yet whenever he descends to details of country life and scenery, as he so often does, every word bears the stamp of having been brought, not from books, but from what his own eyes had seen in the neighborhood of Stratford-upon-Avon. How familiar he was with the garden and all its processes is seen by many a metaphor and allusion, perhaps nowhere more notably than in the 4th Scene of the 3d Act of “Richard II.,” where in the Duke of York’s garden at Langley the discourse of the gardener and his men on the management of fruit-trees is turned to political meaning. A disordered state is a neglected and unweeded garden, the pruning and bleeding of fruit-trees are the restraining great and growing men in the state, and all the operations are so described and applied as only an adept in gardening could do; or again, there is the well-known metaphor in Wolsey’s speech where he likens his blushing honors to blossoms nipt by frost. The process of grafting furnishes many a metaphor for human doings. All the ordinary forest trees, the oak, the elm, the pine, the willow, come in with the easy handling of one who knew them from boyhood. Every bird, the rook, the chough, the throstle, the ousel-cock or blackbird, the nightingale, “The finch, the sparrow, and the lark, The plain-song cuckoo gray”— all find familiar notice; and perhaps of these we might select the lark as his favorite, to judge by the frequency of allusion to it. Though garden flowers—such garden flowers as were cultivated in his time—are not passed over, yet much more noteworthy is the loving way in which Shakespeare dwells, or rather makes his characters dwell, on the field-flowers. Almost every wild-flower that is to be found at this day in the meadows and woods by Avon side looks out from some part of other of his poetry. But this love for flowers, it has been noted, he puts in the mouth, not of his strong heroic characters, his Henry V. or Othello, but in the lips of his more feminine ones. It is the sentimental Duke in “Twelfth Night” who exclaims— “That strain again; it had a dying fall. Oh! it came o’er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing, and giving odor”— just such a bank as may be seen any April day under the Warwickshire hedge-rows. Every one remembers poor Ophelia and her flowers, the flowers with which Arviragus promises to sweeten the sad grave of Fidele; and, above all, the wonderful scene in the “Winter’s Tale” where Perdita presiding at the sheep-shearing feast sorts the flowers according to the age of the guests, “flowers of winter, rosemary and rue,” to the elders, to men of middle age flowers of middle summer— “Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun, And with him rises weeping.” And for her fairest friend— “I would I had some flowers o’ the spring that might Become your time of day; Daffodils, violets, and pale primroses.”