center of the town of Stratford-on-Avon. The estate was sold to him for £60, a moderate sum for so considerable a property, but in a paper of the time of Edward VI the residence is described as having then been for some time “in great ruyne and decay and unrepayred," so that it was probably in a dilapidated condition when it was transferred to Shakespeare. There are reasons for believing that it was renovated by the new owner; but whatever may have been its state of repair at the time of its acquisition, it was unquestionably one of the largest domiciles in the town, there having been no other, with the single exception of the College, that was conspicuously more important. Sir Hugh Clopton, for whom it was erected, speaks of it in 1496 as his "great house," a title under which, as it will be observed anon, it was popularly known at Stratford for upwards of two centuries. Neither its history nor its magnitude sufficed, however, to attract the serious consideration of our early topographers, and thus it is that scarcely any details of a precise character have been discovered respecting the nature of the house, one which, if now in existence, would have been the most interesting edifice on the surface of the globe. We know indeed, that it was mainly constructed of brick raised on stone foundations, that it was gabled, and that there was a bay-window on the eastern or garden side, but little beyond this. Two eye-witnesses only, out of the numbers who had seen the building previously to its destruction, have left memorials, and those but faint notices, of its appearance. Leland, who wrote about the year 1540, simply describes it as "a praty house of bricke and tymbre," words which may imply either that the upper part was formed entirely of wood or that there

were large portions of bricknogging in the outer walls. Our other informant was a native of Stratford-on-Avon, one Richard Grimmitt, who was very familiar with New Place in the years immediately preceding its demolition, and whose old-age dim memory of the locality in 1767 is thus recorded by the Rev. Joseph Greene, an intelligent Warwickshire antiquary of the last century,-"this Richard said he in his youth had been a playfellow with Edward Clopton, senior, eldest son of Sir John Clopton, knight, and had been often with him in the Great House near the Chapel in Stratford call'd New Place; that, to the best of his remembrance, there was a brick wall next the street, with a kind of porch at that end of it next the Chapel, when they cross'd a small kind of green court before they enter'd the house, which was bearing to the left and fronted with brick, with plain windows, consisting of common panes of glass set in lead, as at this time." It appears from this statement that the main entrance was then in Chapel-lane, and this was no doubt the case at a much earlier period, arrangements of that kind being very rarely changed. We may rest assured, therefore, that, when Ben Jonson or Drayton visited the provincial home of the author of Twelfth Night, he would arrive there from the lane through a porched gateway, entering in front of the lawn, a barn on his right hand and the house on the left. All this is in consonance with what is known respecting the surroundings of a large number of other contemporary. mansions. "The architecture of an old English gentleman's house," observes Aubrey, alluding to the Shakespearean era, "was a good high strong wall, a gate-house, a great hall and parlor, and within the little green court

where you come in stood on one side the barne;—they then thought not the noise of the threshold ill musique." In the poet's time there were two barns on the Chapellane side of New Place between the open area mentioned by Grimmitt and the eastern termination of the grounds, but this is all that we know respecting the outbuildings, unless, indeed, there can be included under the latter term an ancient well, the stone-work of which yet remains in a nearly perfect condition. The chief fact of interest, however, in the personal annals of this year, 1597, is the remarkable circumstance that Shakespeare, after leaving his native town in indigence only twelve years previously, should now have been enabled to become, so far as material advantages were concerned, one of its leading inhabitants.

However limited may have been the character of the poet's visits to his native town, there is no doubt that New Place was henceforward to be accepted as his established residence. Early in the following year, on February 4, 1598, corn being then at an unprecedented and almost famine price at Stratford-on-Avon, he is returned as the holder of ten quarters in the Chapel Street Ward, that in which the newly acquired property was situated, and in none of the indentures is he described as a Londoner, but always as "William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon, in the county of Warwick, gentleman.” There is an evidence in the same direction in the interest that he took in the maintenance of his grounds, a fact elicited from two circumstances that are worthy of record. It appears from a comparison of descriptions of parcels, 1597 and 1602, that in the earlier years of his occupancy, he arranged a fruit-orchard in that portion of his garden which adjoined the neighboring premises in Chapel

Street. Then there is the well-authenticated tradition that, in another locality near the back of the house, he planted with his own hands the first mulberry-tree that had ever been brought to Stratford-on-Avon. The date of the latter occurrence has not been recorded, but it may be assigned, with a high degree of probability, to the spring of 1609, in which year a Frenchman named Verton distributed an immense number of young mulberry plants through the midland counties of England. This novel arrangement was carried out by the order of James I, who vigorously encouraged the cultivation of that tree, vainly hoping that silk might thence become one of the staple productions of England.

The establishment of the fruit-orchard and the tradition respecting the mulberry-tree are the only evidences which have reached us of any sort of interest taken by the great dramatist in horticulture. It has, indeed, been attempted to prove his attachment to such pursuits by various allusions in his works, but no inferences as to his personal tastes can be safely drawn from any number of cognate references. There was, no doubt, treasured in the storehouse of his perfect memory, and ready for immediate use, every technical expression, and every morsel of contemporary popular belief, that had once come within his hearing. So marvelous also was Shakespeare's all but intuitive perception of nearly every variety of human thought and knowledge, the result of an unrivaled power of rapid observation and deduction, if once the hazardous course of attempting to realize the personal characteristics or habits of the author through his writings be indulged in, there is scarcely an occupation that he might not be suspected of having adopted at one period or other of his

life. That he was familiar with and fondly appreciated the beauty of the wild flowers; that he was acquainted with many of the cultivated plants and trees; that he had witnessed and understood a few of the processes of gardening;—these facts may be admitted, but they do not prove that he was ever a botanist or a gardener. Neither are his numerous allusions to wild flowers and plants, not one of which appears to be peculiar to Warwickshire, evidences, as has been suggested, of the frequency of his visits to Stratford-on-Avon. It would be about as reasonable to surmise that he must have taken a journey to Elsinore before or when he was engaged on the tragedy of Hamlet, as to adopt the oftrepeated suggestion that the nosegay of Perdita could only have been conceived when he was wandering on the banks of the Avon. To judge in that manner from allusions in the plays it might be inferred that The Winter's Tale must have been written in London, for there is little probability that a specimen of one of the flowers therein mentioned, the crown-imperial, could have been then seen in the provinces, whereas there is Gerard's excellent authority that it had “been brought from from Constantinople among other bulbus rootes, and made denizons in our London London gardens" (Herball, ed. 1597, p. 154). All inductions of this kind must be received with the utmost caution. Surely the poet's memory was not so feeble that it is necessary to assume that the selection of his imagery depended upon the objects to be met with in the locality in which he was writing. Even were this extravagant supposition to be maintained, no conclusion can be derived from it, for it is not probable that London would have had the exclusive