ling remnants of the Forest of Arden north of the softly flowing Avon, where the thatched cot of the woodlander peeps up here and there in comfortable isolation; in the lush meads surrounding Anne Hathaway's Cottage home at Shottery; or in the quaintly built streets (particularly Henley Street) of the Elizabethan town which gave birth to the Poet of all Time, the tongue of the dweller there may be heard to-day tripping out that picturesque, humorous, and expressive language which Shakespeare himself lisped, as it fell from his mother's mouth more than three centuries ago.

SHAKESPEARE A DIALECT PRESERVER. - In this modern use of the language spoken and written by 'Stratford's wondrous Son,' Warwickshire stands unique in all the counties of Merrie England. You cannot go into a wayside cottage, a homestead by the wood, or on the waste without hearing some words come trippingly from the tongue of the peasant which you can at once place your hand upon in the Poet's works. Shakespeare, indeed, was not only the magic delineator of the grand passions of human nature;

he was the unconscious preserver of the dialect of his native country. Dialects may die out altogether in other counties. The dialect of rural Warwickshire never will utterly die, for if it should cease to be spoken in the ingle of the Arden village cottage, it will still be found on the pages of Shakespeare's wonderful books.

As an instance of this, in the first scene of the Second Act of 'Titus Andronicus' the Poet says, with a nice grasp of his homely dialect:

'What, man, more water glideth by the mill

Than wots the miller of, and easy it is

Of a cut loaf to steal a shive.'

That word shive' is a peculiarly comforting word in the mouth of a good Warwickshire housewife when addressed to a hungry wight who halts wearily by her door. It is a word in everyday use, and means a slice. A 'shive of a cut loaf' is so truly modern, and so frequently in the mouth of shepherd, ploughman, and harvester in the Forest of Arden, that one might imagine Shakespeare were still in the flesh, talking the expressive lingo to the country folk of his own greenwood.

THE TURN O' THE TONGUE.-Sweet, cherub-cheeked Hetty (why might it not be Hetty Sorrel ?), after two or three hours' churning in the dairy of the Hall Farm at Corley, in the north of the Forest, which, from a Farm immortalised by George Eliot, has become literally a school for butter-making, will say, with tempting lip and roguish eye: 'Hey, shunna I like a shive off on that cut loaf, an' that chump o' bacon? I should just.' And so it is at board and in field. It is a shive of this and a shive of that; for be it known to all men by these presents, that the Warwickshire lass, equally with the Warwickshire lad, is right valiant at the trencher.

And when Strephon and Phyllis are thirsty, as they are well calculated to be after their unlimited shives of this, that, and the other, and their hard field work in the Feldon and Woodland of Arden, they will ask for 'a tot o' cider, a tot o' milk, or a tot o' tea.' That Coomb shepherd of my acquaintance, whose form is as crooked as the codlin-tree in the garden of his own cottage at Illington, and whose face is withered like a last year's medlar,