"Will you buy any tape,

Or lace for your cape,

My dainty duck, my dear-a;
Any filk, any thread,

Any toys for your head,

Of the new'ft and fin'ft, fin'ft wear-a;
Come to the pedlar,

Money's a meddler

That doth alter all men's wear-a.”

Here, near the church, was the old college for priests, appropriated by Master John à Combe as a dwellinghouse on the diffolution of the religious houses, but still retaining its stately ecclefiaftical character. The church and chapel were fhorn, indeed, of their former glories, and a coat of whitewash had perhaps been laid on the walls to deface any traces of colour or painting; but the carved benches or chairs, the rood-screen, and the stained glass probably yet remained, and the galleries and pews were as yet in the womb of time. Chapel Street was adorned and dignified by New Place, a fine old manfion built by the magnificent Sir Hugh Clopton. In fuch a town, built on a rifing ground on the banks of the Avon, close to the parks of Fulbrooke and Charlecote and the Forest of Arden, the Poet of Nature might well have been proud to have been born, and glad to dwell amongst his own people.

E

CHAPTER III.

I HAD now got fo far as this in my investigation: The place of Shakespere's birth—where he spent his youth, and to which he retired the moment he had acquired a competence—was in his time, notwithstanding its present dreary appearance, a town embellished by many stately and beautiful buildings, the refidence of wealthy burghers and of a large body of clergy, at that time the most learned and cultivated clafs of fociety. It was moreover built on the banks of a lovely river, furrounded by rural villages, parks, and forest tracts-such a country, in fhort, as would seize upon the fancy of a poet, and mark his imagination with the impress of its own character. For though the poet's fancy be, in one sense, independent of outward things, and

"Doth glance from heaven to earth, and earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to fhapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name,"

yet if, as Locke afferts, the mind be a fheet of white
paper
till written upon by the senses, the original fimple
ideas from which the complex images of poetry are
formed must have had their origin in outward things,
however independent of them they may afterwards
become. And that Shakefpere's young imagination
fed upon the scenes in which his youth was spent is
plain, both from the fact that he never loft fight of
the grand object of returning to live in his native town,
and from the whole character of his writings. None
of his contemporaries has drawn fo directly and fo
largely from English rural life as he, and the style of
scenery upon which he delights to dwell, as described,
for inftance, in the words of Titania-

"And never, fince the middle fummer's fpring,
Met we on hill, in dale, foreft, or mead,

By paved fountain, or by rushy brook"

is just that of the neighbourhood of Stratford. Greene and Peele have fome pretty country fcenes, but they want the touches of nature, the elegance, the lightness of the master. In these respects no one approaches him but Chaucer, whofe merits are unhappily buried for the generality in his obsolete language, and whose occafional groffness condemns his poems to close prison. To quote inftances of Shakefpere's power of depicting English country scenes and people would be to tranfcribe