The festival of Easter would generally come before Saint George's day. When Shakespeare was a boy the Reformation had somewhat mitigated the ancient rigor and austerity of Lent, but Easter was none the less a joyous and jubilant anniversary. "Surely," as Mr. Charles Knight remarks, "there was something exquisitely beautiful in the old custom of going forth into the fields before the sun had risen on Easter-day, to see him mounting over the hills with a tremulous motion, as if it were an animate thing bounding in sympathy with the redeemed of mankind. The young poet [Shakespeare] might have joined his simple neighbors on this cheerful morning, and yet have thought with Sir Thomas Browne, 'We shall not, I hope, disparage the Resurrection of our Redeemer if we say that the sun doth _not_ dance on Easter-day.' But one of the most glorious images of one of his early plays [_Romeo and Juliet_] has given life and movement to the sun:-- "'Night's candles are burnt out, and _jocund_ Day Stands _tiptoe_ on the misty mountain's tops.' Saw he not the sun dance--heard he not the expression of the undoubting belief that the sun danced--as he went forth into Stratford meadows in the early twilight of Easter-day?" Sir John Suckling, in his _Ballad upon a Wedding_, alludes prettily to this old superstition in the description of the bride:-- "But O she dances such a way! No sun upon an Easter day Is half so fine a sight." Perhaps Shakespeare had this bit of folk-lore in mind when he wrote these lines in _Coriolanus_ (v. 4. 52):-- "The trumpets, sackbuts, psalteries and fifes, Tabors and cymbals and the shouting Romans, Make the sun dance." Easter was a favorite time for games of ball and many of the athletic sports described in the preceding pages. THE PERAMBULATION OF THE PARISH. On the road to Henley-in-Arden, a few hundred yards from John Shakespeare's house in Henley Street, there stood until about fifty years ago an ancient boundary-tree--an elm to which reference is made in records of the 16th century. From that point the boundary of the borough continued to "the two elms in Evesham highway"; and so on, from point to point, round to the tree first mentioned. Once a year, in Rogation Week (six weeks after Easter), the clergy, the magistrates and public officers, and the inhabitants, including the boys of the Grammar School, assembled under this elm for the perambulation of the boundaries. They marched in procession, with waving banners and poles crowned with garlands, over the entire circuit of the parish limits. Under each "gospel-tree," as at the first boundary elm, a passage from Scripture was read, a collect recited, and a psalm sung.