in retreat and advance, the field before and after, prisoners and their ransom, all true to the letter, of one who had been with Philip Sidney and knighted on the very field of battle in Brittany by the King of France, and sent to the Fleet by Elizabeth’s jealousy because he was so knighted? “Have I not heard in my time lions roar? Have I not heard the sea puffed up with winds Rage like an angry boar, chafed with sweat? Have I not heard great ordnance in the field, And heavens artillery thunder in the skies? Have I not in a pitched battle heard Loud ’larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?” (Taming of the Shrew.) All this had Anthony Sherley heard and seen. Had Bacon? Had John Bull’s Stratford pet? Then, as for field sports, hunting in every form or fashion, he describes as none but he and Jorrocks could. (R. S. Surtees, of Hamsterley, I know, drew all his pictures from originals, and that is why they hold their own.) The dying hare, “Venus and Adonis,” was there ever anything more touching? The same repeated, “As You Like It,” Act II. i. the dying deer, and Jacques weeping over it. Unless at home he had had an early introduction to stable and kennel management, that sort of learning could not be acquired in after-life; his love for his “crop-eared roan,” the descriptions in so many places of his devotion to horses and hounds, he knows them all by name. “Taming of the Shrew,” scene 1, “Huntsman, tender well my hounds;” see also Henry VI. scene 2. His description of deer and deer hunts shows that he had watched their habits, couchant and in chase. What a fund of similar knowledge is there in the Return from Pernassus, _not_ Parnassus, distinguishing between the names at different seasons of their life, and also the same of “Roa-bucke,” “rode on a roan gelding,” “the buck broke gallantly,” and then comes a similar touching description to that of the death of the hare in the Sonnets, “the hounds seized upon him, he groaned, and wept, and dyed, in good faith it made me weep too.” The truth is, when you compare the words and sentiments and expressions with those in Shakespeare’s plays, {40} you feel that one and the same writer was author of them both. Recollect that the modern Pernassus was in the neighbourhood of Bergamo, from whence Kemp had just returned from his visit to Anthony Sherley (see An Almond for a Parrot), and, as Heylyn tells us, “Crema,” the inhabitants of, on the destruction “of Parnassus, a town of Lombardy, where before they lived, were permitted to build here.” Then it is evident that whoever wrote these plays was a Romanist, he sneers at Churchmen and Puritans alike, whilst with regard to Friars and Romanists, he mostly speaks of them with respect. Well, in S. P. O. there is a letter from one Phillipp employed by Cecil “to intercept letters and spy out secrets,” dated Rome, 1601: “He (Anthony Sherley)