as we have in regard to the pasteboard kings and queens who strut their brief hour before us in anachronic absurdity.  But, besides that he wrote in the spirit of his age, Shakespeare wrote in the language and the literary methods of his time.  This is not more evident in the contemporary poets than in the chroniclers of that day.  They all delighted in ingenuities of phrase, in neat turns and conceits; it was a compliment then to be called a “conceited” writer.

Of all the guides to Shakespeare’s time, there is none more profitable or entertaining than William Harrison, who wrote for Holinshed’s chronicle “The Description of England,” as it fell under his eyes from 1577 to 1587.  Harrison’s England is an unfailing mine of information for all the historians of the sixteenth century; and in the edition published by the New Shakespeare Society, and edited, with a wealth of notes and contemporary references, by Mr. Frederick J. Furnivall, it is a new revelation of Shakespeare’s England to the general reader.

Harrison himself is an interesting character, and trustworthy above the general race of chroniclers.  He was born in 1534, or, to use his exactness of statement, “upon the 18th of April, hora ii, minut 4, Secunde 56, at London, in Cordwainer streete, otherwise called bowe-lane.”  This year was also remarkable as that in which “King Henry 8 polleth his head; after whom his household and nobility, with the rest of his subjects do the like.”  It was the year before Anne Boleyn, haled away to the Tower, accused, condemned, and executed in the space of fourteen days, “with sigheing teares” said to the rough Duke of Norfolk, “Hither I came once my lord, to fetch a crown imperial; but now to receive, I hope, a crown immortal.”  In 1544, the boy was at St. Paul’s school; the litany in the English tongue, by the king’s command, was that year sung openly in St. Paul’s, and we have a glimpse of Harrison with the other children, enforced to buy those books, walking in general procession, as was appointed, before the king went to Boulogne.  Harrison was a student at both Oxford and Cambridge, taking the degree of bachelor of divinity at the latter in 1569, when he had been an Oxford M.A. of seven years’ standing.  Before this he was household chaplain to Sir William Brooke, Lord Cobham, who gave him, in 1588-89, the rectory of Radwinter, in Essex, which he held till his death, in 1593.  In 1586 he was installed canon of Windsor.  Between 1559 and 1571 he married Marion Isebrande,—­of whom he said in his will, referring to the sometime supposed unlawfulness of priests’ marriages, “by the laws of God I take and repute in all respects for my true and lawful wife.”  At Radwinter, the old parson, working in his garden, collected Roman coins, wrote his chronicles, and expressed his mind about the rascally lawyers of Essex, to whom flowed all the wealth of the land.  The lawyers in those days stirred up contentions, and then reaped the profits.