chequer. A deep dodge enough, and one would not have thought the man who was shrewd enough to give such advice would have been fool enough to purchase the trumpory title; but he did though. He deserved it at least for the hint. How true is the remark of that sterling poet, Robert Burns :

"A prince can mak a belted night,

A marquis, duke, and a' that;
But an honest man's aboon his might,
Guid faith he manna fa' that.
For a' that, and a' that,

Their dignities, and a' that,

The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth,
Are higher ranks than a' that."

Peter Breughel the Elder, and Francis Floris, two Flemish printers, both pay the debt of nature; Breughel being sixty, and Floris fifty, years of age.-The births of four painters belong to this year: Cagliari, Carlo, or Carletta, being born at Venice; Peter Neefs and Francis Bourbis the Younger, both at Antwerp; and Saenredam, somewhere in Holland,

1571,

SHAKSPERE'S EIGHTH YEAR,

MASTER JOHN SHAKSPERE is now elected and sworn

A.D, chief alderman of the corporation of Stratford-uponAvon. His son William most probably being, as his own Jaques expresses it, a

whining school boy, with his satchel, And shining morning face, creeping, like snail, Unwillingly to school,"

As You Like It, act ii., scene 7th,

In all probability, the Grammar School of his native place had the honour of teaching him the "little Latin and less Greek" which his friend Ben Jonson speaks of. This Grammar School was founded in the reign of Henry VI., by a priest named Jolepe for all boys who are natives of Stratford-upon-Avon; and Edward VI. granted it a charter. There the future dramatist would be able to pick up as much scholarship as in any school in the neighbourhood; and though doubtless the youngster would then, like all other boys, have preferred the wild liberty of truanting in the neighbouring woodlands; indulging, as Benedick says in "Much Ado About Nothing," (act ii.,

scene 1st,) in "the flat transgression of a schoolboy; who, being overjoyed with finding a bird's nest, shows it to his companion, and he steals it." Let us hope that the Welsh parson, Sir Hugh Evans, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," (act iv., scene 1st.,) bore no resemblance to the parson who taught the Grammar School at Stratford; and that William Shakspere's mother had not to complain, like the mother of the schoolboy, William Page;-"Sir Hugh, my husband says my son profits nothing in the world at his book; I pray you ask him some questions in his accidence." Let us rather hope that the clerical tutor at the Stratford Grammar School, earned the same praise that the schoolmaster, Holofernes, does in "Love's Labour Lost," (act iv., scene 2nd,) where the curate, Sir Nathaniel, says :-"Sir, I praise the Lord for you; and so may my parishioners; for their sons are well tutored by you: are a good member of the commonwealth."

you

Queen Elizabeth now sends a printing-press and Irish types into Ireland; and printing is this year introduced into the city of Stirling. The venerable John Stow-and the title of venerable of right belongs to him who has so well won it-now causes the Chronicle of Matthew Paris to be printed in London.

Parliament now made it high-treason to doubt the title of Elizabeth to the throne, to be reconciled to popery, or to reconcile others. The unfortunate Queen of Scots is more strictly confined; the Duke of Norfolk and the Bishop of Ross are sent to the Tower; and Dr. Story is executed for high treason. The Earl of Lennox, regent of Scotland, is murdered on the 4th of September, and the Earl of Mar appointed in his stead. Christopher Goodman, one of the translators of the Genevan Bible, who had been chaplain to Sir Henry Sidney in Ireland, is summoned to appear before Archbishop Parker, and others, at Lambeth, to answer for some opinions he had published when an exile at Geneva, against petticoat government. He was now obliged, to save his life, to sign a recantation, acknowledging that "good and godly women might lawfully govern whole realms and nations," and of course acknowledging his submission to Elizabeth,- -a submission which that virago would soon have forced from him by the rack.

An act was passed this year "for the continuance of making and wearing woollen caps, in behalf of the trade of cappers," by which it was enacted that all above six years old, except the nobility and certain other privileged classes, should wear on Sundays and holidays, caps of wool, of English manufacture, under a penalty of four groats.

These, no doubt, are the "plain statute-caps" to which Shakspere has made Rosaline allude, in "Love's Labour Lost," (act v., scene 2nd) :

"Well, better wits have worn plain statute-caps,"

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And a contemporary of Shakspere, John Marston, in his "Dutch Courtesan," makes Mrs. Mulligrub say :- Though my husband be a citizen, and his cap 's made of wool, yet I have wit."

Some idea of the sports of our ancestors in Elizabeth's reign may be formed from a license she now grants to one John Swinton Powlter, to use certain plays and games, on nine several Sundays, in the county of Middlesex, amongst which are particularly specified shooting with the broad arrow, leaping, and pitching the bar. What would

Sir Andrew Agnew and the saints have said to this ". profanation of the Sabbath," to which may be added theatrical performances?

Elizabeth still refuses her hand in marriage, to the great discomfiture of the Duke of Anjou; Hugh Price, L.L.D., founds a College at Oxford, which he dedicates to Jesus; William Camden leaves his studies at Oxford, and goes to London; and John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, author of an "Apology for the Church of England," died in September. This "Apology" was written in Latin, but it was translated into the vulgar tongue by Lady Anne, wife of Sir Nicholas Baçon, the mother of the immortal Lord Bacon. "As it was one of the first books published in this reign," says Bishop Burnet, "so it was written with that strength and clearness, that it, together with the 'Defence' of it, is still to this day reckoned one of our best books." Jewel was born in 1522, and was educated at Oxford, where he rose at four o'clock in the morning, and studied until midnight. He was a learned, pious, and industrious prelate.

An earthquake occurred this year, in Herefordshire, at Marcley-hill, which Camden describes thus in his "Britannia:-"

"Near the conflux of the Lug and the Wye, eastward, a hill, which they call Marcley-hill, did *** rouse itself as it were out of sleep, and for three days together shoving its prodigious body forward with a horrible roaring noise, and overturning everything in its way, raised itself (to the great astonishment of the beholders,) to a high place; by that kind of earthquake, I suppose, which the naturalists call Brasmatia.

The account given by Sir Richard Baker, in his "Chronicle," is more complete :-

«A prodigious earthquake happened in the east parts of Herefordshire, [at] a little town called Kinnaston. On the seventeenth of February, at six of the clock in 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 feet broad, and fourscore ells long the whole field was about twenty acres. Passing all along, it overthrew a chapel standing in the way, removed an ewe-tree [a yew tree] planted in the churchyard, from the west into the east; with the like force, it thrust before it highways, sheepfolds, 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."

Glancing our eyes once more abroad, we will find that Tasso, who accompanies the cardinal of Este to France, is daily at work on his poem of "Jerusalem Delivered," of which eight cantos is by this time finished; Theodore Beza is chosen moderator of the national synod of Rochelle; and a child is born at Weil, in Wurtemburg, named John Kepler, who shall not only become one of the greatest astronomers of Germany, but of the world.

SHAKSPERE'S NINTH YEAR.

THE Duke of Norfolk, who has been convicted of high A.D. treason in January, is beheaded on Tower-hill, on 1572. the second of June. The Earl of Northumberland, who has been delivered up by the Scots-basely sold for money, as Charles I. will be in after days-is beheaded at York, on the twenty-second of August. The Spanish ambassador is ordered to quit the kingdom, for being concerned in a plot to murder the queen and Burleigh; and three of the conspirators, named Mather, Barney, and Hall, are executed. Francis Drake, burning with hatred against the Spaniards, at whose hands he has been a sufferer, is appointed to the command of two vessels, and is off to plunder the commercial ports of the Spaniards in America, from whence he will return laden with booty. And the Marquis of Winchester,* who has held the office of lord treasurer, now dying in the ninety-seventh year of his age, Lord Burleigh is appointed to the vacant post. The

A poem on the death of this nobleman was published this year, from the pen of one Rowland Broughton. Let us hope it paid the author, as most assuredly it will not give him much fame, judging from the specimen before me.

puritans would fain introduce the Geneva discipline into the church, but the queen dislikes them more than the Romanists.

Perhaps the popish infatuation, that priests can forgive even the murderer his sins, never led to greater excesses than are committed in Paris, on the twenty-fourth of August, the eve of St. Bartholomew, when many thousand protestants are massacred; the French king, Charles IX., amusing himself by discharging his long arquebuse, from the Louvre, on the poor fugitives, as they endeavour to escape. Day and night, for upwards of a week, does the infernal madness of murder and pillage continue; rich and poor alike becoming the victims of papal intolerance. Our own two most illustrious countrymen, Sidney and Raleigh, contrive to escape. The bravest of the admirals of France, Gaspard de Coligny, (whom Charles basely pretended to honour, and whom some of the murderers had fired at two days previously, wounding him in the right and left arm,) is murdered by a mob, under guidance of the Duke of Guise. A villain named Behme, or Besme, enters the room of the admiral with a drawn sword, followed by others of the gang. "Young man," says the veteran, 'my grey hairs ought to command thy respect; but do as thou pleasest; thou canst shorten my life but a few days." The wretch then stabs the brave admiral several times, and throws the body out of the window; and the mob, to whose fury the poor corpse has been exposed for three days, at last hang it by the feet on a gibbet, at Montfaucon. Nor is Paris the only scene of those brutal outrages. Butcheries of a similar character occur at Bordeaux, Lyons, Meaux, Tolouse, Troyes, and Orleans. According to some writers, one hundred thousand huguenots, or protestants, are massacred, in various parts of France, by what Shelley would truly call

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"The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings."

Queen Mab, canto v.

In their beds, on the house-tops, at their own domestic hearths, in the streets, or wherever the exasperated multitude can meet with them, are the "heretics" instantly murdered. The true catholic shrinks not from imbruing his hands in the blood of his brother-man of a different ereed, for his priest has promised him absolution. Many of the huguenots fly to England, where the whole court goes into mourning for those who are slain. But at Madrid the court celebrates the butchery by a public fes