Again, too, in the same play (act v. scene 3) we find Shallow, in his house in Gloucestershire-only the other side of the Avon-saying to Falstaff, "You shall see mine orchard, where in an arbour we will eat a last year's pippin of mine own grafting, with a dish of carraways;" which do not, of course, mean the comfits of that name, as most of the notes say, but the carraway-russet, an apple still well known, both in the midland and southern counties, for its flavour and its good keeping qualities. So, too, in Love's Labour's Lost (act iv. scene 2), we meet the old pedant Holofernes talking about the "pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of cœlo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven, and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth;" which is, in its way, an excellent description, for the pomewater is a large apple, looking very tempting on the tree, but, in reality, excessively sour.

*

And now for a few words about Warwickshire harvesthomes, when, as Shakspere says:

The Summer's green is girded up in sheaves,

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard.

Every one will remember the description in the Winter's

* Alluded to in the old ballad, Blue Cap for Me :

"Whose cheeks did resemble two roasting pomewaters."

Tale (act iv. scene 3) of the sheep-shearing supper, which, by the way, Shakspere has most unaccountably placed, when

The year's growing ancient

Not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth

Of trembling winter,—

instead of at the latter end of the spring. Well, sheep】 shearing suppers are out of date, but this passage

Fie, daughter! when my old wife liv'd, upon

This day, she was both pantler, butler, cook;
Both dame and servant; welcom'd all; serv'd all;
Would sing her song, and dance her turn: now here
At upper end o' the table, now, i' the middle,

On his shoulder, and his: her face o' fire

With labour; and the thing she took to quench it,
She would to each one sip,-

might to this day stand as a description of a harvest-supper at some of the old Warwickshire farm-houses. And at such feasts some short snatches of the songs found in Shakspere's plays may still be heard. Many of them turn upon the same subject as Ophelia's, and it is rather difficult to separate the dross from the gold without injury to the sense. In one that I have heard occur the very lines:

And in answer to the entreaties of the maid, which are

word for word with Ophelia's,

You promised me to wed;

the faithless swain replies,—

I ne'er will wed with any one

1 So easily found as you;

which is the same in sense as the lines in Hamlet. And in another song, touching on the same subject, the treacherous lover tells the forlorn maiden,—

It is the same sad rue, the "herb o' grace o' Sundays," which Ophelia reserves for herself. I have but little doubt that Shakspere heard many of the songs, which he has from memory transcribed into his plays, sung at wakes and festivals. "Let us cast away nothing, for we may live to have need of such a verse," he writes in Troilus and Cressida; and the songs that old Autolycus sings in the Winter's Tale, Shakspere may, perhaps, have picked up from some strolling pedlar, and improved with his own thoughts.

*

* I subjoin, for the sake of comparison, an ordinary pedlar's song, from Munday's Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington (act iii. scene 1), with

Autolycus's, in the Winter's Tale (act iv. scene 3). The reader will at once see how Shakspere has idealized the theme. First, for Munday's:

And now for Shakspere's:Lawn, as white as driven snow; Cyprus, black as e'er was crow; Gloves, as sweet as damask roses; Masks for faces, and for noses; Bugle-bracelet, necklace-amber, Perfume for a lady's chamber;

Golden quoifs, and stomachers,
For my lads to give their dears;
Pins and poking-sticks of steel;
What maids lack from head to heel.
Come buy of me, come: come buy,
come buy;

Buy, lads, or else your lasses cry.

What a difference there is even in the very rhythm of the lines?

་

The House in Henley Street as Restored.

CHAPTER XII.

Ir would have been singular that Shakspere, being born in Warwickshire, should not have used some of its pro

* Some small portion of the matter in this chapter, and more in the Appendix, has appeared in a paper I contributed to Fraser's Magazine for October, 1856, and which the kindness of the editor has enabled me to use again. It has, however, all been entirely rewritten, and may be considered