_Frier Bacon_ and _James IV_, or Shakespeare's _Richard II_, and _Richard III_, and _Romeo and Juliet_, and _Love's Labour's Lost_. These, with alternate shuddering and admiring, mirth or tears, to declaim and in imagination re-enact. And certainly there would be mellow afternoons when the _Songs and Sonnettes_ known as _Tottel's Miscellany_ and _The Paradyse of Daynty Devises_, with their poems of love and chivalry by Thomas, Lord Vaux,--of which they had often heard from their cousins of Harrowden,--and Chapman's completion of _Hero and Leander_ or Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_, and Drayton's fantastic but graceful _Endimion and Phoebe_ would hold them till the shadows were well aslant, and the candles began to wink them back to the Cardinal's quadrangle and the old refectory, beyond, of Broadgates Hall. For the Char and the boats were there then, and all these El Dorados of the mind were to be had in quarto or other form, and some of them were appearing first in print in the year when Frank and his brothers entered Oxford. [Illustration: View taken by Buck in 1730 RUINS OF GRACE-DIEU Note: After Buck's time the ruins were "carried away to mend the roads." See John Throsby, _Select Views of Leicestershire_, Vol. II, 461.] [Illustration: Taken by Buck A PRIORY, ULVESTON, EXTANT IN 1730] We may be sure, that many a time these brothers and sworn friends in literature, and Henry, too, loyal young Elizabethans,--and with them, perhaps, their cousin, Robert Pierrepoint, who was then at Oriel,--strolled northwest from the Cherwell toward Yarnton, and then Woodstock with its wooded slopes, to see the island where Queen Elizabeth, when but princess, had been imprisoned for a twelvemonth, and, hearing a milk-maid singing, had sighed, "She would she were a milkmaid as she was"; and that they took note of fair Rosamund's well and bower, too. They may have tramped or ridden onward north to Banbury, and got there at the same cakeshop in Parsons Street the same cakes we get now. Or, some happy Michaelmas, they would have walked toward the fertile Vale of Evesham, north, first, toward Warwickshire where at Compton Scorpion Sir Thomas Overbury, the ill-fated friend of their future master, Ben Jonson, was born, and on by the village of Quinton but six miles from Shakespeare's Stratford, toward Mickleton and the Malvern Hills; and then, turning toward the Cotswolds, to Winchcombe with its ancient abbey and its orchards, to see just south of it Sudely Castle where Henry VIII's last wife, the divorced Catherine Parr, had lived and died,--where Giles, third Baron Chandos, had entertained Queen Bess, and where in their time abode the Lord William. With this family of Brydges, Barons Chandos, the lads were acquainted, if not in 1597 at any rate after 1602, when the fifth Baron, Grey, succeeded to the title. For, writing _Teares_ on the death of that hospitable "King of the Cotswolds," which occurred in 1621, John Beaumont describes him with