Surely it is the poet himself, who adds, in the person of Horatio,

"So have I heard, and do in part believe it."

Such a night was a preparation for a "happy Christmas; "-the prayers of an earnest Church, the Anthem, the Hymn, the Homily. The cross of Stratford was garnished with the holly, the ivy, and the bay. Hospitality was in every house; but the hall of the great landlord of the parish was a scene of rare conviviality. The frost or the snow will not deter the principal friends and tenants from the welcome of Clopton. There is the old house, nestled in the woods, looking down upon the little town. Its chimneys are reeking; there is bustle in the offices; the sound of the trumpeters and the pipers is heard through the open door of the great entrance; the steward marshals the guests; the tables are fast filling. Then advance, courteously, the master and the mistress of the feast. The Boar's head is brought in with due solemnity; the winecup goes round; and perhaps the Saxon shout of Waes-hael and Drink-hael may still be shouted. The boy-guest who came with his father, the tenant of Ingon, has slid away from the rout; for the steward, who loves the boy, has a sight to make him merry. The Lord of Misrule, and his jovial attendants, are rehearsing their speeches; and the mummers from Stratford are at the porch. Very sparing are the cues required for the enactment of this short drama. A speech to the esquire, closed with a merry jest; something about ancestry and good Sir Hugh; the loud laugh; the song and the chorus,-and the Lord of Misrule is now master of the feast. The Hall is cleared. "Away

with the joint-stools, remove the court-cupboard, look to the plate." * There is dancing till Curfew; and then a walk in the moonlight to Stratford, the pale beam shining equally upon the dark resting-place in the lonely aisle of the Clopton who is gone, and upon the festal hall of the Clopton who remains, where some loiterers of the old and the young still desire

The

WAS William Shakspere at Kenilworth in that summer of 1575, when the great Dudley entertained Elizabeth with a splendour which annalists have delighted to record, and upon which one of our own days has bestowed a fame more imperishable than that of any annals? Percy, speaking of the old Coventry Hock-play, says, "Whatever this old play or storial show was at the time it was exhibited to Queen Elizabeth, it had probably our young Shakspere for a spectator, who was then in his twelfth year, and doubtless attended with all the inhabitants of the surrounding country at these princely pleasures of Kenilworth,' whence Stratford is only a few miles distant." * preparations for this celebrated entertainment were on so magnificent a scale, the purveyings must have been so enormous, the posts so unintermitting, that there had needed not the flourishings of paragraphs (for the age of paragraphs was not as yet) to have roused the curiosity of all mid-England. Elizabeth had visited Kenilworth on two previous occasions. In 1565, after she had created Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester, she bore her sunshine to the possessions she had given to her favourite; and passing through Coventry, "she was honourably received by the mayor and citizens with many fair shows and pageants. It was on this occasion that Humphrey Brownell, the Mayor, must have delighted the Queen with his impromptu speech, worth a hundred

"

I

of the magnificent orations of John Throgmorton the Recorder. Elizabeth had a ready hand for the rich gifts of her subjects; and when on their knees the Corporation of Coventry presented her Majesty a heavy purse, her satisfaction broke out into the exclamation, "A good gift, a hundred pounds in gold! have but few such gifts!" The words were addressed to her lords; but the honest Mayor boldly struck in, "If it please your grace, there is a great deal more in it." What is that?" said the Queen. The hearts of all your loving subjects," replied the Mayor.* Elizabeth on this occasion departed from Kenilworth offended with Leicester. Had he been too bold or too timid ? In the summer of 1572 the royal progress was again for Warwickshire. "The weather having been very foul long time before, and the way much stained with carriage," the Queen was conveyed into her good town of Warwick through bye-ways not quite so miry; but the bailiff and the burgesses knelt in the dirt, and her Majesty's coach was brought as near to the said kneelers as it could be. The long oration, and the heavy purse, of course followed. During this visit to Kenilworth in 1572 two important state affairs were despatched. Thomas Percy Earl of Northumberland was beheaded at York; and the offer of marriage of Francis Duke of Alençon was definitively rejected. In the previous June, Leicester wrote touching this proposal,—" It seems her Majesty meaneth to give good ear to it." There was a counsellor at Kenilworth in the following August who would possess the Queen's "good ear" in a more eminent degree than Montmorenci, the French Ambassador. In 1575, when Robert Dudley welcomed his sovereign with a more than regal magnificence, it is easy to believe that his ambition looked for a higher reward than that of continuing a queen's most favoured servant and counsellor. It is tolerably clear that the exquisite speech of Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream is associated with. some of the poetical devices which the young Shakspere might have beheld at Kenilworth, or have heard described :

Elizabeth.]

The most remarkable of the shows of Kenilworth were associated with the mythology and the romance of lakes and seas. Triton, in likeness of a mermaid, came towards the Queen's Majesty." "Arion appeared sitting on a dolphin's back." So the quaint and really poetical George Gascoigne, in his Brief Rehearsal, or rather a true copy of as much as was presented before her Majesty at Kenilworth.' But the diffuse and most entertaining coxcomb Laneham describes a song of Arion with an ecstacy which may justify the belief that the "dulcet and harmonious breath" of "the sea-maid's music" might be the echo of the melodies heard by the young poet as he stood beside the lake at Kenilworth :-"Now, Sir, the ditty in metre so aptly endited to the matter, and after by voice deliciously delivered; the song, by a skilful artist into his parts so sweetly sorted; each part in his instrument so clean and sharply touched; every instrument again in his kind so excellently tunable; and this in the evening of the day, resounding from the calm waters, where the presence of her Majesty, and longing to listen, had utterly damped all noise and din, the whole harmony conveyed in time, tune, and temper, thus incomparably melodious; with what pleasure (Master Martin), with what sharpness of conceit, with what lively delight, this might pierce into the hearers' hearts, I pray ye imagine yourself, as ye may." If Elizabeth be the "fair vestal throned by the west," of which there can be no reasonable doubt, the most appropriate scene of the mermaid's song would be Kenilworth, and "that very time" the summer of 1575. Of the hidden meaning of that song we shall have

presently to speak.