Our way now lies past Frogmore, and over the river again, by the Albert Bridge, to Southley, where we set our faces up-stream, going back a little on our course to visit Datchet. Another iron bridge, higher up--named the Victoria Bridge--would have taken us thither more directly; though we must then have missed the park and its scenic associations. But if it were only to see the Datchet of Shakespeare, the Datchet lane, and Datchet mead by which Ford's men carried Falstaff to the river brink in the buck-basket, and there canted him into the water with the foul linen, we could as well have remained on the Berkshire shore. There might, indeed, have been a wooden bridge between Windsor and Datchet in Elizabethan days; but it is most likely that the name of Datchet, bridge or no bridge, applied to spots on both sides the river, and that Datchet Mead was a piece of low land between Windsor Home Park and the river. As such, it is mentioned by Mrs. S. C. Hall, who agrees with other writers in supposing that Falstaff and the foul linen were tilted, according to Mistress Ford's injunctions, into the muddy ditch among the whitsters, close to Thames side. But Falstaff, both in his soliloquy at the "Garter" Inn, and in the account of the affair to "Master Brook," distinctly says he was thrown into Thames, the shelving shore of which river saved him from drowning. The real Datchet on the Buckinghamshire side could not have been intended by Shakespeare, unless, by a poetical licence, he brought Datchet over to Windsor. The topographers and the Shakespearean annotators alike have been content to slur this point, leaving their readers to reconcile the doubts concerning which all modern authorities, or such as ought to be authorities, are silent. The nearest elucidation is yet afar off. We find it in a note by Malone on Dennis, who had objected to the probability of the circumstance of Falstaff's having been carried to Datchet Mead, "which," says Dennis, "is half a mile from Windsor." This would refer, certainly, to a mead on the Berkshire side, and not in the parish of Datchet, in a county separated by the Thames. Mrs. Hall was doubtless right in placing Datchet Mead between the towing-path and Windsor Little Park; but it is a pity she was not more explicit. The muddy ditch named by Mistress Ford in the play was probably that which, being covered over in Queen Anne's time, was used as a drain, and came to be called Hog Hole. It was destroyed when the embankment was raised to form a foundation for the Windsor side of Victoria Bridge. Both from this bridge and from its fellow, lower down, good views are obtained of Windsor Castle. At Datchet, no longer so pretty and picturesque as it was half a century ago, is an old church of Early English and Decorated styles, in which Queen Elizabeth's printer, Christopher Barber, is buried; as also Lady Katherine Berkeley, daughter of Lord Mountjoy. Above Datchet, Izaak Walton used