much known beyond New England, and long since obsolete, was a curiosity in its way. Its pews were square-like boxes, and the family, when seated on all sides of one, queerly resembled a sleigh-riding party-the children and other inconsequential persons being placed with their backs to the minister. The pulpit was high and straight, and over the head of the preacher was suspended an immense sounding-board. The deacons had a pew to themselves in front of the pulpit; and the choir nearly filled the great galleries extending across three sides of the building, suggesting to the very young mind the old picture of Xerxes and his hosts-especially in rising to sing a hymn with the leader brandishing his enormous tuningfork. When the choir stood, the congregation stood also. The Thanksgiving sermon to which we listened was most impressive. The learned pastor infused into it the heat of his own enthusiasm, the full measure of his own gratitude for blessings received. There was no ambiguity in his expressions, no confusion in his own thoughts of how much to attempt or how to discriminate. His style was simple and direct, his speech as spontaneous as that of an ingenuous, impetuous boy, his piety as transparent as glass. On reaching home our sedate hostess catechised us as to the text, and what we had learned at the morning service that we could always remember? The following response came from the youngest of our number, and must have surprised her: "I don't know true how it begins, but it goes this way:

'You'll not be carried to the skies

On flowery beds of ease,
While others fight to win the prize,

And sail through bloody seas.'"

Thus the choir on that particular occasion furnished the child a germ of thought, one that was to mature subsequently into a pillar of strength, and prove so helpful as to cause its possessor to feel oftentimes like celebrating Thanksgiving every day in the year.

Then we in turn catechised our catechiser, and elicited much fresh information about Thanksgiving observances in America since that initial celebration of the Pilgrims in 1621. We learned that the first national appointment of a Thanksgiving day was in 1789, by President Washington, the very next year after our grandmother's marriage and establishment in her new home. She told us how thankful she felt on that particular morning, and what a personal matter she made of the occasion, although its special purpose, as recommended by Congress, was to give thanks for the adoption of the Constitution. In 1795, President Washing

ton issued a second proclamation for a national day of thanksgiving, that time on account of the suppression of an insurrection. Going backward a century and more, she explained to us that days of thanksgiving had been appointed in Massachusetts in 1633, in 1634, in 1637, in 1638, in 1639, in 1651, in 1658, and in 1680, about which time it became an annual State custom. She said that occasional days of thanksgiving were appointed by the Dutch governor of New York, as early as 1644, and in many of the years later on. But until the present century had considerably advanced, the official recommendations for the observance of the Thanksgiving festival were mainly confined to the New England States.

The irrepressible company were finally dismissed for their own entertainment, and with flying feet went in pursuit of information of a different character. The mystery of mysteries was the cooking of the Thanksgiving dinner. To most of us, at that period, the long crane in the monster fire-place was a novelty, and the iron kettles of varied shapes and sizes hanging upon it with their boiling and stewing contents, of greater moment than the British Museum has ever been to us since. Steaming pies, mince, apple, and pumpkin, coming from the brick oven, together with a regiment of puddings, whetted our appetites marvelously; and chickens roasting before the fire in a movable tin bake-oven were declared "done" by a selfappointed committee a dozen times or more before the banquet hour arrived. The chicken pie, without which no New England Thanksgiving could have been complete, we did not discover until we were served to it at the table. But we had secret advices from our cheery host that it was baking, with a friendly caution against indecorous interrogation where so many amateur cooks were concerned; and while we waited, with a polite exhibition of excessive patience not very cordially felt, he charmed us with another invoice of captivating stories. He told us about the Kings of England from James I. to George III., describing each in his personal and domestic relations; the tragic fate of Charles I. stirred our quick sympathies for his children, as they stood before us in a copy of the old painting in the Louvre to which we were introduced. He lighted up his accounts of George III. with humorous anecdotes, and, as never before, we gloried in the struggle which had given birth to a government of our own. In the mean time, he taught us other things worth knowing, as, for instance, that man is equal to his aspirations and can obtain whatever he labors for; that study would open a thousand avenues for our future happiness; that we could acquire lessons of value from observation, if we were not too dull to comprehend the fact that we were to go through life with our eyes open; that the art of thinking, the cultivation of memory, and the use of words were three branches of knowledge we particularly needed; and that for people of good sound sense life was really worth living. Perhaps we enjoyed the delicious Thanksgiving feast all the more when it was at length announced for the mental nourishment and encouragement we had received. It would be a pleasure to chronicle the bill of fare under which the table groaned, but the reader has caught a few glimpses already, and the actual statistics would occupy too much space. It was a dinner unlike any offered at the present day-and such an one as would have been difficult to find outside of New England in that long ago. The evening was devoted to varied amusements in which all participated-fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles and cousins,

as well as the children-and games of every description even to "blindman's-buff" and "my ship has come from India" followed each other in rapid succession. At nine o'clock precisely, tea, cake, pie, fruit and nuts were served in magnificent proportions, and the party retired to dream of grandfathers and grandmothers and that genuine old-fashioned New England Thanksgivings had no end.

The spirit of the Thanksgiving festival is, however, and should be, the same in all periods and decades. It can never, in its observances, be to the children of other States and climes just what it was and is to the children

of New England. Yet the sentiment breathing through the latest proclamation of the Governor of New York for the observance of November 25, 1886, is not so very different from those early proclamations of our forefathers. It opens as follows:

"Let there be thanksgiving and prayer to Almighty God for the abundant harvest and the blessings of health and peace with which the year has been crowned. Let there be prayer for a continuance of all the tender mercies and the watchful care which have been divinely granted to us in the past."

Martha & Lamb

I

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S LITERARY EXECUTOR

THE FIRST SHAKESPEAREAN REVIVAL

There is one Anglo-Saxon heritage which we of this side "the mournful and misty Atlantic" certainly have retained equally with our brethren who never came out from under domination of the British crown. The great Shakespeare, at least, knew nothing of an America that was not England; and, in all that goes by his name, there is no hint of a dividing ocean. Both sides of this ocean to-day, as then, are owners of his undying works. And both sides ought to remember gratefully any hand which helped to preserve, in unbroken line from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, this heritage.

Whether connected with William Shakespeare by any natural tie or not, certainly, Sir William Davenant was the nearest approach to a literary executor that William Shakespeare ever had. And that it was he, and he alone, who carried William Shakespeare through a cycle which cared nothing for him, but (as Pepys's and Evelyn's diaries sufficiently evince) preferred artificial Frenchiness and libertinism, ought to be remembered.

After Davenant's death, Dryden wrote a preface to his own and Davenant's version of The Tempest, in which he says, "Sir William Davenant did me the honor to join me with him in the alteration of this work. It was originally Shakespeare's, a poet for whom he had a particularly high veneration, and whom he first taught me to admire." And we shall see there is plenty of other proof of Sir William's sturdy, and—as it had to be in that age,-stubborn loyalty to the great poet of all time— of every time, it seems, except that one.

Young William Davenant, after some preliminary schooling, entered Lincoln College in 1621. But he scribbled poetry instead of studying, and soon left without taking any degree. He attracted the attention of the gay Duchess of Richmond, and for a while became her page, from which service he entered the household of Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who had been a friend of Sir Philip Sidney, and was himself something of a poet. When Lord Brooke died, in 1628, Davenant was left unprovided for, and began to earn his livelihood by his pen alone. His bent was for dramatic poetry, probably the most remunerative sort of verse at that time, as now. At any rate, he produced a lot of plays, all of which were