All have passed--the spacious taverns, those who served, and those who patronised them have gone, never to return. Where great writers and poets assembled and marked the arrival of travellers from the country, and listened to stories of "nine men in buckram," where the horseman saw to the ease of his weary nag before his own, we see crowded thoroughfares in which the pulse of traffic beats furiously for six long days out of seven. Of the many changes London has known in the three centuries that have passed since Shakespeare's time few have been more drastic. Perhaps the Great Fire destroyed many of the taverns; the growth of commerce and the coming of new means of locomotion did the rest. Only in old prints may we find some pleasing recollection of red-tiled or thatched houses with half timber and half plaster walls, their ingle nooks, dormer windows, or many gables. Here the men to whom we still pay tribute spent their hours of ease, unconscious that their lightest words would be sought for eagerly in generations to come--and be sought in vain. But the knowledge that the old houses had their being, and that the great poets of the Elizabethan era frequented them, hallows many a dusty, dingy street in the city's by-ways now given over to feverish activity from dawn to dusk, and to silence from dusk to dawn. CHAPTER IX THE MIDDLE PERIOD Turning again to the plays, there is reason to believe that "The Merry Wives of Windsor" followed "Henry IV." The character of Falstaff, first known as Oldcastle, had taken the town, but the name had been changed at the instance of the eighth Lord Cobham, a descendant of the great Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle. Falstaff's humour made ample atonement for his faults, and the desire to improve his acquaintance is said by several authorities to have been expressed by Queen Elizabeth herself. We are told that her Majesty requested the poet to present the fat knight in love, and that he obeyed instructions in a few weeks. There is no mistaking the high spirits in which the work is written; they are still ringing through every line. The poet remembered the old days of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, and gave the knight's arms to Mr. Justice Shallow openly and unrebuked. Under the aegis of royalty, he could afford to let himself go and hit back at the astonished game-preserver. "The Merry Wives" was no more to its author than a merry jest, made in fulfilment of a royal request, a payment of long-standing scores in the best humour possible, and as soon as it was off his hands the poet turned to another historical subject and wrote "Henry V."