so vanished away.  This was examined before Sir George Norton, and sworn by four honest men that saw it, to be true.”  Equally well substantiated, probably, was what happened in Herefordshire in 1571:  “A field of three acres, in Blackmore, with the Trees and Fences, moved from its place and passed over another field, traveling in the highway that goeth to Herne, and there stayed.”  Herefordshire was a favorite place for this sort of exercise of nature.  In 1575 the little town of Kinnaston was visited by an earthquake:  “On the seventeenth of February at six o’clock of the evening, the earth began to open and a Hill with a Rock under it (making at first a great bellowing noise, which was heard a great way off) lifted itself up a great height, and began to travel, bearing along with it the Trees that grew upon it, the Sheep-folds, and Flocks of Sheep abiding there at the same time.  In the place from whence it was first moved, it left a gaping distance forty foot broad, and fourscore Ells long; the whole Field was about twenty Acres.  Passing along, it overthrew a Chappell standing in the way, removed an Ewe-Tree planted in the Churchyard, from the West into the East; with the like force it thrust before it High-wayes, Sheep-folds, Hedges, and Trees, made Tilled ground Pasture, and again turned Pasture into Tillage.  Having walked in this sort from Saturday in the evening, till Monday noon, it then stood still.”  It seems not improbable that Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane.

It was for an age of faith, for a people whose credulity was fed on such prodigies and whose imagination glowed at such wonderful portents, that Shakespeare wrote, weaving into the realities of sense those awful mysteries of the supernatural which hovered not far away from every Englishman of his time.

Shakespeare was born in 1564, when Elizabeth had been six years on the throne, and he died in 1616, nine years before James I., of the faulty spleen, was carried to the royal chapel in Westminster, “with great solemnity, but with greater lamentation.”  Old Baker, who says of himself that he was the unworthiest of the knights made at Theobald’s, condescends to mention William Shakespeare at the tail end of the men of note of Elizabeth’s time.  The ocean is not more boundless, he affirms, than the number of men of note of her time; and after he has finished with the statesmen ("an exquisite statesman for his own ends was Robert Earl of Leicester, and for his Countries good, Sir William Cecill, Lord Burleigh"), the seamen, the great commanders, the learned gentlemen and writers (among them Roger Askam, who had sometime been schoolmaster to Queen Elizabeth, but, taking too great delight in gaming and cock-fighting, lived and died in mean estate), the learned divines and preachers, he concludes:  “After such men, it might be thought ridiculous to speak of Stage-players; but seeing excellency in the meanest things deserve remembring, and Roscius the Comedian is recorded in