"Then, forester,* my friend, where is the bush

That we must stand and play the murtherer in ?"

To which the forester replies,

Hereby, upon the edge of yonder coppice;

A 'stand' where you may make the fairest shoot."

And in Henry VI. Part III. Act iii. Sc. 1,—

"Under this thick-grown brake we 'll shroud ourselves;
For through this laund anon the deer will come ;
And in this covert will we make our 'stand,'
Culling the principal of all the deer."

Again, in Cymbeline (Act iii. Sc. 4), "When thou hast ta'en thy stand,' the elected deer before thee." Other passages might be mentioned, but it will be sufficient to refer only to The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act v. Sc. 5), and to the song in As You Like It (Act iv. Sc. 2), commencing "What shall he have that kill'd the deer?"

Deer-stealing in Shakespeare's day was regarded only as a youthful frolic. Antony Wood ("Athen. Oxon." i. 371), speaking of Dr. John Thornborough, who was admitted a member of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1570, at the age

* "A forester is an officer of the forest sworn to preserve the vert and venison therein, and to attend the wild beasts within his bailiwick, and to watch and endeavour to keep them safe, by day and night. He is likewise to apprehend all offenders in vert and venison, and to present them to the Courts of the Forest, to the end they may be punished according to their offences."-The Gentleman's Recreation. 1686.

of eighteen, and who was successively Bishop of Limerick and Bishop of Bristol and Worcester, informs us, that he and his kinsman, Robert Pinkney, "seldom studied or gave themselves to their books, but spent their time in the fencing schools, and dancing schools, in stealing deer and conies, in hunting the hare and wooing girls."

Shakespeare himself has been accused of this indiscretion. The story is first told in print by Rowe, in his "Life of Shakespeare":"He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and amongst them some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engaged him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill-usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London."

Mr. Staunton, in his library edition of Shakespeare's Plays, says: "What degree of authenticity the story possesses will never probably be known. Rowe derived his version of it no doubt through Betterton; but Davies makes no allusion to the source from which he drew his

information, and we are left to grope our way, so far as this important incident is concerned, mainly by the light of collateral circumstances. These, it must be admitted, serve in some respects to confirm the tradition. Shakespeare certainly quitted Stratford-upon-Avon when a young man, and it could have been no ordinary impulse which drove him to leave wife, children, friends, and occupation, to take up his abode among strangers in a distant place.

"Then there is the pasquinade, and the unmistakable identification of Sir Thomas Lucy as Justice Shallow, in the Second Part of Henry IV., and in the opening scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor. The genuineness of the former may be doubted; but the ridicule in the Plays betokens a latent hostility to the Lucy family, which is unaccountable, except upon the supposition that the deerstealing foray is founded on facts."

The more legitimate sport in killing deer was by means of blood-hounds, and in The Midsummer Night's Dream we are furnished with an accurate description of the dogs in most repute :—

"My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,

So flew'd, so sanded; and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-knee'd, and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls;
Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells,

INTRODUCTION.

Each under each. A cry more tuneable

Was never holla'd to, nor cheer'd with horn."

9

Act. iv. Sc. I.

In the Comedy of Errors (Act iv. Sc. 2), Dromio of Syracuse alludes to "a hound that runs counter, and yet draws dry foot well," and in the Taming of the Shrew we have the following animated dialogue :—

"Lord. Saw'st thou not, boy, how Silver made it good At the hedge-corner, in the coldest fault?

I would not lose the dog for twenty pound. Huntsman. Why, Belman is as good as he, my lord; He cried upon it at the merest loss,

And twice to-day pick'd out the dullest scent:

Trust me, I take him for the better dog."

Many more such instances might be adduced, but the

reader might perhaps be tempted to exclaim, with Timon of Athens:

"Get thee away, and take thy beagles with thee."

Act iv. Sc. 3.

We will therefore only glance at that amusing scene in the Merry Wives of Windsor (Act v. Sc. 5), where Falstaff appears in Windsor Forest, disguised with a buck's head on. "Divide me," says he, "like a brib'dbuck, each a haunch: I will keep my sides to myself, my shoulders for the fellow of this walk, and my horns I bequeath your husbands."

C

We have here an allusion to the ancient method of "breaking up" a deer.* "The fellow of this walk" is the forester, to whom it was customary on such occasions to present a shoulder. Dame Juliana Berners, in her "Boke of St. Albans," 1496, says,

"And the right shoulder, wheresoever he be,

Bere it to the foster, for that is fee."

And in Turbervile's "Book of Hunting," 1575, the distribution of the various parts of a deer is minutely described.

The touching description of a wounded stag, in As You Like It, can scarcely escape notice. Alluding to "the melancholy Jaques," one of the lords says,———

*

"To-day my lord of Amiens and myself

Did steal behind him, as he lay along

Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood;
To the which place a poor sequestred stag,
That from the hunters' aim had ta'en a hurt,
Did come to languish; and, indeed, my lord,
The wretched animal heav'd forth such groans,

That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat

"We say the deer is broken up,' the fox and hare are 'cased."-The Gentleman's Recreation. 1686.

From this ancient practice, too, is derived the phrase, "to eat humble pie," more correctly written "umble pie." This was a venison pasty, made of the umbles (heart, liver, and lungs), and always given to inferiors, and placed low down on the table when the squire feasted publicly in the hall.