above all their professional brethren, by the King's own act, carried into effect within ten days after his arrival within his new metropolis. But all these objections are removed when we refer to the facts opened to us by the council registers of Aberdeen. King James the Sixth of Scotland had recommended his servants to the magistrates of Aberdeen; and Lawrence Fletcher, there can be no doubt, was one of those servants so recommended. The patent of James the First of England directed to Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakspere, and others, eighteen months after the performances at Aberdeen, is directed to those persons as our servants." It does not appoint them the King's servants, but recognises the appointment as already existing. Can there be a reasonable doubt that the appointment was originally made by the King in Scotland, and subsisted when the same King ascended the English throne? Lawrence Fletcher was admitted a burgess of Guild of the borough of Aberdeen as comedian to his Majesty, in company with other persons who were servitors to his Majesty. He received that honour, we may conclude, as the head of the company, also the King's servants. We know not how he attained this distinction amongst his fellows, but it is impossible to imagine that accident so favoured him in two instances. The King's servant who was most favoured at Aberdeen and the King's servant who is first in the patent in 1603, was surely placed in that position by the voice of his fellows, the other King's servants. William Shakspere is named with him in a marked manner in the heading of the patent. Seven of their fellows are also named, as distinguished from "the rest of their associates." There can be no doubt of the identity of the Lawence Fletcher, the servant of James VI. of Scotland, and the Lawrence Fletcher, the servant of James I. of England. Can we doubt that the King's servants who played comedies and stage plays in Aberdeen, in 1601, were, taken as a company, the King's servants who were licensed to exercise the art and faculty of playing, throughout all the realm, in 1603? If these points are evident, what reason have we to doubt that William Shakspere, the second named in the licence of 1603, was amongst the King's servants at Aberdeen in 1601 ? Every circumstance concurs in the likelihood that he was of that number recommended by the King's special letter; and his position in the licence, even before Burbage, was, we may well believe, a compliment to him who in 1601 had taught "our James" something of the power and riches of the English drama. upon? The circumstances which we have thus detailed give us, we think, warranty to conclude that the story of Macbeth might have been suggested to Shakspere upon Scottish ground; that the accuracy displayed in the local descriptions and allusions might have been derived from a rapid personal observation; that some of the peculiarities of his witchcraft imagery might have been found in Scottish superstitions, and more especially in those which we have shown may have been rife at Aberdeen at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Is there anything whatever to contradict the inferences which are justly to be deduced from the records which we have described and commented It cannot be denied, we apprehend, that Shakspere's company was at Aberdeen in the autumn of 1601. There is nothing that we have found which can be opposed to the fair and natural inferences that belong to the registers of the Town Council. The records of the Presbytery of Aberdeen are wholly silent upon the subject of this visit of a company of players to their city. These records, on the 25th of September, 1601, contain an entry regarding Lord Glamis an entry respecting one of the many deeds of violence for which Scotland was remarkable, when the strong hand so constantly attempted to defy the law Mr. Patrick Johnson, it seems, had been killed by Lord Glamis, and the fact is here brought under the cognizance of the Presbytery. An entry of the 9th of October deals with Alexander Ceath [Keith], on a charge of adultery. Another of the 23rd of October relates to John Innis. Beyond the 5th of November, when there is another record, it would be unnecessary to seek for any minute regarding the players who were rewarded and honoured by the Town Council. There is no entry whatever on the subject.* If Shakspere's company were at Aberdeen -and to disprove it, it must be shown that Lawrence Fletcher, who was the King of Scotland's comedian in 1601, was not the Lawrence Fletcher who was associated with Shakspere in the patent granted by James upon his accession : • We consulted these documents, which are preserved in the fine library of the Advocates at Edinburgh. We were assisted by very kind friends-William Spalding, Esq., Professor of Rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh (who very early distinguished himself as a critic on Shakspere ), and John Hill Burton, Esq. (who possesses the most complete knowledge of the treasures of that valuable library)-in searching for documents that could illustrate this question. in 1603-what possible reason can there be for supposing that Shakspere was absent from his company upon so interesting an occasion as a visit to the Scottish King and Court? The extraordinary merits of the dramas of Shakspere might have been familiar to the King through books. Previous to 1601, there have been nine undoubted plays of Shakspere's published, which might readily have reached Scotland.* Essex and Southampton were in the habit of correspondence with James; and at the very hour when James officially knew of his accession to the crown of England, he dispatched an order from Holyrood House to the Council of State for the release of Southampton from the Tower. It is not likely that the Lord Chamberlain's servants would have taken the long journey to Scotland upon the mere chance of being acceptable to the Court. If they were desired to come, it is not probable that Shakspere would have been absent. It was probably his usual season of repose from his professional pursuits in London. The last duties to his father's memory might have been performed on the 8th of September, leaving abundant time to reach the Court, whether at Holyrood, or Stirling, or Linlithgow, or Falkland; to be enrolled amongst the servants who performed before the King; and subsequently to have been amongst those his fellows who received rewards on the 9th of October for their comedies and stage-plays at Aberdeen. In the summer of 1618 Ben Jonson undertook the extraordinary task of travelling to Edinburgh on foot. Bacon said to him with reference to his project, "He loved not to see poesy go on other feet than poetical Dactylus and Spondæus." Jonson seems to have been proud of his exploit, for in his News from the New World discovered in the Moon,' a masque presented at Court in 1620, he makes a printer say, "One of our greatest poets (I know not how good a one) went to Edinburgh on foot, and came back." According to Drummond he was "to write his foot pilgrimage hither, and call it a discovery." We have no traces of Jonson in this journey, except what we derive from the Conversations with Drummond,' and the notice of honest John Taylor in his 'Pennilesse Pilgrimage: "I went to Leith, where I found my long-approved and assured good friend, Master Benjamin Jonson, at one Master John Stuart's house." Jonson remained long enough in Scotland to become familiar with its hospitable people and its noble scenery. He wrote a poem in which he called Edinburgh "The heart of Scotland, Britain's other eye." "He hath intention," saith Drummond, "to write a fisher or pastoral play, and set the stage of it in the Lomond Lake." After his return to London, he earnestly solicits Drummond, by letter, to send him "some things concerning the Loch of Lomond." We find nothing in Jonson's poetry that gives us an impression that he had caught any inspiration from the country of mountains and lakes. We have no internal evidence at all that he had been in Scotland. * There is a beautiful copy of the first edition of Love's Labour's Lost, 1598, amongst Drum. mond's books, preserved apart in the library of the University of Edinburgh. 'Conversations with Drummond.' We have no token of the impress of its mountain scenery upon his mind at all approaching to the distinctness of a famous passage in Shakspere—a solitary passage in a poet who rarely indeeed describes any scenery, but one which could scarcely have been written without accurate knowledge of the realities to which "black vesper's pageants" have resemblance : "Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish; A vapour, sometime, like a bear or lion, A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon it, that nod unto the world John Taylor, homely as he is, may better enable us to trace Shakspere's probable course. Taylor, also travelling on foot, was a week in reaching Lichfield passing through Coventry. He was another week filling up some time with over-much carousing, before he got out of Manchester. Preston detained him three days with its jollity; and it was another week before, passing over the hills of Westmoreland, he reached Carlisle. Shakspere, setting out on horseback from Stratford, would reach Carlisle by easy stages in six days. Taylor stops not to describe the merry city. It was more to his purpose to enjoy the "good entertainment" of which he there "found store," than to survey its castle and its cathedral; or to look from its elevated points upon fertile meadows watered by the Eden, or the broad Frith, or the distant summits of Crossfell and Skiddaw. Would he had preserved for us some of the ballads that he must have heard in his revelries, that told of the wondrous feats of the bold outlaws who lived in the greenwood around "Carlisle, in the north countree." Assuredly Shakspere had heard of Adam Bell, the brave archer of Inglewood. "He that hits me, let him be clapped on the shoulder and called Adam." It is pleasant to believe that some snatches of old minstrelsy might have recreated his solitary journey as he rode near the border-land. Sir Walter Scott, in the delightful introduction to his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,' says, "The accession of James to the English crown converted the extremity into the centre of his kingdom." The Scottish poet would seem to have borrowed the idea from a very humble English brother of the craft : "For now those crowns are both in one combin'd, Those former borders that each one confin'd Appears to me (as I do understand) To be almost the centre of the land: This was a blessed heaven-expounded riddle To thrust great kingdoms' skirts into the middle."+ John Taylor trudges from Carlisle into Annandale, wading through the Esk, and wondering that he saw so little difference between the two countries, seeing Antony and Cleopatra, one of Shakspere's later plays. + Much Ado about Nothing. Taylor's 'Pennilesse Pilgrimage.' that Scotland had its sun and sky, its sheep, and corn, and good ale. tells us that in former times this border-land "Was the curs'd climate of rebellious crimes." But he According to him, and he was not far wrong, pell-mell fury and hurly-burly, spoiling and wasting, sharking, shifting, cutting throats, and thieving, constituted the practice both of Annandale and Cumberland. When Taylor made his pilgrimage, the existing generation would have a very fresh recollection of these outrages of former times. If Shakspere travelled over this ground, he would be more familiar with the passionate hatreds of the borderers, and would hear many a song which celebrated their deadly feuds, and kept alive the spirit of rapine and vengeance. As recently as 1596 the famous Raid of Carlisle had taken place, when the Lord of Buccleuch, then Warden of Liddesdale, surprised the Castle of Carlisle, and carried off a daring Scotch freebooter, Kinmont Willie, who had been illegally seized by the Warden of the West Marches of England, Lord Scrope. The old ballad which, forty years ago, was preserved by tradition on the western borders of Scotland, was perhaps sung by many a sturdy clansman at the beginning of the seventeenth century : "Wi' coulters, and wi' forehammers, We garr'd the bars bang merrilie, |