Chief among those influences was that of the lovely scenery by which the poet's young imagination was enfolded. Whether he was one of the throng which waited for the Queen on some old-time highway, or stood with the eager crowd who gathered about the Castle gates on the great day of the royal visit, is of no consequence: it can hardly be doubted that the imaginative boy of eleven did not lose that splendid spectacle; what is certain is his familiarity with the Warwickshire landscape that fortunate landscape beautiful in itself and appealing to every imagination because it was Shakespeare's country.

There are more striking outlooks than those which are found between Kenilworth and Stratford; there are more fertile and garden-like stretches of country; but there is nowhere in England happier harmony of the typical qualities of the English country: gentle undulation of wold and wood, groups of ancient trees, long lines of hedges, slow rivers winding under overhanging branches and loitering in places of immemorial shade; stately homes rich in association with men and women of force or craft, or possessed of the noble art of gentleness in ungentle times; a low, soft sky from which clouds are rarely absent, and an atmosphere which softens all outlines, subdues all sounds, and works magical effects of light and distance. These qualities of ripeness and repose are seen in their perfection from the ruined Mervyn's Tower, in which Amy Robsart was imprisoned. As far as the eye can reach, the landscape is full of a tender and gracious beauty. Nothing arrests and holds the at

tention, for the loveliness is diffused rather than concentrated; it lies like a magical veil over the whole landscape, concealing nothing and yet touching everything with a modulating softness which seems almost like a gift from the imagination. In midsummer, when the grain stands almost as high as a man's head, the foot-path which runs through it can be followed for a long distance by the eye, so sharply cut through the waving fields is it. Those winding foot-paths, which take one away from the highroads into the heart of the country, are nowhere more alluring to the eye and the imagination than in Warwickshire. They make chances for intimacy with the landscape which the highways cannot offer. The long-travelled roads are old and ripe with that quiet richness of setting which comes with age; they rise and fall with the gentle movement of the country; they are often arched with venerable trees; they wind up hill and down in leisurely, picturesque curves and lines; they cross slow-moving streams; they often loiter in recesses of shade which centuries have conspired to deepen and widen.

But it is along the quiet by-paths that one comes upon all that is essential and characteristic in Warwickshire. These immemorial ways put any man who chooses to follow them in possession of the landscape; they cross the most carefully tended fields, they penetrate the most jealously guarded estates, they offer access to ancient places of silence and seclusion. The narrow path between the hedges is one of those rights of the English people which evidence their sovereignty over possessions, the titles to which have

been lodged for centuries in private hands. They silently affirm that, though the acres may be private property, the landscape is the inalienable possession of the English people. In May, when the hawthorn is in bloom and the nightingale is in full song, a Warwickshire foot-path leads one into a world as ideal as the island in "The Tempest" or the fairy-haunted country of the "Midsummer Night's Dream." That Shakespeare knew these pathways into the realm of the imagination there is ample evidence; that he was familiar with these byways about Stratford is beyond a doubt. Does not one of them still lead to Shottery? Kenilworth, which was a noble and impressive stronghold in Shakespeare's boyhood, ample enough to entertain a court with long-continued and magnificent pageants, is not less imposing in its vast ruins than in the day when knights rode at one another, spears at rest, in the tilting-yard and the Queen was received at the great gate by Leicester. In the loveliness of its surroundings, the beauty of its outlook, the romantic interest of its ivy-covered ruins, and the splendour and tragedy of its historic fortunes, it symbolizes the harmony of natural and human association which invests all Warwickshire with perennial charm. Much of this charm has come since Shakespeare's time, but it was there in quality and characteristic when he roamed afield on summer afternoons, or, on holidays, made his way to Kenilworth, Warwick, or Coventry. It was in key with his own poised and harmonious spirit; its quality is diffused through his work. For nature in the plays is always subordinate to the unfolding of

character through action, but is so clearly limned, so constantly in view, so much and so significantly a part of the complete impression which conveys not only a drama but its setting and atmosphere, that it must have had large space in the poet's spiritual life.

There are touches of Warwickshire in all Shakespeare's work in "The Winter's Tale" the flowers of Warwickshire are woven together in one of the most exquisite calendars of season and blossom in the whole range of poetry; in "As You Like It" the depths and hollows and long stretches of shade of the old Forest of Arden rise before the imagination; in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" there are bits of landscape which are now in fairyland, but were once good solid Warwickshire soil. The valley of the Tweed and the mountains about the Scotch lakes form a natural background for Scott's poetry; the Ayrshire landscape rises into view again and again in the verse of Burns; the lake district of Cumberland, with its mists and multitudinous voices of hidden streams, lies behind Wordsworth's verse. In like manner, Warwickshire lies always in the background of Shakespeare's mind, and gives form, quality, and colour to the landscape of his poetry. Unless dramatic necessity imposes catastrophic effects upon him, as in "Lear" and "Macbeth," Shakespeare's landscape is reposeful, touched with ripe and tender beauty, happily balanced between extremes in temperature, happily poised between austerity and prodigality in beauty. Its loveliness has more solidity and substance than

that which the New England poets loved so well, and the fragrance of which, as delicate as that of the arbutus, they have caught and preserved; while, on the other hand, it has not the voluptuous note, the beguiling and passionate sensuousness, of the Italian landscape. The beauty of the country in which Rosalind wanders and Jacques meditates is more harmonious with man's spiritual fortunes and less sympathetic with his passion than that in which Romeo and Juliet live out the brief and ardent drama of that young love which sees nothing in the world save the reflection of itself. The landscape of the Forest of Arden knows all the changes of the season, and bends the most obsequious courtier to its conditions; it has a quiet and pervasive charm for the senses, but its deepest appeal is to the imagination; there is in it a noble reticence and restraint which exact much before it surrenders its ultimate loveliness, and in its surrender it reinvigorates instead of relaxing and debilitating. Its beauty is as much a matter of structure as of form; as much a matter of atmosphere as of colour. And this is the charm of Warwickshire.

It does not know the roll and thunder of the sea, which Tennyson thought were more tumultuous and resonant on the coast of Lincolnshire than anywhere else in England; it is not overlaid with the bloom which makes Kent a garden when the hop-vines are in flower; it lacks that something, half legendary and half real, which draws to Cornwall so many lovers of the idylls of Arthur; the noble largeness of the Somerset landscapes is not to be found within its boun