result of the depredations committed by the poet and his companions.

Another version of the narrative has been recorded by Archdeacon Davies, who was the vicar of Sapperton, a village in the neighboring county of Gloucester, and who died there in the year 1708. According to this authority the future great dramatist was "much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipped and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county 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." It is evident, therefore, from the independent testimonies of Rowe and Davies, that the deer-stealing history was accepted in the poet's native town and in the neighborhood during the latter part of the seventeenth century. That it has a solid basis of fact cannot admit of a reasonable doubt. It was current at a period in the history of Shakespearean appreciation before tales of the kind became liable to intentional falsification, and the impressive story of the penniless fugitive, who afterwards became a leading inhabitant of Stratford and the owner of New Place, was one likely to be handed down with passable fidelity to the grandchildren of his contemporaries. It is, moreover, one which exactly harmonizes with circumstances that materially add to its probability, with the satirical allusions to the Lucys in their immediate relation to a poaching adventure, and with the certainty that there must have been some very grave reason to induce him to leave his wife and children to seek

his unaided fortunes in a distant part of the country, rendering himself at the same time liable to imprisonment (5 Eliz. c. 4. s. 47) for violating the conditions of his apprenticeship. If there had been no such grave reason, how should there have been the provincial belief in 1693 that he had ran "from his master to London, and there received into the play-house as a servitor?" What but a strong and compulsory motive could have driven him so far away from a locality to which, as we gather from subsequent events, he was sensitively attached? The only theory, indeed, that would sanction the unconditional rejection of the traditions is that which assumes that they were designed in explanation of the allusions in the Merry Wives of Windsor, but surely, if that had been the case, there would have been a more explicit reference to the accusations of Master Shallow, charges that are in the aggregate of a more formidable description than those which have been transmitted by hearsay. "You have hurt my keeper, kill'd my dogs, stol'n my deer" (ed. 1602). "You have beaten my men, kill'd my deer, and broke open my lodge" (ed. 1623). It is also exceedingly improbable that there should have been any one at Stratford-on-Avon at the time of Betterton's visit who would have cared to elucidate the justice's implications, and it would appear, from the incorrect quotations which are given by Davies, that even the archdeacon was somewhat better acquainted with the history of Sir Thomas Lucy than he was with the comedy.

Neither the best citizens nor the most amiable men are always those whose cautious and dispassionate temperaments have enabled them to pass through the heats of youth without getting into scrapes. Those only, indeed,

who consider it their duty to invest the greatest of dramatists with the honors of canonization will be distressed to hear that the poet, in the years of his apprenticeship to a cheerless business, got into trouble by netting rabbits and occasionally joining in the class of adventures that were then known under the title of "unlawful huntings." The general tradition among the rustics of the neighborhood was, and perhaps still is, that he was wild in his younger days, an impression delivered, as I have heard it in years gone by, in no tone or spirit of detraction; and he was wild in the least reprehensible of all irregular directions, not in the slums of Warwick, nor with roisterers in the taverns of Stratford, but in sports of the wood and the field that may have been illegally pursued, but were nevertheless regarded by the multitude as indications of manly spirit and gallantry. Sir Philip Sydney's May-Lady terms deer-stealing a "prettie service," and this was the light in which it was usually viewed so long as the keepers were outwitted. These were days when youthful raids for fruit or animals were not only excusable in the eyes of society, but apt to be considered desirable features of education, and we accordingly find a writer of the next century, Francis Osborn, born about the year 1589, bitterly lamenting that, owing to the mild character of his home-training, he had lost the advantages which others had derived from a participation in such-like kind of exploits; for, to quote his own words, "not undergoing the same discipline, I must needs come short of their experience that are bred up in free-schools, who, by plotting to rob an orchard, &c., run through all the subtleties required in taking of a town; being made by use familiar to secrecy and compliance with Opportunity, qualities never

after to be attained at cheaper rates than the hazard of all; whereas these see the danger of trusting others and the rocks they fall upon by a too obstinate adhering to their own imprudent resolutions, and all this under no higher penalty than a whipping." Then there was the curious fact that the students of Oxford, the center of the kingdom's learning and intelligence, had been for many generations the most notorious poachers in all England. An Act of the fifteenth century, under which disorderly hunters were to be banished from the university, does not appear to have been very effective, for their serious depredations in the reign of Henry VIII, positively led, as recorded by Leland, to the disparking of Radley, near Abingdon, a park that was about four miles distant from the scholastic city. The same lawless spirit prevailed among the younger collegians for many years. Dr. Forman relates how two students in 1573,-one of them John Thornborough, then aged twenty-one, afterwards Dean of York and Bishop of Worcester, "never studied nor gave themselves to their books, but to go to schools of defence, to the dancing-schools, to steal deer and conies, and to hunt the hare, and to wooing of wenches." This was pretty well, and yet we are told, on the excellent authority of Anthony Wood, that Thornborough "was a person well-furnish'd with learning, wisdom, courage, and other as well episcopal as temporal accomplishments beseeming a gentleman, a dean, and a bishop"; so it is clear that his attachment to the recreation of game-stealing at Shakespeare's poaching-age was not in any way detrimental to his subsequent reputation. He would, indeed, have suffered far more in the estimation of his contemporaries if he had been the Oxford freshman who, as recorded in the old jest-books, joining his fellow

students in one of their favorite clandestine expeditions upon the understanding that he was to maintain a rigid silence, vexatiously frightened away a choice herd of rabbits by exclaiming, "Ecce cuniculi multi”; thus excusing himself when reproved for his folly,-who in the world, said he, would have thought that conies could have understood Latin?

But although it will be gathered from these evidences that amateur poaching was not always visited in those days with a distinct loss of character, it must not be inferred that its votaries, when detected, did not sometimes get into trouble and a certain amount of attendant disgrace. Much would depend upon the extent and nature of the depredations, and no little of course on the special tastes and pursuits of the owners. The landed gentry had suffered so much inconvenience from the practice that many of them had long been anxious for the establishment of stricter game-laws. Strenuous efforts had been made to render even rabbit-taking a felony, and it is not probable that Sir Thomas Lucy, an enthusiastic sportsman and an advocate for game-preservation, could have regarded the doings of Shakespeare and his companions with equanimity. It was natural that he should do his best to protect his covers from spoliation, and it is easy to believe that there may have been a display of arbitrary and undue severity in the process. There could have been no one among the poachers who would have been likely to have offered a successful resistance, or who would have dared to have appealed to a superior court in respect to a matter in which all of them were incipiently in the wrong; and it must be borne in mind that the future poet was then no more either to Sir Thomas or to the world than Peter