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SIR T. LUCY-MONUMENT IN

CHARLECOTE CHURCH.

ran regularly as public conveyances. If Shakespeare, after the custom of the time, bought a horse for the occasion, he probably sold it, as Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps suggests on reaching Smithfield, to James Burbage, who was a liveryman in that neighborhood-the father of the famous actor Richard Burbage, with whom the poet was afterwards thrown in intimate relations. It was the custom among men of small means to buy horses for a journey, and sell them when the journey was accomplished. Tradition has long affirmed that Shakespeare habitually used the route which ran through Oxford and High Wycombe. The Crown Inn, which stood near Carfax, in Oxford, was the center of many associations, real or imaginary, with Shakespeare's journeys from the Capital to his home in New Place. The beautiful university city was even then venerable with years, and thronged with students. Shakespeare's infinite wit and marvelous charm, to which there are many contemporary testimonies, made him a welcome companion in one of the most brilliant groups of men in the history of literature. The spell of Oxford must have been upon him, and volumes

of biography might well be exchanged for a brief account of one evening in the commons room of some college when the greatest and most companionable of English men of genius was the guest of scholars who shared with him the liberating power of the new age; for Shakespeare was loved by men of gentle breeding and of ripest culture.

Dickens once said that if he sat in a room five minutes, without consciously taking note of his surroundings, he found himself able, by the instinctive action of his mind, to describe the furnishing of the room to the smallest detail. This faculty of what may be called instinctive observation Shakespeare possessed in rare degree; he saw everything when he seemed to be seeing nothing. It is not impossible that, as Aubrey declares, "he happened to take the humor of the constable in Midsummer Night's Dream' in a little town near Oxford." There is no constable in Shakespeare's single fairy-play, and Aubrey was probably thinking of Dogberry or Verges. Shakespeare was constantly "taking the humor" of men and women wherever he found himself, and although Oxford is connected with his life only by a faint

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'LONDON and WESTMINSTER in the Reign of QUEEN ELIZABETH.Anno Dom 1563

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SHOWING LONDON AS IT APPEARED IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY

FROM A RARE PRINT.

OLD LONDON.

tradition, it may have furnished him with more than one sketch which he later developed into a figure full of reality and substance. It would have been quite in keeping with the breadth and freedom of his genius to find a clown in Oxford more interesting than some of the scholars he met; for clowns occasionally have some touch of individuality, some glimmer of humor, while scholars are sometimes found without flavor, pungency, or originality. Shakespeare's principle of selection in dealing with men was always vital; he put his hand unerringly on significant per

sons.

In 1586 the foremost Englishman reached London, without means, in search of a vocation and a place in which to exercise it. The time was fortunate, and co-operated with him in ways which he did not, then or later, understand; for, however clearly a man may comprehend his gift and master his tools, he is too much a part of his age to discern his spiritual relations to it as these are later disclosed in the subtle channels through which it inspires and vitalizes him, and he in turn expresses, interprets, and affects it.

To the youth from the little village on the Avon, London was a great and splendid city; but the vast metropolis of to-day, with a population of more than five million people, was then a town of about one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. The great fire which was to change it from a mediæval to a modern city was almost a century distant; and the spire of old St. Paul's was seen, as one approached, rising over masses of red-roofed, many-gabled

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From an old print showing the bridge as it looked upon Shakespeare's arrival in London.
This bridge was replaced by a modern structure in 1831.

houses, crowded into the smallest space,
and protected by walls and trenches. The
most conspicuous objects in the city were
the Tower, which rose beside the Thames
as a symbol of the personal authority of
the monarch; the Cathedral, which served
as a common center of community life,
where the news for the day was passed
from group to group, where gossip was
freely interchanged, and servants were
hired, and debtors found immunity from
arrest; and old London Bridge, a town
in itself, lined with buildings, crowded
with people, with high gate-towers at
either end, often ghastly with the heads
that had recently fallen from the block at
the touch of the executioner's ax.

The streets were narrow, irregular, overhung with projecting signs which creaked on rusty hinges and, in high winds, often came down on the heads of unfortunate pedestrians. These highways were still foul with refuse and evil odors; within the memory of men then living they had been entirely unpaved. Their condition had become so noisome and dangerous fifty years earlier that Henry VIII. began the work of paving the principal thoroughfares. Round stones were used for this purpose, and were put in position as they came to hand, without reference to form, size, or regularity of surface. Walking and riding were, in consequence, equally disagreeable. The thoroughfares were beaten into dust in summer and hollowed out into pools in

winter; a ditch, picturesquely called "the kennel," ran through the road and served as a gutter. Into these running streams, fed with the refuse which now goes through the sewers, horses splashed and pedestrians often slipped. The narrow passage for foot-passengers was overcrowded, and every one sought the space furthest away from the hurrying pedestrians and litter-carriers and reckless riders. Two centuries later Dr. Johnson divided the inhabitants of London into two classes-the peaceable and the quarrelsome, or those who "gave the wall" and those who took it. To add to the discomfort, great water-spouts gathered the showers as they fell on the roofs of houses and shops, and discharged them in concentrated form on the heads of passers-by.

The London of that day was the relatively small and densely populated area in the heart of the modern metropolis which is known as the City. Its center was St. Paul's Cathedral; and Eastcheap, which Falstaff loved so well, was a typi cal thoroughfare. A labyrinth of foul alleys and dingy, noisome courts covered the space now penetrated by the most crowded streets. Outside the limits of the town stretched lonely, neglected fields, dangerous at night by reason of footpads and all manner of lawless persons, in an age when streets were unlighted and police unknown. St. Pancras, surrounded by its ancient graves, stood in a lonely place with extensive rural views in all directions.

Westminster was separated from the city by a long stretch of country known later as the Downs; cows grazed in Gray's Inn Fields.

The Thames was the principal thoroughfare between London and Westminster, and was gay with barges and boats of every kind, and noisy with the cries and oaths of hundreds of watermen. The vocabulary of profanity and vituperation was nowhere richer; every boat's load on its way up or down the stream abused every other boat's load in passing; the shouts "Eastward Ho!" or "Westward Ho!" were deafening.

In 1586 London was responding to the impetus which rapidly increasing trade had given the whole country, and was fast outgrowing its ancient limits. Neither the Tudor nor the Stuart sovereigns looked with favor on the growth of the

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power of a community which was never lacking in the independence which comes from civic courage and civic wealth. James I. said, with characteristic pedantry, that "the growth of the capital resembleth that of the head of a rickety child, in which an excessive influx of humours draweth and impoverisheth the extremities, and at the same time generateth distemper in the overloaded parts." The instinct which warned the father of Charles I. against the growth of London was sound, as the instincts of James often were; but there was no power within reach of the sovereign which could check the growth of the great city of the future. That growth was part of the expansion of England; one evidence of that rising tide of racial vitality which was to carry the English spirit, genius, and activity to the ends of the earth.

A Flight

By Tighe Hopkins

HIS is some dream," was the man's first thought: "oh, if I could prove it real !"

He lay there in the long, moist grass afraid to move, although the night all about him was so dark, so very dark. What stirred him chiefly was a wonderful sweetness of the air; a clean, fresh savor that he had not known for years. "It was never like that in there," he thought. Without lifting himself, he turned half round, and his eyes strained at the darkness. Then it was that he began to think he was alive and awake. Behind him, not twenty yards away, rose the huge black mass of the prison.

"Blessed be God! it was true, then! He had escaped; he was free. All the others were in there, locked in their cells, and every gate and every door locked; and he, he who had endured six years, was free. The liberty that God destined for all his creatures was his at last. He rocked himself for joy, rolling to and fro in the sweet, moist grass. It seemed, all at once, so natural. He had longed to escape, he had dreamed of escaping, and he had escaped.

Copyright, 1900, by Tighe Hopkins,

Then he wondered how he had done it, but he could not in the least remember what had happened since he had quitted his cell for work in the carpenter's shop in the afternoon. It puzzled him, yet it did not seem too strange. He thought he must have slipped in letting himself down from the wall, and fainted on falling But he was not hurt in the least; he had never felt such strength in him, such lightness.

It was a dark, rich night of summer; no moon, and scarcely the shimmer of a star; it was the very night he had hoped to escape in. He sat up in the grass, and considered what he should do; turned it over in his mind, comfortably, without the least anxiety.

He would go home. Home, that had seemed so far when they locked him in at night-every night of six unending years

seemed now no further than the edge of this warm, dark, quiet field where no one was stirring. He was sure he could be home before daylight.

He crept to his feet, and then, black as it was, he fancied that he stood very high. He missed the whitewashed roof of the cell, which he could almost touch with his head, reaching on tiptoe, and the sense

of space above gave him a feeling of greater height, and he asked himself if it were possible for him to be seen.

All this time he had been utterly alone, and this sense of solitude made him think that he had put the prison leagues behind him; but as he stood up he heard a voice, or voices, not very far away. The echo of the voices shook him; he remembered that, when his flight was discovered, he w. uld be pursued. He threw himself in the grass again, and began to steal away, crawling. Then he rose, ran, and stopped.

There were no lights about the prison. He stayed, panting; perhaps they had not yet found out. But he could see shadowfigures growing in the black beyond; he was certain that he saw them; they made marks upon the darkness. If they were warders, there should be lanterns with them; but perhaps they were scouting with their lanterns hidden, and would form a cordon round him, and close in on him. He forgot the hope of home, and ran blindly for safety. He wished, in his terror, that he were back again in prison. The whistle of an engine sounded; it seemed not very far in front of him, and he ran towards the sound. He remembered that the prison was quite close to London; the train, if he could reach it, might carry him there, or far out into the country.

He was quite sure now that he was being followed, and he ran headlong, with no thought but of saving himself. If he could but reach the railway !

Now and again he stumbled, and once he fell heavily; but he felt no hurt, and was scarcely conscious of the shock; he believed he could run through the night without fatigue. He thought of what would happen to him if he were taken; he could hear the warders' chuckle of revenge as they hammered round his ankles the irons he would have to wear waking and sleeping for six months.

The scrub that he was traversing had no end, and in the dark it was as trackless as a desert; yet in the cell the man had sometimes heard sounds of life out there, music even, and far-off echoes of laughter; and he knew that, desolate and black as it was, he must even now be almost upon London's edge. Streets were lighted, and people going to and fro in them, and shopmen at their doors, it might be not above

a mile away.

Then, as he continued running, there traced itself against the obscurity of the night an irregular large outline right in front of him; and the man went weak, thinking he had been moving in a circle, and had reached the prison again. Stealing closer, he saw that this was a place with a low wall, and iron rails above it, and trees overhanging; and he bore in mind the great cemetery of London, and guessed that this was it. More, he was now certain of his whereabouts.

He had stopped right against the cemetery gate, and could see lights in the lodge inside; and he moved away and crouched in an angle of the wall, and fell again to listening. It was so still that the man's heart ceased thumping; he had not lost his freedom yet. Then, again, he heard the siren whistle of an engine, heard it more clearly than before, and knew that he was drawing closer to the line.

He moved along, hugging the wall of the cemetery, which was a definite means of guidance. But the wall seemed to stretch out interminably, and he fancied that if he could climb into and strike across the cemetery he would come out within a little distance of the railway.

With scarcely an effort he clambered over-himself surprised how swift and agile he was grown and stood amid the dense leafage of the burial-ground. Innumerable white paths showed faintly around him, but he avoided these, and began at once to steer a cautious way among the tombs and gravestones, seeking always the straightest course. He had made but a short distance from his point of entrance, for every step was felt and groped in the utter darkness of the cemetery, when again he had a vivid sense of the nearness of another presence. He stopped instantly, and cowered to the ground. This time he was not mistaken: feet were on the gravel path quite close to him--whether in front or behind he could not tell for certain.

He had reached a space where the soil was as yet untenanted; there was not so much as a headless mound to shelter by. How foolish he had been in entering the cemetery; they would send there at once to search for him. He could still hear the feet moving softly on the gravel, and now they were so near that, though he himself could distinguish nothing, he thought he must surely be perceived. The suspense

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