length they reach the village. There is cordial welcome in every house. The tables of the Manor Hall are set out with a substantial English breakfast; and the farmer's kitchen emulates the same bounteous hospitality. In a little while the church-tower sends forth another note. A single bell tolls for matins. The church soon fills with a zealous congregation; not a seat is empty. The service for this particular feast is attended to with pious reverence; and when the people are invited to assist in its choral parts, they still show that, however the national taste for music may have been injured by the suppression of the chauntries, they are familiar with the fine old chaunts of their fathers, and can perform them with spirit and exactness, each according to his ability, but the most with some knowledge of musical science. The homily is ended. The sun shines glaringly through the white glass of this new church; and some of the Stratford people may think it fortunate that their old painted windows are not yet all removed.* The dew is off the green that skirts the churchyard; the pipers and crowders are ready; the first dance is to be chosen. Thomas Heywood, one of Shakspere's pleasant contemporaries, has left us a dialogue which shows how embarrassing was such a choice:— "Jack. Come, what shall it be?' Rogero?' Jenkin. Rogero?' no; we will dance The beginning of the world.' Sisly. I love no dance so well as 'John, come kiss me now.' Nicholas. I have ere now deserv'd a cushion; call for the Cushion-dance.' Jenkin. No; we 'll have' The hunting of the fox.' Jack. 'The hay, The hay;' there's nothing like ‘The hay.' 6 Jenkin. Let me speak for all, and we 'll have Sellenger's round.' "† Jenkin, who rejects Rogero,' is strenuous for The Beginning of the World,' and he carries his proposal by giving it the more modern name of 'Sellenger's Round.' The tune was as old as Henry VIII.; for it is mentioned in The History of Jack of Newbury,' by Thomas Deloney, whom Kemp called the great ballad-maker:-"In comes a noise of musicians in tawny coats, who, taking off their caps, asked if they would have any music? The widow answered, 'No; they were merry enough.' 'Tut!' said the old man; ‘let us hear, good fellows, what you can do; and play me The Beginning of the World.'" A quaint tune is this, by whatever name it be known-an air not boisterous in its character, but calm and graceful;—a round dance "for as many as will;" who "take hands and go round twice, and back again," with a succession of figures varying the circular movement, and allowing the display of individual grace and nimbleness:- * “All images, shrines, tabernacles, roodlofts, and monuments of idolatry are removed, taken down, and defaced; only the stories in glass windows excepted, which, for want of sufficient store of new stuff, and by reason of extreme charge that should grow by the alteration of the same into white panes throughout the realm, are not altogether abolished in most places at once, but by little and little suffered to decay, that, white glass may be provided and set up in their rooms.”—Harrison's Description of England :' 1586. "Each one, tripping on his toe, Will be here with mop and mowe.' The country folks of Shakspere's time put their hearts into the dance; and, as their ears were musical by education, their energy was at once joyous and elegant. Glad hearts are there even amongst those who are merely lookers-on upon this scene. The sight of happiness is in itself happiness; and there was real happiness in the "unreproved pleasures" of the youths and maidens If Jenkin carried the voices for Sellenger's Round,' Sisly must next be gratified with 'John, come kiss me now.' Let it not be thought that Sisly called for a vulgar tune. This was one of the most favourite airs of Queen Elizabeth's 'Virginal Book,' and after being long popular in England it transmigrated into a "godly song" of Scotland. The tune is in two parts, of which the first part only is in the Virginal Book,' and this is a sweet little melody full of grace and tenderness. The more joyous revellers may now desire something more stirring, and call for 'Packington's Pound,' as old perhaps as the days of Henry VIII., and which survived for a couple of centuries in the songs of Ben Jonson and Gay. The controversy about players, pipers, and dancers has fixed the date of some of these old tunes, showing us to what melodies the young Shakspere might have moved joyously in a round or a galliard. Stephen Gosson, for example, sneers at Trenchmore. But we know that Trenchmore' was of an earlier date than Gosson's book.§ A writer who came twenty years after Gosson shows us that the Trenchmore' was scarcely to be reckoned amongst the graceful dances: "In this case, like one dancing the Trenchmore,' he stamped up and down the yard, holding his hips in his hands." It was the leaping, romping dance, in which the exuberance of animal spirits delights. Burton says "We must dance Trenchmore' over tables, chairs, and stools." Selden has a capital passage upon Trenchmore,' showing us how the sports of the country were adopted by the Court, until the most boisterous of the dancing delights of the people fairly drove out "state and ancientry." He says, in his Table Talk,'—"The Court of England is much altered. At a solemn dancing, first you had the grave measures, then the corantoes and the galliards, and this kept up with ceremony; and at length to Trenchmore' and the Cushiondance:' then all the company dances, lord and groom, lady and kitchen-maid, no distinction. So in our Court in Queen Elizabeth's time, gravity and state were kept up; in King James's time things were pretty well; but in King Charles's time there has been nothing but Trenchmore' and the ‘Cushiondance,' omnium gatherum, tolly polly, hoite come toite.” It was in this spirit that Charles II. at a court ball called for Cuckolds all arow,' which he said * Tempest, Act Iv., Scene 11. See Ben Jonson's song in Bartholomew Fair,' beginning— § See p. 56. was "the old dance of England."* From its name, and its jerking melody, this would seem to be one of the country dances of parallel lines. They were each danced by the people; but the round dance must unquestionably have been the most graceful. Old Burton writes of it with a fine enthusiasm:-"It was a pleasant sight, to see those pretty knots and swimming figures. The sun and moon (some say) dance about the earth, the three upper planets about the sun as their centre,—now stationary, now direct, now retrograde; now in apogæo, then in perigao; now swift, then slow; occidental, oriental; they turn round, jump and trace, and about the sun with those thirty-three Maculæ or Burbonian planets, circa solem saltantes Cytharedum, saith Fromundus. Four Medicean stars dance about Jupiter, two Austrian about Saturn, &c., and all (belike) to the music of the spheres." Joan's Placket,' the delightful old tune that we yet beat time to, when the inspiriting song of When I followed a lass' comes across our memories, would be a favourite upon the green at Welford; and surely he who in after-times said, “I did think by the excellent constitution of thy leg it was formed under the star of a galliard,"§ might strive not to resist the attraction of the air of Sweet Margaret,' and willingly surrender himself to the inspiration of its gentle and its buoyant movements. One dance he must take part in; for even the squire and the squire's lady cannot resist its charms,—the dance which has been in and out of fashion for two Pepys's' Memoirs,' 8vo., vol. i., p. 359. +Anatomy of Melancholy,' Part III., Sec. 2. Burton, the universal reader, might have caught the idea from Sir John Davies's Orchestra; or, a Poem expressing the Antiquity and Excellency of Dancing :'— "Dancing, bright lady, then began to be, When the first seeds whereof the world did spring, The fire, air, earth, and water, did agree, By Love's persuasion, Nature's mighty king, Since when they still are carried in a round, Like this, he fram'd the gods' eternal bower, As that their movings do a music frame, And they themselves still dance unto the same." Love in a Village. § Twelfth Night, Act 1., Scene 1. centuries and a half, and has again asserted its rights in England, in despite of waltz and quadrille. We all know, upon the most undoubted testimony, that the Sir Roger de Coverley who to the lasting regret of all mankind caught a cold at the County Sessions, and died, in 1712, was the great-grandson of the worthy knight of Coverley, or Cowley, who "was inventor of that famous country-dance which is called after him."* Who can doubt, then, that William Shakspere might have danced this famous dance, in hall or on greensward, with its graceful advancings and retirings, its bows and curtsies, its chain figures, its pretty knots unravelled in simultaneous movement? In vain for him might old Stubbes denounce peril to body and mind in his outcry against the "horrible vice of pestiferous dancing." The manner in which the first Puritans set about making people better, after the fashion of a harsh nurse to a froward child, was very remarkable. Stubbes threatens the dancers with lameness and broken legs, as well as with severer penalties; but, being constrained to acknowledge that dancing" is both ancient and general, having been used ever in all ages as well of the godly as of the wicked," he reconciles the matter upon the following principle: If it be used for man's comfort, recreation, and godly pleasure, privately (every sex distinct by themselves), whether with music or otherwise, it cannot be but a very tolerable exercise." We doubt if this arrangement would have been altogether satisfactory to the young men and maidens at the Welford Wake, even if Philip Stubbes had himself appeared amongst them, with his unpublished manuscript in his pocket, to take the place of the pipers, crying out to them—" Give over, therefore, your occupations, you pipers, you fiddlers, you minstrels, and you musicians, you drummers, you tabretters, you fluters, and all other of that wicked brood." Neither, when the flowing cup was going round amongst the elders to song and story, would he have been much heeded, had he himself lifted up his voice, exclaiming, "Wherefore should the whole town, parish, village, and country, keep one and the same day, and make such gluttonous feasts as they do?" One young man might have answered, "Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?"§ Crossing the Avon by the ancient mill of Welford, we descend the stream for about a mile, till we reach the rising ground upon which stands the hamlet of Hillborough. This is the "haunted Hillborough" of the lines which tradition ascribes to Shakspere. Assuredly the inhabitants of that fine old farm-house, still venerable in its massive walls and its mullioned windows, would be at the wake at Welford. They press the neighbours from Stratford to go a little out of their way homewards to accept their own hospitality. There is dance and merriment within the house, and shovel-board and tric-trac for the sedentary. But the evening is brilliant; for the sun is not yet setting behind Bardon Hill, and there is an early moon. There will be a game at Barley-break in the field before the old house. The lots are cast; three damsels and three youths are Spectator, Nos. 2 and 517. + Anatomy of Abuses. § Twelfth Night, Act 11., Scene 1. + Ibid. || See p. 69. chosen for the sport; a plot of ground is marked out into three compartments, in each of which a couple is placed,—the middle division bearing the name of hell. In that age the word was not used profanely nor vulgarly. Sidney and Browne and Massinger describe the sport. The couple who are in this condemned place try to catch those who advance from the other divisions, and we may imagine the noise and the laughter of the vigorous resistance and the coy yieldings that sounded on Hillborough, and scared the pigeons from their old dovecote. The difficulty of the game consisted in this-that the couple in the middle place were not to separate, whilst the others might loose hands whenever they pleased. Sidney alludes to this peculiarity of the game: But half a century after Sidney, the sprightliest of poets, Sir John Suckling, described the game of Barley-break with unequalled vivacity : |