himself written for a friend :

"O, mistress mine, where are you roaming?

O, stay and hear; your true love's coming,
That can sing both high and low :
Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journeys end in lovers' meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know.
What is love? 't is not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure:

In delay there lies no plenty;

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty;

Youth's a stuff will not endure."

And the challenge was received in all kindness; and the happy lover might say, with Sir Thomas Wyatt,

"She me caught in her arms long and small.

Therewithal sweetly she did me kiss,

And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?'"

for he was her accepted " servant,"-such a "servant" as Surrey sued to Geraldine to be, the recognised lover, not yet betrothed, but devoted to his mistress with all the ardour of the old chivalry. In a few days they would be handfasted; they would make their public troth-plight.

CHARLCOTE: the name is familiar to every reader of Shakspere; but it is not presented to the world under the influence of pleasant associations with the world's poet. The story, which was first told by Rowe, must be here repeated: "An extravagance that he was guilty of forced him both out of his country, and that way of living which he had taken up; and though it seemed at first to be a blemish upon his good manners, and a misfortune to him, yet it afterwards happily proved the occasion of exerting one of the greatest geniuses that ever was known in dramatic poetry. He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and, amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engaged him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlcote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time, and shelter himself in London."* The good old gossip Aubrey is wholly Some Account of the Life of William Shakespear, written by Mr. Rowe.

*

silent about the deer-stealing and the flight to London, merely saying, "This William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen." But there were other antiquarian gossips of Aubrey's age, who have left us their testimony upon this subject. The Reverend William Fulman, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who died in 1688, bequeathed his papers to the Reverend Richard Davies of Sandford, Oxfordshire; and on the death of Mr. Davies, in 1707, these papers were deposited in the library of Corpus Christi. Fulman appears to have made some collections for the biography of our English poets, and under the name Shakspere he gives the dates of his birth and death. But Davies, who added notes to his friend's manuscripts, affords us the following piece of information: "He was much given to all unluckiness, in stealing venison and rabbits; particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipped, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country, to his great advancement. But his revenge was so great, that he is his Justice Clodpate, and calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his name, bore three louses rampant for his arms." The accuracy of this chronicler, as to events supposed to have happened a hundred years before he wrote, may be inferred from his correctness in what was accessible to him. Justice Clodpate is a new character; and the three louses rampant have diminished strangely from the "dozen white luces" of Master Slender. In Mr. Davies's account we have no mention of the ballad-through which, according to Rowe, the young poet revenged his "ill usage." But Capell, the editor of Shakspere, found a new testimony to that fact: "The writer of his Life,' the first modern, [Rowe] speaks of a 'lost ballad,' which added fuel, he says, to the knight's before-conceived anger, and redoubled the prosecution;' and calls the ballad the first essay of Shakespeare's poetry:' one stanza of it, which has the appearance of genuine, was put into the editor's hands many years ago by an ingenious gentleman (grandson of its preserver), with this account of the way in which it descended to him: Mr. Thomas Jones, who dwelt at Tarbick, a village in Worcestershire, a few miles from Stratford-on-Avon, and died in the year 1703, aged upwards of ninety, remembered to have heard from several old people at Stratford the story of Shakespeare's robbing Sir Thomas Lucy's park ; and their account of it agreed with Mr. Rowe's, with this addition-that the ballad written against Sir Thomas by Shakespeare was stuck upon his park-gate, which exasperated the knight to apply to a lawyer at Warwick to proceed against him. Mr. Jones had put down in writing the first stanza of the ballad, which was all he remembered of it, and Mr. Thomas Wilkes (my grandfather) transmitted it to my father by memory, who also took it in writing." This, then, is the entire evidence as to the deer-stealing tradition. According to Rowe, the young Shakspere was engaged more than once in robbing a park, for which he was prosecuted by Sir Thomas Lucy; he made a ballad upon his prosecutor, and then, being more severely pursued, fled to London. According to Davies, he was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits; for which he was often whipped, sometimes imprisoned, and at last forced to * Notes and various Readings to Shakespeare, Part III., p. 75. See Note to this Chapter.

fly the country. According to Jones, the tradition of Rowe was correct as to robbing the park; and the obnoxious ballad being stuck upon the park-gate, a lawyer of Warwick was authorised to prosecute the offender. The tradition is thus full of contradictions upon the face of it. It necessarily would be so, for each of the witnesses speaks of circumstances that must have happened a hundred years before his time. We must examine the credibility of the tradition therefore by inquiring what was the state of the law as to the offence for which William Shakspere is said to have been prosecuted; what was the state of public opinion as to the offence; and what was the position of Sir Thomas Lucy as regarded his immediate neighbours.

The law in operation at the period in question was the 5th of Elizabeth, chapter 21. The ancient forest-laws had regard only to the possessions of the Crown; and therefore in the 32nd of Henry VIII. an Act was passed for the protection of "every inheritor and possessor of manors, land, and tenements," which made the killing of deer, and the taking of rabbits and hawks, felony. This Act was repealed in the 1st of Edward VI.; but it was quickly re-enacted in the 3rd and 4th of Edward VI. (1549 and 1550), it being alleged that unlawful hunting prevailed to such an extent throughout the realm, in the royal and private parks, that in one of the king's parks within a few miles of London five hundred deer were slain in one day. For the due punishment of such offences the taking of deer was again made felony. But the Act was again repealed in the 1st of Mary. In the 5th of Elizabeth it was attempted in Parliament once more to make the offence a capital felony. But this was successfully resisted; and it was enacted that, if any person by night or by day "wrongfully or unlawfully break or enter into any park empaled, or any other several ground closed with wall, pale, or hedge, and used for the keeping, breeding, and cherishing of deer, and so wrongfully hunt, drive, or chase out, or take, kill, or slay any deer within any such empaled park, or closed ground with wall, pale, or other enclosure, and used for deer, as is aforesaid," he shall suffer three months' imprisonment, pay treble damages to the party offended, and find sureties for seven years' good behaviour. But there is a clause in this Act (1562-3) which renders it doubtful whether the penalties for taking deer could be applied twenty years after the passing of the Act, in the case of Sir Thomas Lucy. "Provided always, That this Act, or anything contained therein, extend not to any park or enclosed ground hereafter to be made and used for deer, without the grant or licence of our Sovereign Lady the Queen, her heirs, successors, or progenitors." At the date of this statute Charlcote, it is said, was not a deerpark; was not an enclosed ground royally licensed. For the space of fortytwo years after the passing of this Act of Elizabeth there was no remedy for deer-stealing (except by action for trespass) in grounds not enclosed at the passing of that Act. The statute of the 3rd of James I. recites that for offences within such grounds there is no remedy provided by the Act of Elizabeth, or by any other Act. It appears to us, however, that Malone puts the case against the tradition too strongly when he maintains that Charlcote