Paul's as if upon a public highway; and in Traill's" Social England" we are told that tailors met their customers and measured them for garments in the same sacred building, and lawyers and clients held there their consultations.

The social life of Elizabeth's time cannot be compressed into brief compass, but must be studied from many points of view before it can be at all understood.

Thus we should have to take up in turn each class of the many ranks into which the English were divided, for we could not argue from the life of a merchant to that of an idler about town, nor from the pursuits of Sir Philip Sidney could we understand the daily occupations of a small London shopkeeper.

Readers of Shakespeare will acquire some notion of the life led by the men of action, something of rural life, and a glimpse of London ways; but even in those all-embracing chronicles of the time there is little hint

of the every-day drudgery that made England a great commercial nation; of the small trades of the city streets; of the religious observances and persecutions; of the very sights and scenes that were commonplaces to the author, but would be of absorbing interest to us.

There is in Sir Walter Scott's "Fortunes of Nigel" a picture of London life under King James that will help us to know intimately what it must have been a few years earlier; and no student of the times can afford to miss Scott's marvelous reconstruction of these old London days.

We might spend many a day in visiting the market-places to see the women of the time in their queer caps and ruffs chaffering over baskets of vegetables; in watching with indignation the suffering of some unfortunate victim of the pillory, pelted and jeered at by the brutal city crowds; in frequenting the open parks and grounds and gazing at the pageants of the trade guilds or the

merry-makings upon May days and other holidays. Even the routine of the day's work, the opening of shops by the 'prentices, the setting out of wares to catch the eyes of passers-by, the methods of traffic, would be new in a thousand minor matters.

The dress of each class, from the high starched ruffs and dyed hair of the Queen, a walking treasury of bejeweled finery, to the rags of the wandering fiddler, would furnish an endless subject of study. The customs at the table, the services in the churches, the keeping or non-keeping of Sunday, the street ballads, the quarters of the city devoted to each special trade, the street brawls, the wedding or funeral processions all might be taken up in turn and made the subject of a long discourse by an observer from our own times.

In the midst of these bewildering differences it is with a sense of relief that we find the laws of human nature not so different but that we may understand the passions

and motives Shakespeare has preserved for us; and we may believe that if we could have sat with the audiences in The Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose or the Globe we should have laughed or wept with the people of the time at the pictures of life presented by Shakespeare's fellow-actors. There would be allusions we could not understand; but considering the changes that have transformed his century to ours, it is remarkable that so little in the dramas is beyond our sympathy.

CHAPTER IX

A DAY WITH SHAKESPEARE

MERCHANT OF VENICE."

THE

The life led by Shakespeare in this bustling world of London we can only guess out for ourselves, remembering that our surmises will be true only very generally. Probably he lived in lodgings attended by some old serving-woman such as he has recreated for us in Juliet's nurse, or Dame Quickly the hostess. The furnishing of his chamber was likely, in a man of his character, to be simple.

We can imagine him awaking in the morning to see the sunlight coming through the small panes of a latticed window, and arraying himself in his long hose, trunk, unstarched shirt with ruffles at the wrists,