and ingress by the chief roadways;-beginning at the Tower of London, we can recall the existing names of Aldgate, Bishopgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Newgate, Ludgate. This circuit, somewhat in the shape of a stretched bow, measured 2 miles and 200 yards. In ancient times there was a wall extending along the base of this circuit, defending the city on the river side, but in Shakespeare's time this wall-the string, as it were, of the stretched bowhad almost completely disappeared, and the south side of Thames Street consisted of wharves, warehouses, and other buildings. From Aldgate there were suburbs stretching as far as Whitechapel. "Both sides of the street," wrote John Stow, the contemporary of Shakespeare, "be pestered with cottages and alleys, even up to Whitechapel Church, and almost half a mile beyond it, into the common field; all which ought to be open and free for all men. But this common field, I say, being sometime the beauty of this city on that part, is so encroached upon by building of filthy cottages, and with other purpressors, enclosures and laystalls (notwithstanding all proclamations and acts of Parliament made to the contrary), that in some places it scarce remaineth a sufficient highway for the meeting of carriages and droves of

cattle." There were inconsiderable suburbs on the north; on the north-west there were streets and dwellings around Smithfield and Clerkenwell, but the chief extension was along the river, east and west. A continuous line of buildings stretched from Temple Bar to Westminster, along the river front, consisting chiefly of palaces and mansions. On the east, from the Tower, stretched a tapering finger of dwellings beyond Ratcliffe. Stow greatly deprecated these additions on the east side. He remarks that from the precinct of St Katherine's by the Tower to Wapping, was never a house standing within these forty years;" but alas! now a continual street reached, "almost to Ratcliffe, a good mile from the Tower." Tenements in place of trees was an exchange of which Stow did not approve. "There hath been of late," he says, "in place of elm-trees, many small tenements raised towards Ratcliffe ; and Ratcliffe itself hath been also increased in building eastward, in place where I have known a large highway, with fair elm-trees on both sides, that the same hath now taken hold of Lime Hurst, or Lime Host, corruptly called Lime House, sometime distant a mile from Ratcliffe." On the south, there was a fringe of building along the river bank, at the back

of which were fields and open spaces, and beyond this the country; an uninterrupted expanse of the beautiful scenery of Surrey.

With slight deductions here and there, it might be said that the whole of what is now the County of London was then open country. A man could walk westward along Holborn, and by the time he reached St Giles' Church, where now is Shaftesbury Avenue, he would be in the fields. If he went from Holborn up Gray's Inn Lane, by the time he reached King's Cross he would have left London behind him: St Pancras was a rural village. On the north, if he passed through Cripplegate, a few minutes' walk would take him through the suburbs; or if he took the road through Moorgate, by the time he had passed the Moorfields and left Finsbury fields behind him, he would have the rising country all before him, and he would very soon encounter one of the farm homesteads which supplied the city with agricultural produce.

It follows that life in Shakespeare's London was not the distinctive town-life which we associate with the London of to-day. A young man from a provincial town, used to rural sights and sounds, endowed with the love of nature, would not pine for the green

fields at home; he would take a walk into the country.
He would find a forest of Arden on the heights of
Hampstead and Highgate; he could take part in a
sheep-shearing celebration at even a less distance.
As he walked through the city on business bent, a
flock of wild duck or teal might wing over his head
with outstretched necks, taking flight from the marshes
on the north of the city, to the river or the marshes
on the south between Paris Garden and Lambeth.
One of the most delightful features of the city itself,
the city within the walls, was the spacious garden
attached to most of the ancient houses; these gardens
were well stocked with fruit-trees, and with flower-
beds, cultivated for "garnishing the chambers" of the
citizens' dwellings. The citizen in his warehouse or
living room could hear the note of the piratical black-
bird among
his fruit, or the song of the thrush, or the
linnet's pretty warble. If Shakespeare had his lodg-
ing in the precinct of St Helen's, Bishopgate, he would
doubtless hear the cuckoo,

"When daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

Do paint the meadows with delight."

Or if (as we believe he did at one time) he dwelt on

the Surrey side, near the Bear Garden, the note of Philomel, "the winged Dryad" might reach him from among the trees as he lay sleepless and in thought some summer night:

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought"

he summoned up remembrance of things past. Nature was ever calling to Shakespeare, by ear and eye, while he lived and worked in London.

But there were other and scarcely less important appeals to Shakespeare's genius. In and around the city were the precincts of dissolved priories and other religious houses: the chapel or some portion thereof generally saved for the purposes of the reformed worship; for the rest, stately ruins, cloisters, garden walks, grassy slopes and trees; here and there portions of the old buildings converted into dwellings, occasionally new houses erected on the garden spaces, in the words of Stow, "for the lodgings of noblemen, strangers born, and others." At the Theatre in Holywell, at the playhouse in Blackfriars, Shakespeare would be surrounded by these evidences of a past, not remote to him, when one of the bulwarks of London, against King and Barons alike, more strong than the wall of the city, was the secure existence of