ants, upon which you can at once place your finger in the plays of Shakespeare; so, in like manner, it is almost impossible to find a single person in the great universe outside it who has not heard of, or visited, this sacred spot in the heart's core of this little island of ours, 'Set in the silver sea.' MICHAEL DRAYTON.-This 'Heart of England,' as Warwickshire was so poetically called by Michael Drayton, author of the 'Polyolbion,' 'The Wars of the Barons,' and other important works dealing with those spacious times, who was born at Hartshill, in the north of Shakespeare's country, in 1563, one year before the birth of the greater poet, is not only the heart and centre of natural beauty, whence sprang to birth one of the divinest intellects the world has ever seen, or is likely to see, but is also the literal heart and centre of the physical conformation of the small, yet mighty, land upon which the sun never sets. If a Shakespeare-loving Scotsman, before crossing the border and leaving behind him his native 'land of brown heath and shaggy wood,' were to take a map of England and mark an exact perpendicular line from Berwick-on-Tweed to the Isle of Wight; then a line from Dover to the Isle of Anglesey; and again an oblique line from the Severn to the Humber, he would find that the lines exactly intersect each other in Warwickshire, and almost immediately upon that literary Mecca of the world, Stratford-on-Avon, which gave birth to and cradled 'the gentle Shakespeare,' of whom his friend, Ben Jonson, speaks so lovingly. Michael Drayton, therefore, was wise and truly right in calling his birth country of Warwickshire the Heart of England.' THE HEART OF HISTORY.-And as Warwickshire is the heart of the physical conformation of England, so is it the heart of history and of romance. It is not necessary to go back so far as the days of the Romans, though, if it were, it would be found that at that time Warwickshire held the fate and history of many a king and queen in war, and in peace held them captive by the exquisite beauty of its woodland; which was wilder then than now, and more in union with the tastes and inclinations of those fierce warriors, |