1 SCENE.-" I will be thy Beadsman, Valentine." THE Anglo-Saxon bead, a prayer,-something prayed, has given the name to the mechanical help which the ritual of the early church associated with the act of praying. To drop a ball down a string at every prayer, whether enjoined by the priest or by voluntary obligation, has been the practice of the Romish church for many centuries. In our language the ball, from its use, came to be called the bead. To "bid the beads," and to "pray," were synonymous. Burnet, in his History of the Reformation, says, "The form of bidding prayer was not begun by King Henry, as some have weakly imagined, but was used in the times of popery, as will appear by the form of bidding the beads in King Henry the Seventh's time. The way was, first, for the preacher to name and open his text, and then to call on the people to go to their prayers, and to tell them what they were to pray for; after which all the people said their beads in a general silence, and the minister kneeled down also and said his." We find the expression "bedes bydding" in the Vision of Pierce Plowman, which was written, according to Tyrwhitt, about 1362. In the same remarkable poem we also find Bedman -beadman, or beadsman. A beadsman, in the sense of "I will be thy beadsman," is one who offers up prayers for the welfare of another. In this general sense it was used by Sir Henry Lee to Queen Elizabeth. (See Illustration 10.) "Thy poor daily orator and beadsman was the common subscription to a petition to any great man or person in authority. We retain the substance, though not the exact form, of this courtly humiliation, even to the present day, when we memorialize the Crown and the Houses of Parliament, and seek to propitiate those authorities by the unmeaning assurance that their "petitioners shall ever pray." But the great men of old did not wholly depend upon the efficacy of their prayers for their welfare, which proceeded from the expec tation or gratitude of their suitors. They had regularly appointed beadsmen, who were paid to weary Heaven with their supplications. It is to this practice that Shakspere alludes, in the speech of Scroop to Richard II. :

"Thy very beadsmen learn to bend their bows Of double-fatal yew against thy state." Johnson, upon this passage, says, "The king's beadsmen were his chaplains." This assertion is partly borne out by an entry in "The Privy Purse Expenses of King Henry VIII.," published by Sir Harris Nicolas :-"Item, to Sir Torche, the king's bede man at the Rood in Grenewiche, for one yere

now ended, xl s." The title "Sir" was in these days more especially applied to priests. (See Merry Wives of Windsor.) But the term " Bedesman was also, we have little doubt, generally applied to any persons, whether of the clergy or laity, who received endowments for the purpose of offering prayers for the sovereign. Henry VII. established such persons upon a magnificent scale. The Harleian MS. No. 1498, in the British Museum, is an indenture made between Henry VII. and John Islipp, Abbot of St. Peter, Westminster, in which the abbot engages to "provide and sustain within the said monastery, in the almshouses there, therefore made and appointed by the said king, thirteen poor meu, one of them being a priest;" and the duty of these thirteen poor men is "to pray during the life of the said king, our sovereign lord, for the good and prosperous state of the same king, our sovereign lord, and for the prospering of this his realm." These men are not in the indenture called bedesmen; that instrument providing that they shall be named and called the Almesse men of the said king our sovereign lord." The general designation of those who make prayers for others- bedesmen-is here sunk in a name derived from the particular almesse (alms), or endowment. The dress of the twelve almsmen is to be a gown and a hood, "and a scochyn to be made and set upon every of the said gowns, and a red rose crowned and embroidered thereupon." In the following design (the figure of which, a monk at his devotions, is from a drawing by Quelinus, a pupil of Rubens) the costume is taken from an illumination in the indenture now recited, which illumination represents the abbot, the priest, and the almsmen receiving the indenture.

Ochiltree, in the Antiquary; and this brings us back to "Beadsmen." This prince of mendicants was, as our readers will remember, a "King's Bedesman "-" an order of paupers to whom the kings of Scotland were in the custom of distributing a certain alms, in conformity with the ordinances of the Catholic church, and who were expected, in return, to pray for the royal welfare and that of the state." The similarity in the practices of the "King's Bedesmen" of Scotland, and the "Almesse men of Henry VII., is precise. "This order," as Sir Walter Scott tells us in his advertisement to the Antiquary, from which the above description is copied, "is still kept up." The "poor orators and beadsmen" of England live now only in a few musty records, or in the allusions of Spenser and Shakspere; and in the same way the "Blue Gowns" or "King's Bedesmen " of Scotland, who "are now seldom to be seen in the streets of Edinburgh," will be chiefly remembered in the imperishable pages of the Author of Waverley.

2 SCENE J.-" Nay, give me not the boots."

This expression may refer, as Steevens has suggested, to a country sport in harvest-time, in which any offender against the laws of the reaping-season was laid on a bench and slapped with boots. But Steevens has also concluded-and Douce follows up the opinion,-that the allusion is to the instrument of torture called the Boots. That horrid engine, as well as the rack and other monuments of the cruelty of irresponsible power, was used in the question, in the endeavour to wring a confession out of the accused by terror or by actual torment. This meaning gives a propriety to the allusion which we have not seen noticed. In the passage before us Valentine is bantering Proteus about his mistress-and Proteus exclaims, "Nay, give me not the boots"-do not torture me to confess to those love-delinquencies of which you accuse me. The torture of the boots was used principally in Scotland; and Douce has an extract from a very curious pamphlet containing an account of its infliction in the presence of our James I., before he was called to the English crown, upon one Dr. Fein, a supposed wizard, who was charged with raising the storms which the king encountered on his passage from Denmark. The brutal superstition, which led James to the use of this horrid torture, is less revolting than the calculating tyranny which prescribed its application to the unhappy Whig preachers of a century later, as recorded by Burnet, in the case of Maccael, in 1666. Our readers will here again remember Scott, in his powerful scene of Macbriar before the Privy Council of Scotland, -and will think of the wily Lauderdale and his detestable joke when the tortured man has fainted -"he'll scarce ride to-day, though he has had his boots on." Douce says, "the torture of the boot was known in France, and, in all probability, imported from that country." He then gives a representation of it, copied from Millæus's Praxis criminis persequendi, Paris, 1541. The wood-cut which we subjoin is from the same book; but we have restored a portion of the original engraving which Douce has omitted-the judges, or examiners, witnessing the torture, and prepared to

Shakspere found the "canker worm" in the Old Testament (Joel i. 4). The Geneva Bible, 1561, has "That which is left of the palmer-worm hath the grasshopper eaten, and the residue of the grasshopper hath the canker-worm eaten, and the residue of the canker-worm hath the caterpillar eaten." The Arabic version of the passage in Joel, renders what is here, and in our received translation, "the palmer-worm" by dud, which seems a general denomination for the larva state of an insect, and which applies especially to the "canker-worm." original Hebrew, which is rendered palmer-worm, is from a verb meaning to cut or shear; the Greek of the Septuagint, by which the same word is rendered, is derived from the verb meaning, to bend. -(See Pictorial Bible, Joel i.) These two words give a most exact description of the "cankerworm; "-of "the canker in the musk-rose buds;"

The

inner partitions of its dwelling: it becomes the cutting insect of the Hebrew. In this way,

"the most forward bud

"Is eaten by the canker ere it blow."

4 SCENE I." Not so much as a ducat." The ducat-which derives its name from duke, a ducal coin-is repeatedly mentioned in Shakspere. There were two causes for this. First, many of the incidents of his plays were derived from Italian stories, and were laid in Italian scenes; and his characters, therefore, properly use the name of the coin of their country. Thus, ducat occurs in this play-in the Comely of Errors-in Much Ado about Nothing-in Romeo and Juliet; and, more than all, in the Merchant of Venice. But Italy was the great resort of English travellers in the time of Shakspere; and ducat being a familiar word to him, we find it also in Hamlet, and in Cymbeline. Venice bas, at present, its silver ducat-the ducat of eight livres-worth about 38. 3d. The following representation of its old silver ducat is from a coin in the British Museum :

of the larvæ which are produced in the leaves of many plants, and which find habitation and food by the destruction of the receptacle of their infant existence. These caterpillars are termed "leafrollers," and their economy is amongst the most curious and interesting of the researches of entomology. The general operations of these larvæ, and the particular operations of the "cankers in the musk-rose buds," have been described in a little volume entitled, "Insect Architecture." A small dark brown caterpillar, with a black head and six feet, is the "canker worm" of the rose. It derives its specific name Lozotaenia Rosana, from its habits. The grub, produced from eggs deposited in the previous summer or autumn, makes its appearance with the first opening of the leaves, and it constructs its summer tent while the leaves are in their soft and half-expanded state. It weaves them together so strongly, bending them (according to the Greek of the Septuagint) and fastening their dises with the silken cords which it spins-that the growth of the bud in which it forms its canopy is completely stopped. Thus secured from the rain and from external enemies, it begins to destroy the

A verb is here made out of the name of a coin-the tester-which is mentioned twice in Shakspere: 1, by Falstaff, when he praises his recruit Wart, "There's a tester for thee;" and, 2, by Pistol, "Tester I'll have in pouch." We have also testril, which is the same, in Twelfth Night. The value of a tester, teston, testern, or testril, as it is variously written, was supposed to be determined by a passage in Latimer's sermons (1584):"They brought him a denari, a piece of their cur

rent coin that was worth ten of our usual pence-such another piece as our testerne." But the value of the tester, like that of all our ancient coins, was constantly changing, in consequence of the infamous practice of debasing the currency, which was amongst the expedients of bad governments for wringing money out of the people by cheating as well as violence. The French name, teston, was applied to a silver coin of Louis XII., 1513, because it bore the king's head; and the English shilling received the same name at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII.,-probably because it had the same value as the French teston. The following representation of the shilling of Henry VIII. is from a specimen in the British Museum. The testons were called in by proclamations in the second and third years of Edward VI., in consequence of the extensive forgeries of this coin by Sir William Sherrington, for which, by an express act of parliament, he was attainted of treason. They are described in these proclamations as "pieces of xiid., commonly called testons." But the base shillings still continued to circulate, and they were, according to Stow, "called down" to the value of ninepence, afterwards to sixpence, and finally to fourpence halfpenny, in the reign of Edward VI.

6 SCENE II.-" Best sing it to the tune of Light o' love."

This was the name of a dance tune, which, from the frequent mention of it in the old poets, appears to have been very popular. Shakspere refers to it again in Much Ado about Nothing, with more exactness: "Light o' love ;-that goes without a burthen; do you sing it and I'll dance it." We shall give the music (which Sir John Hawkins recovered from an ancient MS.) in that play.

7 SCENE II.-" Injurious wasps! to feed on such sweet honey."

The economy of bees was known to Shakspere with an exactness which he could not have derived from books. The description in Henry V., "So work the honey bees," is a study for the naturalist as well as the poet. He had doubtless not only observed "the lazy. yawning drone," but the "injurious wasps," that plundered the stores which had been collected by those who

"Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds." These were the fearless robbers to which the pretty pouting Julia compares her fingers :

"Injurious wasps! to feed on such sweet honey, And kill the bees that yield it with your stings." The metaphor is as accurate as it is beautiful.

8 SCENE III.-" Some to the wars, &c."

We have alluded to these lines, somewhat at length, in the Introductory Notice. It would be out of place here to give a more particular detail of what were the wars, and who the illustrious men that went "to try their fortunes there," or to recapitulate" the islands far away," that were sought for or discovered, or to furnish even a list of "the studious universities" to which the eager scholars of Elizabeth's time resorted. The subject is too large for us to attempt its illustration by any minute details. We may, however, extract a passage from Gifford's "Memoirs of Ben Jonson," prefixed to his excellent edition of that great dramatist, which directly bears upon this passsage :

The long reign of Elizabeth, though sufficiently agitated to keep the mind alert, was yet a season of

comparative stability and peace. The nobility, who had been nursed in domestic turbulence, for which there was now no place, and the more active spirits among the gentry, for whom entertainment could no longer be found in feudal grandeur and hospitality, took advantage of the diversity of employment happily opened, and spread themselves in every direction. They put forth, in the language of Shakspere,

'Some, to the wars, to try their fortunes there;
Some, to discover islands far away;
Some, to the studious universities;'

and the effect of these various pursuits was speedily discernible. The feelings narrowed and embittered in household feuds, expanded and purified themselves in distant warfare, and a high sense of honour and generosity, and chivalrous valour, ran with electric speed from bosom to bosom, on the return of the first adventurers in the Flemish campaigns; while the wonderful reports of discoveries, by the intrepid mariners who opened the route since so successfully pursued, faithfully committed to writing, and acting at once upon the cupidity and curiosity of the times, produced an inconceivable effect in diffusing a thirst for novelties among a people, who, no longer driven in hostile array to destroy one another, and combat for interests in which they took little concern, had leisure for looking around them, and consulting their own amusement."

9 SCENE III." In having known no travel, &c"

There was a most curious practice with reference to travelling in those days, which is well described in Fynes Moryson's Itinerary. Adventurous persons, of slender fortune, deposited a small sum, upon undertaking a distant or perilous journey, to receive a larger sum if they returned alive. Moryson's brother, he tells us, desired to visit Jerusalem and Constantinople, and he "thought this putting out of money to be an honest means of gaining, at least, the charges of his journey." He, therefore, "put out some few hundred pounds, to be repaid twelve hundred pounds, upon his return from those two cities, and to lose it if he died in the journey." We shall have occasion to refer to this

practice, in the Tempest, where Shakspere distinctly notices it :

**Each putter out on five for one will bring us

Good warrant of," &c.

We have here mentioned this singular sort of bargain, to shew that those who undertook "travel" in those days were considered as incurring serious dangers.

10 SCENE III." There shall he practise tilts and tournaments."

St. Palaye, in his Memoirs of Chivalry, says, that, in their private castles, the gentlemen practised the exercises which would prepare them for the public tournaments. This refers to the period which appears to have terminated some half century before the time of Elizabeth, when real warfare was conducted with express reference to the laws of knighthood; and the tournay, with all its magnificent array, its minstrels, its heralds, and its damosels in lofty towers,-had its hard blows, its wounds, and sometimes its deaths. There were the "Joustes à outrance," or the "Joustes mortelles et à champ," of Froissart. But the "tournaments" that Shakspere sends Proteus to practise," were the "Joustes of Peace," the "Joustes à Plaisance," the tournaments of gay pennons and pointless lances. They had all the gorgeousness of the old knightly encounters, but they appear to have been regarded only as courtly pastimes, and not as serious preparations for " a well-foughten field." One or two instances from the annals of these times will at least amuse our readers, if they do not quite satisfy them that these combats were as harmless to the combatants as the fierce encounters between other less noble actorsthe heroes of the stage,

On Whitsun Monday, 1581, a most magnificent tournament was held in the Tilt-yard at Westminster, in honour of the Dauphin, and other noblemen and gentlemen of France, who had arrived as commissioners to the queen. Holinshed describes the proceedings respecting this "Triumph," at great length. A magnificent gallery was erected for the queen and her court, which was called by the combatants the fortress of perfect beauty; "and not without cause, forasmuch as her highness would be there included." Four gentlemen-the Earl of Arundel, the Lord Windsor, Mr. Philip Sydney, and Mr. Fulke Greville-calling themselves the foster-children of Desire, laid claim to this fortress, and vowed to withstand all who should dare to oppose them. Their challenge being accepted by certain gentlemen of the court, they proceeded (in gorgeous apparel, and attended by squires and attendants richly dressed) forthwith to the tilt, and on the following day to the tournay, where they behaved nobly and bravely, but, at length, submitted to the queen, acknowledging that they ought not to have accompanied Desire by Violence, and concluding a long speech, full of the compliments of the day, by declaring themselves thenceforth slaves to the "Fortress of Perfect Beautie." These "Courtlie triumphes" were arranged and conducted in the most costly manner. The queen's gallery was painted in imitation of stone and covered with ivy and garlands of flowers; cannons were fired with perfumed powder; the dresses of the knights and courtiers were of the richest stuffs,

and covered with precious stones; and moving mounts, costly chariots, and many other devices were introduced to give effect to the scene.

The

In the reign of Elizabeth there were annual exercises of arms, which were first commenced by Sir Henry Lee. This worthy knight made a vow to appear armed in the Tilt-yard at Westminster, on the 27th November (the anniversary of the queen's accession) in every year, until disabled by age, where he offered to tilt with all comers, in honour of Her Majesty's accession. He continued the queen's champion until the thirty-third year of her reign, when, having arrived at the sixtieth year of his age, he resigned in favour of George, Earl of Cumberland, who was invested in the office with much form and solemnity in 1590. It was on the 27th November in that year, that Sir Henry Lee, having performed his devoirs in the lists for the last time, and with much applause, accompanied by the Earl of Cumberland, presented himself before the queen, who was seated in her gallery overlooking the lists, and kneeling on one knee, humbly besought Her Majesty to accept the Earl of Cumberland for her knight, to continue the yearly exercises which he was compelled, from infirmities of age, himself to relinquish. queen graciously accepting the offer, the old knight presented his armour at Her Majesty's feet, and then assisting in fastening the armour of the earl, he mounted him on his horse. This ceremony being performed, he put upon his own person a side coat of "black velvet pointed under the arm, and covered his head (in lieu of a helmet) with a buttoned cap of the country fashion." Then, whilst music was heard proceeding from a magnificent temple which had been erected for the occasion, he presented to the queen, through the hands of three beautiful maidens, a veil curiously wrought, and richly adorned, and other gifts of great magnificence, and declared that, although his youth and strength had decayed, his duty, faith, and love remained perfect as ever; his hands, instead of wielding the lance, should now be held up in prayer for Her Majesty's welfare; and he trusted she would allow him to be her Beadsman, now that he had ceased to incur knightly perils in her service. But the queen complimented him upon his gallantry, and desired that he would attend the future annual jousts, and direct the knights in their proceedings; for indeed his virtue and valour in arms were declared by all to be deserving of command. In the course of the good old knight's career of "virtue and valour in arms," he was joined by many companions, anxious to distinguish themselves in all courtly and chivalrous exercises. One duke, nineteen earls, twenty-seven barons, four knights of the garter, and above one hundred and fifty other knights and esquires, are stated to have taken part in these annual feats of arms.- -(See Walpole's Miscellaneous Antiquities, No. I. pp. 41 to 48, which contains an extract from "Honour, Miltary and Civil." By Sir W. Segur; Norroy : London, 1602.)

If Shakspere had not looked upon these "Annual Exercises of Arms," when he thought of the tournaments "in the emperor's court," he had probably been admitted to the Tilt-yard at Kenilworth, on some occasion of magnificent display by the proud Leicester.