THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.

from the bust, the Squire must have been extremely formal and precise, with an extraordinary idea of his own consequence; but certainly one that would not make such a fool of himself as Master Shallow. He has acquired a most unenviable notoriety, and an immortality he did not reckon on. He seems to have been engaged in other broils with his neighbours; for, as noticed by Halliwell, there is extant among the miscellaneous papers at the Rolls House, a list of those who made a riot upon Master Thomas Lucy, Esquire, which contains the names of thirty-five inhabitants of Stratford. He had probably treated many with lordly insolence, before he was unfortunate enough to meet in with one who was armed with the lash.

The woodland scenery around Charlecote is richly picturesque, and in its natural features must have remained unchanged since Shakespeare's time, although the trees of that age have apparently all fallen under the woodman's axe, and others have come to a stately growth on their site. There is a stamp about a tree of three centuries old which is unmistakable, and which cannot be said to belong to any in the park. The immense trees dug up in our mosses have led to theories about the decay of vegetative power and a change of climate, since the time those massive oaks flourished in spots where none grow now. But these hypotheses are all unnecessary. Nothing else is required to produce trees as huge as ever existed, except that individuals should be allowed to grow undisturbed for centuries, as they did when this country was covered with gloomy forests, seldom trod even by the wander

ing savage. A charm attaches to this undulating park of Charlecote, with its clumps of fine elms and beeches, its spreading oaks, and herds of deer; and we may associate with it Fulbrooke park, which is farther from Stratford on the Warwick road, because it must have been in roaming through these woodlands at noonday and by moonlight that Shakespeare acquired those romantic ideas of forest life which he has embodied in "As You Like It." It is probable, though not certain, that the forest of Arden in that play is the Warwickshire Arden, which in the times of the old Britons and the Saxons was an immense forest, though it is now open country under cultivation. There are French

elements in the play, and also an Arden in France; but that matters little in determining the question, since in the ideal world created by the poet, his imagination groups together scenes and characters from various times and countries. Thus he introduces lions, serpents, and palm-trees, denizens of a tropical clime, into a European forest. Whichever Arden Shakespeare meant, we have no doubt it was in wandering through the thickets in the vicinity of his native place, and, perhaps, in reclining

"Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out

Upon the brook that brawls along this wood,"

he had marked the death of a stricken deer.

"A poor sequestered stag,

That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt,
Did come to languish; and, indeed, my lord,
The wretched animal heaved forth such groans,
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting; and the big round tears

Coursed one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase; and thus the hairy fool

Stood on the extremest verge of the swift brook,
Augmenting it with tears."

No doubt, like the melancholy Jaques, he had moralized the spectacle, and possibly in continuing his walk had then formed his contemplation of the world as a stage on which is acted the play of human life, the seven ages of man being the acts.