speare.

This story enriches with a rare touch of real life our faint and meagre memorials of ShakeNot sufficiently well established to be beyond the assaults of those who think it scorn that the author of King Lear and Hamlet should have stolen deer and written coarse lampoons, it yet may well be cherished, and its credibility maintained, by those who prize a trait of character and a glimpse of personal experience above all question of propriety. In Queen Bess's time deerstealing did not rank with sheep-stealing; and he who wrote, and was praised for writing, The Comedy of Errors and Troilus and Cressida when he was a man, may well be believed, without any abatement of his dignity, to have written the Lucy ballad in his boyhood. Malone thought that he had exploded the tradition by showing that Sir Thomas Lucy had no park, and therefore could have no deer to be stolen; and the lampoon has been set aside as a fabrication by some writers, and regarded by all with suspicion. But it appears that, whether the knight had an enclosure with formal park privileges or not, the family certainly had deer on their estate, which fulfils the only condition requisite for the truth of the story in that regard; for Sir Thomas Lucy, son of Shakespeare's victim, sent a buck as a present to Harehill when Sir Thomas Egerton entertained Queen Elizabeth there in August, 1602.* I think that there is a

solution to the question somewhat different from any that has yet been brought forward, and much more probable.

The first scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor certainly gives strong support to the tradition; so strong, in fact, that it has been supposed, with some reason, to have been its origin. In that scene Shakespeare makes Justice Shallow (who, in the words of Davies, is his clodpate, or, as we should say, his clownish or loutish, justice) bear a dozen white luces, or pikes, in his coat of arms, which bearing gives the Welsh parson the opportunity for his punning jest that "the dozen white louses do become an old coat well."* The Lucys bore punning coat-armor, three luces, hariant; and the allusion is unmistakable. In that scene, too, the country gentleman who is so proud of the luces in his old coat bursts upon the stage furious at Falstaff for having killed his deer. Now, in Shakespeare's day, as well as long before, killing a gentleman's deer was almost as common among wild young men as robbing a farmer's orchard

*Some critics have attributed the transformation of luces to louses to Sir Hugh's incapacity of English speech; but this is to rob the Welshman of his wit. The pronunciation of u as ow is no trick of a Welsh tongue, or of any other, I believe; but "louse" was pronounced like "luce" or "loose" by many people. So the ballad tells us that "lousy is Lucy as some volke miscall it." There is a similar variation as to the name Toucey, which some pronounce Toosey, giving the first syllable the vowel sound of too and you, others Towsey, with the sound of how, thou.

among boys. Indeed, it was looked upon as a sign of that poor semblance of manliness sometimes called spirit, and was rather a gentleman's misdemeanor than a yeoman's; one which a peasant would not have presumed to commit, except, indeed, at risk of his ears, for poaching at once upon the game- and the sin-preserves of his betters. Noblemen engaged in it; and in days gone by the very first Prince of Wales had been a deerstealer. Among multitudinous passages illustrative of this trait of manners, a story preserved by Wood in his Athena Oxonienses fixes unmistakably the grade of the offence. It is there told, on the authority of Simon Forman, that his patrons, Robert Pinkney and John Thornborough, the latter of whom was admitted a member of Magdalen College in 1570, and became Bishop of Bristol and Worcester, "seldom studied or gave themselves to their books, but spent their time in fencing-schools and dancing-schools, in stealing deer and conies, in hunting the hare and wooing girls." * In fact, deer-stealing then supplied to the young members of the privileged classes in Old England an excitement of a higher kind than that afforded by beating watchmen and tearing off knockers and bellpulls to the generation but just passed away. A passage of Titus Andronicus, written soon after Shakespeare reached London, is here in point. Prince Demetrius exclaims:

*Vol. I. p. 371.

"What, hast thou not full often struck a doe,

an

And cleanly borne her past the keeper's nose?" Whereupon Steevens, wishing to discredit the play as Shakespeare's, remarks: "We have here Demetrius, the son of a queen, demanding of his brother if he has not often been reduced to practise the common artifices of a deer-stealer, absurdity worthy the rest of the piece." Probably Steevens had never read in the old chronicle of Edward of Caernarvon, the first Prince of Wales, that "King Edward put his son, Prince Edward, in prison because he had riotously broken into the park of Walter Langton, Bishop of Chester, and stolen his deer." The Prince did this at the instigation of his favorite, that handsome, insolent rake, Piers de Gaveston; and he had previously begged Hugh le Despencer to pardon his "well-beloved John de Bonynge," who had in like manner broken into that nobleman's park. What was pastime for a Prince of Wales and his companions in the fourteenth century, might well be regarded as a venial misdemeanor on the part of a landless knight, and a mark of spirit in a yeoman's son, in the sixteenth.

But he with the "three louses rampant" on his coat makes much more than this of Falstaff's affair. He will bring it before the Council, he will make a Star-Chamber matter of it, and pronounces it a riot. And, in fact, according to his account, Sir John was not content with steal

ing his deer, but broke open his lodge and beat his men. It seems then, that, in writing this passage, Shakespeare had in mind not only an actual occurrence in which Sir Thomas Lucy was concerned, but one of greater gravity than a mere deer-stealing affair; that having been made the occasion of more serious outrage.

Now, Sir Thomas Lucy was a man of much consideration in Warwickshire, where he had come to a fine estate in 1551, at only nineteen years of age. He was a member of Parliament twice; first in 1571, and next from November, 1584, to March of the following year; just before the very time when, according to all indications, Shakespeare left Stratford. Sir Thomas was a somewhat prominent member of the Puritanical party, as appears by what is known of his Parliamentary course. For instance, during his first term he was one of a committee appointed upon "defections" in religious matters, one object of the movers of which was "to purge the Common Prayer Book, and free it from certain superstitious ceremonies, as using the sign of the cross in baptism," &c. He was, on the other hand, active in the enforcement and preservation of the game privileges of the nobility and gentry, and served on a committee to which a bill for this purpose was referred, of which he appears to have been chairman. This took place in his last term, 1584 to 1585, the time of his alleged persecution of