But this made mee more violent in persuite of the stagg, to recover my reputation. And I happened to be the only horseman in when the dogs set him up at bay; and approaching nere him on horseback, he broke through the dogs and run at mee, and tore my horse's side with his hornes close to my thigh. Then I quitted my horse, and grew more cunning (for the dogs had set him up again), stealing behind him with my sword and cut his hamstrings, and then got upon his back and cut his throate: which as I was doing, the company came in and blamed my rashness for running such a hazard. Sir Peter Legh believed that-- The forest music is to hear the hounds Rend the thin air and with a lusty cry Awake the drowsy echo, and confound Their perfect language in a mingled voice. But though, like Percy, in Chevy Chase, he delighted-- To drive the deer with hound and horn, hunting the stag was not the only amusement he provided for his friends. The Mysteries and Miracle Plays had then given place to "stage-plays, interludes, and comedies;" though the drama was only in its puling infancy, it was rising into popular favour. My Lord of Leicester had his company of players, who performed before the Queen at the Kenilworth revels in 1575, when the whole country side flocked to the great earl's great castle. Doubtless there was amongst the spectators the bright son of the well-to-do burgess of Stratford, who would probably there received his first impressions of the drama, as he witnessed the rude masques, the storial shows of Gascoigne, and the allegory of the Lady of the Lake. The great Earl of Derby had a company of players in Lancashire, who, according to the Stanley papers, relieved the dulness of the Puritan chaplain's preaching on the Sunday morning by a theatrical performance before the household in the same mansion on the Sunday evening; and Sir Peter Legh, not to be behind hand, had a company of his own. The severe moralists of the age were strongly opposed to stage plays, and accounted them greater abominations than drinking, dicing, bear-baiting, and cock-fighting, and the law defined as "vagabonds" all players who were "not belonging to any baron of this realm, or towards any other person of greater degree." Sir Peter Legh's actors not only performed at Lyme and enlivened the houses of his neighbours, but we read in the Shuttleworth accounts already referred to that in the "Armada" year they appeared at Gawthorpe and were paid for a performance in the hall there. Sir Peter's liberality and munificence added to his popularity, and caused him to be looked up to with reverence and respect as well by his equals as by the common people. As we have said, he died in 1589, at the ripe age of 76; but Dame Margaret, his wife, must have survived him several years, for among the family portraits at Lyme there is one of her, taken in 1595, when she was in her ninetieth year. By her Sir Peter had a numerous issue--five sons and two daughters.