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'