The mulberry gardens were soon converted into a pleasure resort after the manner of the Vauxhall and Cremorne of my youth. Both Evelyn and Pepys mention them and give them the worst of characters. Evelyn calls them (May 10th, 1654) “the only place of refreshment about the town for persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated at, Cromwell and his partisans having shut up and seized on Spring Gardens, which till now had been the usual rendezvous for ladies and gallants at this season.” Pepys, in his outspoken way, went further in his condemnation some years later. His spades were always spades—yet the sly old dog confessed to having amused himself greatly there. There is in especial a very characteristic account of a dinner there, given by Mr. Sheres, at which Pepys was introduced to a Spanish Olio, “a very noble dish, such as I never saw better or any more of. This and the discourse he did give us of Spain, and description of the Escuriall, was a fine treat.” The entertainment seems to have been managed with an eye to economy, for after dinner they all went off to Brentford, ordering the waiter to set on one side what had not been eaten, and they would come back and have it for supper. What would the head waiter at the “Ritz” or the “Carlton” say to such an order as that? But the evening was spoilt by the sudden indisposition of poor Mr. Sheres, the amphitryon of the Olio, probably the cause of the trouble—to which Pepys appears to have returned to the “noble dish” with appetite, issuing unscathed from the temptation. Sir Charles Sedley, the profligate wit and brilliant writer, of whom Charles the Second said that “Nature had given him a patent as Apollo’s viceroy,” and that “his style, whether in writing or discourse, would be the standard of the English tongue,” wrote a play called the _Mulberry Garden_, which Pepys, a great playgoer and probably a good judge, damned with faint praise. The “Tribullus of his age,” as Dryden dubbed him in his dedication to “The Assignation,” for once had failed to score. The story of Shakespeare’s mulberry has led me far astray, and when we get to Evelyn and Pepys it is difficult not to wander on. But I must curb my prolixity. I think I have said enough to show that the Troston plants have a pedigree which it would defy all the sagacity and learning of the College of Heralds to demolish. Kew, always generous, has continued to propagate from them, and as Sir David Prain, the present director, writes to Sir Sidney Lee: “We have sent plants to places where there are memorials of Shakespeare, and to people interested in matters relating to him.” It is to the kindness of Sir William Thiselton Dyer that I owe my special treasure.