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Old Graves in Trinity Churchyard, Stratford

Seats are taken, the manuscript is opened, and the club becomes a green-room conference. The play is not to be recast entirely, the changes from the early version being mainly to introduce certain touches to flatter the royal ears, and to suit it to the more elaborate equipment of the Whitehall stage. Quill in hand, the reader as he proceeds crosses out from his manuscript everything that clogs the movement or detracts from the playfulness; giving free rein to his luxuriant imagination, he scatters the choicest flowers of fancy to create a vivid and animated picture. The lovers meet and part with pretty rhymes and repartee; the hard-handed men--the tradesmen and tinkers--bring their clumsy efforts to serve the wedding-feast; the fairies, graceful, lovely, enchanting, dance amidst the fragrance of enameled meadows.

Old Warwickshire Cottages

His fellow writers feel the charm. No one of them can do work in so many kinds nor of such kind in each. They recognise their master, they are under his magic spell; the familiar stories from Plutarch and Chaucer and Ovid take on a new meaning; the very holly on the walls seems alive with the fairy folk, as indeed it should be, according to the pretty, old superstition that elves and fairies hover about all Christmas fêtes. Hence, branches are hanging in hall and bower in order that these invisible guests may "hang in each leaf and cling on every bough." The holly, its prickly leaves symbolic of the crown of thorns, and its red berries of the blood of Christ, banishes the ivy and other greens, and becomes the popular favourite that it has since remained, for Christmas decoration.

A Group of Morris Dancers

A responsive audience truly. Roars of laughter greet the rollicking humour of the clowns and their rude burlesque of things theatrical. But longest and loudest is the applause over the new touches--those portions that have been written in to please the court and the Queen. To remodel a play written for a marriage celebration so that it shall seem to praise the virginity of the Queen were surely no slight task, but it has been accomplished.

Though the scene is laid in Greece, yet the play is full of the English life that all know so well. "Merrie England" and not classic Greece has given the poet the picture of the sweet country school-girls working at one flower, warbling one song, growing together like a double cherry. Of England, is the picture of the hounds with "ears that sweep away the morning dew"; from England, all this out-door woodland life, the clown's play and the clowns themselves,--Bottom with his inimitable conceit, and his fellows, Snug, Quince, and the rest. English is all Puck's fairy lore, the cowslips tall, the red-hipt humble-bee, Oberon's bank, the pansy love-in-idleness, and all the lovely imagery of the verse. English is the whole scenic background, and the "Wood near Athens" is plainly the Stratford boy's idealised memory of the Weir Brake that he knows so well.

Mayhap, in very truth, on some mid-summer night the young poet, even then of "imagination all compact," did indeed dream a dream or see a