marshes and mosses." The parson of Rothemay, with a filial love for his native place, says, "The air is temperate and healthful about it, and it may be that the citizens owe the acuteness of their wits thereunto, and their civil inclinations." This, indeed, was a community fitted to appreciate the treasures which Lawrence Fletcher and his fellows would display before them; and it is to the honour of Aberdeen that, in an age of strong prejudices, they welcomed the English players in a way which vindicated their own character for "wisdom, learning, gallantry, breeding, and civil conversation.” It is not to those who so welcomed them that we must chiefly lay the charge of the witch persecutions of that time. In almost every case these atrocities were committed under the sanction of the Kirk Session; and in the same way, when a stern religious asceticism became the dominant principle in England, the feeling of religious earnestness, lofty as it was in many essentials, too often was allied with superstitious enthusiasm, which blinded the reason and blunted the feelings as fearfully as the worst errors of the ancient Church. The tolerant Shakspere would have listened to the stories of these persecutions with the same feelings with which he regarded the ruins of the Dominican convent at Aberdeen, which was razed to the ground in 1560. A right principle was in each case wrongly directed: "There is some soul of goodness in things evil." We have thus, there being ample documentary evidence that Shakspere's Company was at Aberdeen in October, 1601, assumed that Shakspere would naturally be of the number. His tragedy of Macbeth exhibits traces of local knowledge which might have been readily collected by him in the exact path of such a journey. We have attempted very slightly to sketch the associations with which he might have been surrounded during this progress, putting these matters, of course, hypothetically, as materials for the reader to embody in his own imagination. We may conclude the subject by very briefly tracing his path homeward. Honest John Taylor, who seems to have been ready for every kindness that fortune could bestow upon him, left Edinburgh in better guise than he came thither: "Within the port, or gate, called the Netherbow, I discharged my pockets of all the money I had and as I came penniless within the walls of that city at my first coming thither, so now, at my departing from thence, I came moneyless out of it again." But he soon found a worthy man ready to help him in his straits: "Master James Acmootye, coming for England, said, that if I would ride with him, that neither I nor my horse should want betwixt that place and London." If we take Taylor as our guide, we may see how Shakspere journeyed with his fellows, upon the great high road between Edinburgh and the city of their own Blackfriars. On the first day they would ride to Dunbar; on the second day they would reach Berwick. They might lodge at an inn, but the exuberance of the ancient Scotch hospitality would probably afford them all welcome in the stronghold of some wealthy laird. Taylor thus describes the hospitality of his hosts at Coberspath [Cockburnspath], between Dunbar and Berwick: "Suppose ten, fifteen, or twenty men and horses came to lodge at their house, the men shall have flesh, tame and wild fowl, fish, with all variety of good cheer, good lodging, and welcome; and the horses shall want neither hay nor provender : and at the morning at their departure the reckoning is just nothing. This is this worthy gentleman's use, his chief delight being only to give strangers entertainment gratis." His description of the hospitality "in Scotland beyond Edinburgh" is more remarkable: "I have been at houses like castles for building; the master of the house his beaver being his blue bonnet, one that will wear no other shirts but of the flax that grows on his own ground, and of his wife's, daughters', or servants' spinning; that hath his stockings, hose, and jerkin of the wool of his own sheeps' backs; that never (by his pride of apparel) caused mercer, draper, silk-man, embroiderer, or haberdasher to break and turn bankrupt: and yet this plain homespun fellow keeps and maintains thirty, forty, fifty servants, or perhaps more, every day relieving three or four score poor people at his gate; and, besides all this, can give noble entertainment, for four or five days together, to five or six Earls and Lords, besides Knights, Gentlemen, andtheir followers, if they be three or four hundred men and horse of them, where they shall not only feed but feast, and not feast but banquet; this is a man that desires to know nothing so much as his duty to God and his King, whose greatest cares are to practise the works of piety, charity, and hospitality: he never studies the consuming art of fashionless fashions, he never tries his strength to bear four or five hundred acres on his back at once; his legs are always at liberty -not being fettered with golden garters, and manacled with artificial roses, whose weight (sometime) is the relics of some decayed lordship. Many of these worthy house-keepers there are in Scotland: amongst some of them I was entertained; from whence I did truly gather these aforesaid observations." The Water-Poet passes through Berwick without a word. The poet of Henry IV. would associate it with vivid recollections of his own Hotspur : "He had byn a march-man all hys dayes, And kepte Barwyke-upon-Twede." ""* He was now in the land of old heroic memories, which had reached the ear of his boyhood in his own peaceful Stratford, through the voice of the wandering harper; and which Froissart had recorded in a narrative as spirited as the fancies of "the old song of Percy and Douglas." The dark blue Cheviots lifted their summits around him, and *The Battle of Otterbourne. beneath them were the plains which the Douglas wasted, who 66 Boldely brente Northomberlande, And haryed many a towyn." He was in the land which had so often been the "On Holy-rood day, the gallant Hotspur there, The |