request at the Court as those which belong to a later period. The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Henry V., The Merchant of Venice, all the productions of the previous century, were produced at Court, and the King commanded The Merchant of Venice a second time. The constant performance of Shakspere's plays, as shown by the accounts of the Revels, at this early period after James's accession, would seem to indicate something like a previous acquaintance with them; and this acquaintwe may justly assume took place upon the visit of Lawrence Fletcher and his company to Scotland in the autumn of 1601.

ance

From Falkland to Aberdeen would be a considerable journey in those days of neglected roads, when rivers had to be forded, and mountains crossed by somewhat perilous paths. It is not improbable that the company halted at Perth, which was within a morning's ride of Falkland. The Presbytery of that town, as we have seen, were more favourably disposed some twelve years before to theatrical performances than the ministers of religion at Edinburgh; they tolerated them under wise restrictions. The King, in 1601, was anxious to stand well with the people of Perth, and he became a burgess of the city, and banqueted with the citizens. It was politicly done," as Melville says of the French rope-dancer. He might venture in that city to send his servants the players to amuse the people; for those who had supported his leanings towards Episcopalian Church government were strong there, and would gladly embrace any occasion to cultivate amusements that were disagreeable to their ascetic opponents The same feelings would prevail still more strongly at Aberdeen. The young citizens of Bon Accord, as it was called, clung to the amusements of the older times, the Robin Hoods and Queens of May, in spite of the prohibitions of their magistrates. The Kirk Session prohibited maskers and dancers, but the people still danced; and upon the solemn occasion when the popish Earls of Huntley and Errol were received into the bosom of the Kirk, upon renouncing their errors, there was music and masking around the Cross, and universal jollity was mingled with the more solemn ceremonials. The people of Aberdeen were a loyal people, and we are not surprised that they welcomed the King's players with rewards and honours.

There is preserved, in the Library of Advocates, a very curious description of Aberdeen in the middle of the seventeenth century, written originally in Latin by James Gordon, parson of Rothemay, with a contemporary translation. The latter has been lately printed by the Spalding Club. The changes during half a century would not be very considerable; and the English players would therefore have sojourned in a city which, according to this authority, "exceeds not only the rest of the towns in the north of Scotland, but likewise any city whatsomever of that same latitude, for greatness, beauty, and frequency of trading." Gordon's description is accompanied by a large and well-executed plan, which has also been published; and certainly the new and old towns of Aberdeen, as they existed in those days, were spacious, and judiciously laid out, with handsome public buildings and well-arranged streets, backed by wooded gardens,-a pleasant place to look upon, with fruitful fields immediately around it, though "anywhere you pass a mile without the town the

country is barren like, the hills scraggy, the plains full of marshes and mosses." The parson of Rothemay, with a filial love for his native place, says, "The air is temperate and healthful about it, and it may be that the citizens owe the acuteness of their wits thereunto, and their civil inclinations." This, indeed, was a community fitted to appreciate the treasures which Lawrence Fletcher and his fellows would display before them; and it is to the honour of Aberdeen that, in an age of strong prejudices, they welcomed the English comedians in a way which vindicated their own character for "wisdom, learning, gallantry, breeding, and civil conversation." It is not to those who so welcomed them that we must chiefly lay the charge of the witch persecutions. In almost every case these atrocities were committed under the sanction of the Kirk Session; and in the same way, when a stern religious asceticism became the dominant principle in England, the feeling of religious earnestness, lofty as it was in many essentials, too often was allied with superstitious enthusiasm, which blinded the reason and blunted the feelings as fearfully as the worst errors of the ancient Church. The tolerant Shakspere would have listened to the stories of these persecutions with the same feelings with which he regarded the ruins of the great Dominican convent at Aberdeen, which was razed to the ground in 1560. A right principle was in each case wrongly directed: "There is some soul of goodness in things evil."

We have thus, upon evidence that we cannot doubt of Shakspere's company

being at Aberdeen in October, 1601, assumed that Shakspere would naturally be of the number; having endeavoured previously to show that his tragedy of Macbeth, especially, exhibits traces of local knowledge which might have been readily collected by him in the exact path of such a journey. We have attempted very slightly to sketch the associations with which he might have been surrounded during this progress, putting these matters, of course, hypothetically, as materials for the reader to embody in his own imagination. We may conclude the subject by very briefly tracing his path homeward.

:

Honest John Taylor, who seems to have been ready for every kindness that fortune could bestow upon him, left Edinburgh in better guise than he came thither "Within the port, or gate, called the Netherbow, I discharged my pockets of all the money I had and as I came penniless within the walls of that city at my first coming thither, so now, at my departing from thence, I came moneyless out of it again." But he soon found a worthy man ready to help him in his straits: "Master James Acmootye, coming for England, said, that if I would ride with him, that neither I nor my horse should want betwixt that place and London." If we take Taylor as our guide, we may see how Shakspere journeyed with his fellows upon the great high road between Edinburgh and London. On the first day they would ride to Dunbar; on the second day they would reach Berwick. They might lodge at an inn, but the exuberance of the ancient Scotch hospitality would probably afford them all welcome in the stronghold of some wealthy laird. Taylor thus describes the hospitality of his hosts at Cober-spath [Cockburns-path], between Dunbar and Berwick: "Suppose ten, fifteen, or twenty men and horses come to lodge at their house, the men shall have flesh, tame and wild fowl, fish, with all variety of good cheer, good lodging, and welcome; and the horses shall want neither hay nor provender and at the morning at their departure the reckoning is just nothing. This is this worthy gentleman's use, his chief delight being only to give strangers entertainment gratis." His description of the hospitality "in Scotland beyond Edinburgh" is more remarkable:-"I have been at houses like castles for building; the master of the house his beaver being his blue bonnet, one that will wear no other shirts but of the flax that grows on his own ground, and of his wife's, daughters', or servants' spinning; that hath his stockings, hose, and jerkin of the wool of his own sheep's backs; that never (by his pride of apparel) caused mercer, draper, silk-man, embroiderer, or haberdasher to break and turn bankrupt; and yet this plain homespun fellow keeps and maintains thirty, forty, fifty servants, or perhaps more, every day relieving three or four score poor people at his gate; and, besides all this, can give noble entertainment, for four or five days together, to five or six Earls and Lords, besides Knights, Gentlemen, and their followers, if they be three or four hundred men and horse of them, where they shall not only feed but feast, and not feast but banquet; this is a man that desires to know nothing so much as his duty to God and his King, whose greatest cares are to practise the works of piety, charity, and hospitality: he never studies the consuming art of fashionless fashions, he never tries his strength to bear four or five hundred acres on his back at once; his legs are always at liberty-not being fettered with golden garters, and manacled

with artificial roses, whose weight (sometime) is the relics of some decayed lordship. Many of these worthy housekeepers there are in Scotland: amongst some of them I was entertained; from whence I did truly gather these aforesaid observations."

The Water Poet passes through Berwick without a word. The poet of Henry IV. would associate it with vivid recollections of his own Hotspur :

"He had byn a march-man all hys dayes,

And kepte Barwyke upon Twede." *

He was now in the land of old heroic memories, which had reached the ear of his boyhood in his own peaceful Stratford, through the voice of the wandering harper; and which Froissart had recorded in a narrative as spirited as the fancies of "the old song of Percy and Douglas." The dark blue Cheviots lifted their summits around him, and beneath them were the plains which the Douglas wasted, who

He was in the land which had so often been the battle-field of Scotch and English in the chivalrous days, when war appeared to be carried on as much for sport as for policy, and a fight and a hunting were associated in the same song. The great battle of Otterbourn, in 1388, "was as valiantly foughten as could be devised," says Froissart; "for Englishmen on the one party, and Scots on the other party, are good men of war: for when they meet there is a hard fight without sparring; there is no love between them as long as spears, axes, or daggers will endure, but lay on each upon other; and when they be wel! beaten, and that the one part hath obtained the victory, they then glorify so in their deeds of arms and are so joyful, that such as be taken they shall be ransomed or they go out of the field, so that shortly each of them is so content with other, that at their departing courteously they will say, God thank you; but in fighting one with another there is no play nor sparring." The spirit that moved the Percy and Douglas at Otterbourn animated the Percy and another Douglas at Holmedon in 1402.

"On Holy-rood day, the gallant Hotspur there,
Young Harry Percy, and brave Archibald,

That ever valiant and approved Scot,

At Holmedon met,

Where they did spend a sad and bloody hour." +

The scene of this conflict was not many miles from Berwick. A knowledge of these localities was not necessary for Shakspere, to produce his magnificent creation of Hotspur. But in a journey through Northumberland the recollections of Hotspur would be all around him. At Alnwick, he would ride by the

'The Battle of Otterbourne.'

+ Henry IV., Part I., Act I., Scene L

gate which Hotspur built, and look upon the Castle in which the Percies dwelt. Two centuries had passed since Hotspur fell at Shrewsbury; but his memory lived in the ballads of his land, and the dramatic poet had bestowed upon it a more lasting glory. The play of Henry IV. was written before the union of England and Scotland under one crown, and when the two countries had constant feuds which might easily have broken out into actual war. But Shakspere, at the very time when the angry passions of England were excited by the Raid of Carlisle, thus made his favourite hero teach the English to think honourably of their gallant neighbours :