not to be outdone by what had happened at Cambridge two years before.  From the accounts, the delight of the hearty queen must have been intense; and as she was never afraid to testify most frankly her genuine feelings, we may be sure the Oxford authorities and their pupils must have presented their entertainments with extraordinary pomp.  The plays, as at Cambridge, were of various character, but the one that gave especial pleasure was an English piece having the same subject as the Knighte’s Tale of Chaucer, and called Palamon and Arcite.  It would be pleasant to know that the poet followed as far as possible the words of Chaucer.  There is a fine incident narrated connected with the performance.  In the scene of the chase, when

  “Theseus, with alle joye and blys,
  With his Ypolite, the faire queene,
  And Emelye, clothed al in greene,
  On hontyng be they riden ryally,”

a “cry of hounds” was counterfeited under the windows in the quadrangle.  The students present thought it was a real chase, and were seized with a sudden transport to join the hunters.  At this, the delighted queen, sitting in stiff ruff and farthingale among her maids of honour, burst out above all the tumult with “Oh, excellent!  These boys, in very truth, are ready to leap out of the windows to follow the hounds!” When the play was over, the queen called up the poet, who was present, and the actors, and loaded them with thanks and compliments.

When, forty years after, in 1605, the dull James came to Oxford, the poor boys had a harder time.  A thing very noteworthy happened when the king entered the city in his progress from Woodstock.  If Warton’s notion is correct, scarcely the iron cross in the pavement that marks the spot where the bishops were burned, or the solemn chamber in which they were tried, yea, scarcely Guy Fawkes’s lantern, which they show you at the Bodleian, or the Brazen Nose itself, are memorials as interesting as the archway leading into the quadrangle of St. John’s College, under whose carving, quaint and graceful, one now gets the lovely glimpse into the green and bloom of the gardens at the back.  At this gate, three youths dressed like witches met the king, declaring they were the same that once met Macbeth and Banquo, prophesying a kingdom to one and to the other a generation of monarchs, that they now appeared to show the confirmation of the prediction.  Warton’s conjecture is that Shakespeare heard of this, or perhaps was himself in the crowd that watched the boys as they came whirling out in their weird dance, and that then and there was conceived what was to become so mighty a product of the human brain,—­Macbeth.