Davies, he was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits; for which he was often whipped, sometimes imprisoned, and at last forced to fly the country. According to Jones, the tradition of Rowe was correct as to robbing the park; and the obnoxious ballad being stuck upon the park-gate, a lawyer of Warwick was authorised to prosecute the offender. The tradition is thus full of contradictions upon the face of it. It necessarily would be so, for each of the witnesses speaks of circumstances that must have happened a hundred years before his time. We must examine the credibility of the tradition therefore by inquiring what was the state of the law as to the offence for which William Shakspere is said to have been prosecuted; what was the state of public opinion as to the offence; and what was the position of Sir Thomas Lucy as regarded his immediate neighbours.

The law in operation at the period in question was the 5th of Elizabeth, chapter 21. The ancient forest-laws had regard only to the possessions of the Crown; and therefore in the 32nd of Henry VIII. an Act was passed for the protection of "every inheritor and possessor of manors, land, and tenements," which made the killing of deer, and the taking of rabbits and hawks, felony. This Act was repealed in the 1st of Edward VI.; but it was quickly re-enacted in the 3rd and 4th of Edward VI. (1549 and 1550), it being alleged that unlawful hunting prevailed to such an extent throughout the realm, in the royal and private parks, that in one of the king's parks within a few miles of London five hundred deer were slain in one day. For the due punishment of such offences the taking of deer was again made felony. But the Act was again repealed in the 1st of Mary. In the 5th of Elizabeth it was attempted in Parliament once more to make the offence a capital felony. But this was successfully resisted; and it was enacted that, if any person by night or by day "wrongfully or unlawfully break or enter into any park empaled, or any other several ground closed with wall, pale, or hedge, and used for the keeping, breeding, and cherishing of deer, and so wrongfully hunt, drive, or chase out, or take, kill, or slay any deer within any such empaled park, or closed ground with wall, pale, or other enclosure, and used for deer, as is aforesaid," he shall suffer three months' imprisonment, pay treble damages to the party offended, and find sureties for seven years' good behaviour. But there is a clause in this Act (1562-3) which renders it doubtful whether the penalties for taking deer could be applied twenty years after the passing of the Act, in the case of Sir Thomas Lucy. "Provided always, That this Act, or anything contained therein, extend not to any park or enclosed ground hereafter to be made and used for deer, without the grant or licence of our Sovereign Lady the Queen, her heirs, successors, or progenitors." At the date of this statute Charlcote, it is said, was not a deer-park; was not an enclosed ground royally licensed. It appears to us that Malone puts the case against the tradition too strongly when he maintains that Charlcote was not a licensed park in 1562; and that, therefore, its venison continued to be unprotected till the statute of the 3rd of James. The Act of Elizabeth clearly contemplates any "several ground""closed with wall, pale, or hedge, and used for the keeping of deer;" and as Sir Thomas Lucy built the mansion at Charlcote in 1558, it may reasonably be supposed that at the date of the statute the domain of Charlcote was closed with wall, pale, or hedge. The Lucys, however, whatever was the state of

the law as to their park, had a proprietorship in deer, for the successor of the Sir Thomas of the ballad sent a present of a buck to the Lord Keeper Egerton in 1602. The deer-stealing tradition has shifted its locality as it has advanced in age. Charlcote, according to Mr. Samuel Ireland, was not the place of Shakspere's unlucky adventures. The Park of Fulbrooke, he says, was the property of Sir Thomas Lucy; and he gives us a drawing of an old house where the young offender was conveyed after his detection. Upon the Ordnance Map of our own day is the Deer

Barn, where, according to the same tradition, the venison was concealed. The engraving here given is founded upon a representation of the Deer Barn, "drawn by W. Jackson, 1798." I found it amongst some papers belonging to Mr. Waldron, that came into my possession, and I presented it to the author of a tract, published in 1862, entitled "Shakespeare no Deer-Stealer." The rude drawing is now in the Museum at Stratford.

The author of this tract, Mr. C. Holte Bracebridge, cannot be named by ourselves, nor, indeed, by any of his contemporaries, without a feeling of deep respect. His generous exertions to alleviate the miseries accompanying the war in the Crimea, originated in the same high principle as those of Florence Nightingale. But he must excuse us if we hesitate in our belief that the shifting of the scene of the deerstealing from Charlcote to Fulbrooke adds much additional value to the credibility of the tradition. The argument of Mr. Bracebridge is in substance as follows:"From 1553 to 1592, Fulbrooke Park was held in capite of the Crown by Si: Francis Englefield. From 1558 to the time of his death, abroad, in 1592, Sir Francis had been attainted, and his property sequestered, although the proceeds were not appropriated by the Queen. It follows, then, that neither Sir Thomas Lucy nor his family had a proprietary right in Fulbrooke until the last years of Shakspere's life, when the estate, having been re-granted to the mother of the former attainted owner, it had been purchased from his nephew. But as Lucy's park ran along the bank of the Avon for nearly a mile, and for about the same distance Fulbrooke occupied the opposite bank; as the river was shallow and had a regular ford at Hampton Lucy, situate at one angle of Charlcote Park, the deer of

."

Fulbrooke and the deer of Charlcote were only kept separate by the fence on either side, that of the banished man being probably broken down. It is clear, holds Mr. Bracebridge, that if Shakspere had broken into Charlcote, and had there taken a buck or a doe, he would have been liable to the penalties of the 5th of Elizabeth; and that Sir Thomas Lucy would not have abstained from taking the satisfaction of the law, "for an offence, looked upon at that period, by the gentry at least, very much as housebreaking is with us." Because, therefore, Sir Thomas Lucy was a gentleman of ancient lineage, as his ancestor once held Fulbrooke Park of the Crown; as Englefield was abroad as a proscript, "he, Lucy, no doubt, hunted there." We state the argument of Mr. Bracebridge, from these facts, in his ow words: In this state of things, Shakspeare would treat very lightly the warnings of the Charlcote keepers, knowing as a young lawyer that he had as good a right as Sir Thomas to sport over Fulbrooke, insomuch as there was no legal park there." If Mr. Bracebridge's arguments may be admitted to prove that William Shakspere, in the eye of the law, was not a deer-stealer; if he himself knew that he had as good a right to take a deer in Fulbrooke as Sir Thomas Lucy himself, what becomes of the tradition, first reduced to shape by Rowe, that he was prosecuted by Sir Thomas Lucy, somewhat too severely as he thought; that in order to revenge the ill-usage he made a ballad upon the knight; and that this production was so very bitter that he was obliged to leave his business and family, and shelter himself in London? The elaborate and ingenious argument of the author of "Shakespeare no Deer-Stealer," offers the best support to our opinion, thus noticed by him:Mr. Knight, after reviewing the evidence as to the tradition, considers it unworthy of belief." All the accessories of the story confirm us in this opinion. Under the law, as it existed from Henry VIII. to James I., our unhappy poet could not be held to have stolen rabbits, however fond he might be of hunting them; and certainly it would have been legally unsafe for Sir Thomas Lucy to have whipped him for such a disposition. Pheasants and partridges were free for men of all condition. to shoot with gun or cross-bow, or capture with hawk. There was no restriction against taking hares except a statute of Henry VIII., which, for the protection of hunting, forbade tracking them in the snow. With this general right of sportwhatever might have been the opinion of the gentry that the taking of a deer was as grievous an offence as the breaking into a house-it is clear that, with those of Shakspere's own rank, there was no disgrace attached to the punishment of an offender legally convicted. All the writers of the Elizabethan period speak of killing a deer with a sort of jovial sympathy, worthy the descendants of Robin Hood. "I'll have a buck till I die, I'll slay a doe while I live," is the maxim of the Host in 'The Merry Devil of Edmonton;' and even Sir John, the priest, reproves him not: he joins in the fun. With this loose state of public opinion, then, upon the subject of venison, is it likely that Sir Thomas Lucy, with the law on his side, would have pursued for such an offence the eldest son of an alderman of Stratford with any extraordinary severity? If the law were not on his side, Sir Thomas Lucy would only have made himself ridiculous amongst his neighbours by threatening to make a Star Chamber matter of it. The knight was nearly the most important person residing in the immediate neighbourhood of Stratford. In 1578 he had been High Sheriff. At the period when the deer-stealing may be supposed to have taken place he was seeking to be

member for the county of Warwick, for which he was returned in 1584.

Ile was in the habit of friendly intercourse with the residents of Stratford, for in 1583 he was chosen as an arbitrator in a matter of dispute by Hamnet Sadler, the friend of John Shakspere and of his son. All these considerations tend, we think, to show that the improbable deer-stealing tradition is based, like many other stories connected with Shakspere, on that vulgat love of the marvellous which is not satisfied with the wonder which a being eminently endowed himself presents, without seeking a contrast of profligacy, or meanness, or ignorance in his early condition, amongst the tales of a rude generation who came after him, and, hearing of his fame, endeavoured to bring him as near as might be to themselves.

Charlcote, then, shall not, at least by us, be surrounded by unpleasant associations in connexion with the name of Shakspere. It is, perhaps, the most interesting locality connected with that name; for in its great features it is essentially unchanged. There stands, with slight alteration, and those in good taste, the old mansion as it was reared in the days of Elizabeth. A broad avenue leads to its fine gateway, which opens into the court and the principal entrance. We would desire to people that hall with kindly inmates; to imagine the fine old knight, perhaps a little too puritanical, indeed, in his latter days, living there in peace and happiness with his family; merry as he ought to have been with his first wife, Jocosa (whose English name, Joyce, soundeth not quite so pleasant), and whose epitaph, by her husband, is honourable alike to the deceased and to the survivor.* We can picture him planting the second

avenue, which leads obliquely across the park from the great gateway to the porch of the parish-church. It is an avenue too narrow for carriages, if carriages then had been common; and the knight and his lady walk in stately guise along that grassy pathway, as the Sunday bells summon them to meet their humble neighbours in a place where all are equal. Charlcote is full of rich woodland scenery. The lime-tree avenue, may, perhaps. be of a later date than the age of Elizabeth; and one elm has evidently succeeded another from century to century. But there are old gnarled oaks and beeches dotted about the park. Its little knolls and valleys are the same as they were two centuries The same Avon flows beneath the gentle elevation on which the house stands, sparkling in the sunshine as brightly as when that house was first built. There may we still lie

ago.

"All the time of her life a true and faithful servant of her good God; never detected of any crime or vice; in religion, most sound; in love to her husband, most faithful and true; in friendship, most constant; to what in trust was committed to her, most secret: in wisdom, excelling; in governing her house, and bringing up of youth in the fear of God, that did converse with her, most rare and singular. A great maintainer of hospitality; greatly esteemed of her betters; misliked of none unless of the envious. When all is spoken that can be said, a woman so furnished and garnished with virtue as not to be bettered, and hardly to be equalled of any. As she lived most virtuously, so she died most godly.

"Set down by him that best did know what hath been written to be true, Thomas Lucy."