It is not pleasant to learn that the poet's father was fined for maintaining a _sterquinarium_, which being translated from the Latin is _dung-heap_, in front of his house in Henley Street--now, like the other Stratford streets, kept as clean as any cottage-floor in the town--and we have ample evidence that the general sanitary condition of the place was very bad. John Shakespeare would probably not have been fined if his _sterquinarium_ had been behind his house instead of before it. Stratford, however, was no worse in this respect than other English towns. The terrible plagues that devastated the entire land in those "good old times" were the natural result of the unwholesome habits of life everywhere prevailing--_everywhere_, for the mansions of noblemen and the palaces of kings were as filthy as the hovels of peasants. The rushes with which royal presence-chamber and banquet-hall were strewn in place of carpets were not changed until they had become too unsavory for endurance. Meanwhile disagreeable odors were overcome by burning perfumes--of which practice we have a hint in _Much Ado About Nothing_ in the reference to "smoking a musty room." But away from these musty rooms of great men's houses, and the foul streets and lanes of towns, field and forest and river-bank were as clean and sweet as now. The banished Duke in _As You Like It_ may have had other reasons than he gives for preferring life in the Forest of Arden to that of the court from which he had been driven; and Shakespeare's delight in out-of-door life may have been intensified by his experience of the house in Henley Street, with the reeking pile of filth at the front door. His poetry is everywhere full of the beauty and fragrance of the flowers that bloom in and about Stratford; and the wonderful accuracy of his allusions to them--their colors, their habits, their time of blossoming, everything concerning them--shows how thoroughly at home he was with them, how intensely he loved and studied them.