ing meadows ample opportunities for quiet meditation or scientific enquiry. Here it was that Gerard, the celebrated botanist, a few years afterwards stumbled upon a new kind of crow-foot which he describes as being similar to the ordinary plant, "saving that his leaves are fatter, thicker, and greener, and his small twiggie stalkes stand upright, otherwise it is like; of which kinde it chanced that, walking in the fielde next unto the Theater by London, in company of a worshipfull marchant named master Nicholas Lete, I founde one of this kinde there with double flowers, which before that time I had not seene," the Herball, 1597, p. 804. Thus Shakespeare's observation of our wild flowers was not necessarily limited, as has been supposed, to his provincial experiences, two of the principal theatres with which he was connected having been situated in a rural suburb, and green fields being throughout his life within an easy walk from any part of London.

Shakespeare's early theatrical life must have been an era of pecuniary struggles. There were his wife and children to support, at all events partially, even if some kind of assistance were tendered by the Hathaways; while his father had been in difficulties for several years past. In 1578, his parents had borrowed the sum of £40, on the security of his mother's estate of Asbies, from their connexion, Edmund Lambert of Barton-on-theHeath. The loan remaining unpaid, and the mortgagee dying in March, 1587, his son and heir, John, was naturally desirous of having the matter settled. John Shakespeare being at that time in prison for debt, and obviously unable to furnish the money, it was arranged shortly afterwards that Lambert should, on cancelling the mortgage and paying also the sum of £20, receive from