quence, and the passionate earnestness with which such
friends speak when the heart is opened. But there is one,
whose Shadow we now see, more passionate and more
earnest than
any of that company. She rises, with a full
goblet in her hand: Son, I drink to thee. Benjamin, my
beloved son, thrice I drink to thee. See ye this paper;
one grain of the subtle drug which it holds is death. Even
as we now pledge each other in rich canary, would I have
pledged thee in lusty strong poison, had thy sentence taken
execution. Thy shame would have been my shame, and
neither of us should have lived after it.'
'She was no churl,' says Benjamin.

ENGLISH POETS IN SCOTLAND.

I HAVE not hesitated to express a belief that Shaksper visited Scotland in 1601, as one of the company of Engl players who performed at Aberdeen that year, under th management of Lawrence Fletcher. The question be satisfactorily settled; but in the following paper I have taken a rapid view of the supposed journey, as an illustre tion of the aspects which Scotland would present to a Englishman a little while before the accession of James.*

In the summer of 1618, Ben Jonson undertook th extraordinary task of travelling to Edinburgh on for Bacon said to him, with reference to his project,' He love not to see poesy go on other foot than poetical Dactylus and Spondæus.'† Jonson seems to have been proud of his exploit; for in his News from the New World discovere in the Moon,' a masque, presented at Court in 1620, he makes a printer say, 'One of our greatest poets (I know re how good a one) went to Edinburgh on foot, and can back.' According to Drummond he was to write his fo pilgrimage hither, and call it a discovery.' We have n traces of Jonson in this journey, except what we derive from the Conversations with Drummond,' and the notic 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 o 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."

*This, and two preceding papers, p. 135 and p. 147, formed chapters in the original edition of William Shakspere, a Biography; but were omitted by me in the succeeding editions. † Conversations with Drummond.

'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 as 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. We have no token of the impress of its mountain scenery upon his mind approaching to the distinctness of a famous passage in Shakspere-a solitary passage in a poet who rarely indeed. 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 't that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air.'*

John Taylor, homely as he is, may better enable us to trace Shakspere's probable course, assuming that the journey was undertaken. Taylor, 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

*

Antony and Cleopatra, one of Shakspere's later plays.

M

he had preserved for us some of the ballads that he must have heard in his revelries, that told of the wondrous feat of the bold outlaws who lived in the greenwood around

Carlisle, in the north countree.'

Assuredly Shakspere had heard of Adam Bell, the brav archer of Inglewood: 'He that hits me, let him be clappe on the shoulder and called Adam.* It is pleasant t believe that some snatches of old minstrelsy might have recreated his solitary journey as he rode near the borde land.

Sir Walter Scott, in the delightful Introduction to his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,' says, The accessi of James to the English crown converted the extremity its the centre of his kingdom.' The Scottish poet would see to have borrowed the idea from a very humble Englis 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 differ ence between the two countries, seeing that Scotland had its sun and sky, its sheep, and corn, and good ale. But be

tells us that in former times this border-land

"Was the curs'd climate of rebellious crimes.'

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

* Much Ado About Nothing.

† Taylor's ‹ Pennilesse Pilgrimage.'

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, fifty years ago, was preserved by tradition on the western borders of Scotland, was perhaps 11 sung by many a sturdy clansman at the beginning of the seventeenth century :

But the feuds of the Scotch and English borderers were not the only causes of insecurity on the western frontier. If the great dramatic poet, who has painted so vividly the desolation of civil war in his own country, had passed through Annandale in 1601, he would have seen the traces of a petty civil war which was then raging between the clans of Maxwell and Johnstone, who a few years before had met in deadly conflict on the very ground over which he would pass. The lord of Maxwell, with a vast band of followers, had been slain without quarter. This was something different from the quiet security of England-a state of comparative blessedness that Shakspere subse

* The snatch of melody in Lear, in all likelihood part of an English song, will occur to the reader :

'Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd?'

Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. ii. p. 58.