silent about the deer-stealing and the flight to London, merely saying, "This William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen." But there were other antiquarian gossips of Aubrey's age, who have left us their testimony upon this subject. The Reverend William Fulman, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who died in 1688, bequeathed his papers to the Reverend Richard Davies of Sandford, Oxfordshire; and on the death of Mr. Davies, in 1708, these papers were deposited in the library of Corpus Christi. Fulman appears to have made some collections for the biography of our English poets, and under the name Shakspere he gives the dates of his birth and death. But Davies, who added notes to his friend's manuscripts, affords us the following piece of information: "He was much given to all unluckiness, in stealing venison and rabbits; particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipped, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country, to his great advancement. But his revenge was so great, that he is his Justice Clodpate, and calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his name, bore three louses rampant for his arms." The accuracy of this chronicler, as to events supposed to have happened a hundred years before he wrote, may be inferred from his correctness in what was accessible to him. Justice Clodpate is a new character; and the three louses rampant have diminished strangely from the "dozen white luces" of Master Slender. In Mr. Davies's account we have no mention of the ballad-through which, according to Rowe, the young poet revenged his "ill usage." But Capell, the editor of Shakspere, found a new testimony to that fact: "The writer of his 'Life,' the first modern, [Rowe] speaks of a 'lost ballad,' which added fuel, he says, to the knight's before-conceived anger, and 'redoubled the prosecution;' and calls the ballad 'the first essay of Shakspere's poetry: one stanza of it, which has the appearance of genuine, was put into the editor's hands many years ago by an ingenious gentleman (grandson of its preserver), with this account of the way in which it descended to him: Mr. Thomas Jones, who dwelt at Tarbick, a village in Worcestershire, a few miles from Stratford-on-Avon, and died in the year 1703, aged upwards of ninety, remembered to have heard from several old people at Stratford the story of Shakespeare's robbing Sir Thomas Lucy's park ; and their account of it agreed with Mr. Rowe's, with this addition—that the ballad written against Sir Thomas by Shakespeare was stuck upon his park-gate, which exasperated the knight to apply to a lawyer at Warwick to proceed against him. Mr. Jones had put down in writing the first stanza of the ballad, which was all he remembered of it, and Mr. Thomas Wilkes (my grandfather) transmitted it to my father by memory, who also took it in writing." The first stanza of the ballad which Mr. Jones put down in writing as all he remembered of it, has been so often reprinted, that we can scarcely be justified in omitting it. It is as follows: : "A parliamente member, a justice of peace, At home a poor scare-crowe, at London an asse; *Notes and various Readings to Shakespeare, Part III., p. 75. See Note to this Chapter If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it, Yet an asse in his state We allowe by his eares but with asses to mate. But the tradition sprang up in another quarter. Mr. Oldys, the respectable antiquarian, has also preserved this stanza, with the following remarks :-"There was a very aged gentleman living in the neighbourhood of Stratford (where he died fifty years since), who had not only heard from several old people in that town of Shakspeare's transgression, but could remember the first stanza of that bitter ballad, which, repeating to one of his acquaintance, he preserved it in writing, and here it is, neither better nor worse, but faithfully transcribed from the copy, which his relation very courteously communicated to me."* The copy preserved by Oldys corresponds word by word with that printed by Capell; and it is therefore pretty evident that each was derived from the same source, -the person who wrote down the verses from the memory of the one old gentleman. In truth, the whole matter looks rather more like an exercise of invention than of memory. Mr. De Quincey has expressed a very strong opinion "that these lines were a production of Charles II.'s reign, and applied to a Sir Thomas Lucy, not very far removed, if at all, from the age of him who first picked up the precious filth: the phrase 'parliament member' we believe to be quite unknown in the colloquial use of Queen Elizabeth.” But he has overlooked a stronger point against the authenticity of the ballad. He says that "the scurrilous rondeau has been imputed to Shakspeare ever since the days of the credulous Rowe." This is a mistake. Rowe expressly says the ballad is "lost.' It was not till the time of Oldys and Capell, nearly half a century after Rowe, that the single stanza was found. It was not published till seventy years after Rowe's "Life of Shakspeare." We have little doubt that the regret of Rowe that the ballad was lost was productive not only of the discovery, but of the creation, of the delicious fragment. By-and-by more was discovered, and the entire song "was found in a chest of drawers that formerly belonged to Mrs. Dorothy Tyler, of Shottery, near Stratford, who died in 1778, at the age of 80." This is Malone's account, who inserts the entire song in the Appendix to his posthumous "Life of Shakspeare," with the expression of his persuasion "that one part of this ballad is just as genuine as the other; that is, that the whole is a forgery." We believe, however, that the first stanza is an old forgery, and the remaining stanzas a modern one. If the ballad is held to be all of one piece, it is a self-evident forgery. But in the "entire song" the new stanzas have not even the merit of imitating the versification of the first attempt to degrade Shakspere to the character of a brutal doggrel-monger. This, then, is the entire evidence as to the deer-stealing tradition. According to Rowe, the young Shakspere was engaged more than once in robbing a park, for which he was prosecuted by Sir Thomas Lucy; he made a ballad upon his prosecutor, and then, being more severely pursued, fled to London. According to • MS. Notes upon Langbaine, from which Steevens published the lines in 1778. 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 own. 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 sport— whatever 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 |