THE WARWICKSHIRE LAD. Ye Warwickshire lads, and ye lasses, For the lad of all lads, was a Warwickshire lad. Be proud of the charms of your county, Where nature has lavished her bounty, Where much she has given, and some to be spar'd, For the bard of all bards, was a Warwickshire bard, Warwickshire bard, Never pair'd, For the bard of all bards, was a Warwickshire bard. Each shire has its different pleasures, How he writ! For the wit of all wits, was a Warwickshire wit. Old Ben, Thomas Otway, John Dryden, And half a score more we take pride in, Of famous Will Congreve we boast too the skill, But the Will of all Wills, was a Warwickshire Will, Warwickshire Will, Matchless still, For the Will of all Wills, was a Warwickshire Will. Our Shakspeare compared is to no man, Nor Frenchman, nor Grecian, nor Roman, Their swans are all geese, to the Avon's sweet swan, And the man of all men, was a Warwickshire man, Warwickshire man, Avon's swan, And the man of all men, was a Warwickshire man. As ven'son is very inviting, To steal it our bard took delight in, To make his friends merry, he never was lag, For the wag of all wags, was a Warwickshire wag, Warwickshire wag, Ever brag, For the wag of all wags, was a Warwickshire wag. 318 There never was seen such a creature, Of all she was worth he robbed Nature; He took all her smiles, and he took all her grief, And the thief of all thieves, was a Warwickshire thief, Warwickshire thief, He's the chief, For the thief of all thieves, was a Warwickshire thief. A grand ball commenced in the amphitheatre in the evening, and was kept up till three o'clock next morning. In front of the building, an ambitious transparency was exhibited, representing Time leading Shakspeare to immortality, with Tragedy on one side, and Comedy on the other. A general illumination took place in the town, along with a brilliant display of fireworks, under the management of Mr Angelo. The next morning was ushered in like the former by firing of cannon, serenading, and ringing of bells. A public breakfast was again served in the town-hall, and at eleven o'clock the company repaired to the amphitheatre, to hear performed Garrick's Shakspeare Ode, which he had composed for the dedication of the town-hall, and placing there a statue of the great bard presented by Garrick to the corporation. We quote the grandiloquent language of Boswell, the biographer of Johnson, regarding this production. The performance of the Dedication Ode was noble and affecting: it was like an exhibition in Athens or Rome. The whole audience were fixed in the most earnest attention; and I do believe, that if one had attempted to disturb the performance, he would have been in danger of his life. Garrick, in the front of the orchestra, filled with the first musicians of the nation, with Dr Arne at their head, and inspired with an awful elevation of soul, while he looked from time to time at the venerable statue of Shakspeare, appeared more than himself. While he repeated the ode, and saw the various passions and feelings which it contains fully transfused into all around him, he seemed in ecstasy, and gave us the idea of a mortal transformed into a demigod, as we read in the pagan mythology.' The statue of Shakspeare, above referred to, was raised in a conspicuous position above the assembled company, and Garrick, we are told, was stationed in the centre of the orchestra, dressed in a brown suit, richly embroidered with gold lace, with his steward's wand of the mulberry-wood in his hand, and the medallion, presented him by the corporation, suspended from his breast. Our space does not permit us to transcribe here the Dedication Ode, which is a piece of considerable length. Declaimed by Garrick, with the airs and choruses set to music by Arne, and performed under the personal direction of that gifted composer, it must have formed the most attractive part of the jubilee festivities. On its completion, its author stood up and delivered a eulogium on Shakspeare, in which the enemies of the dramatist (if he had any) were called on to state anything which they knew to his prejudice. Upon this, King, the celebrated comedian, ascended to the orchestra, and in the character of a macaroni, the reigning type of fop of the day, commenced a denunciatory attack on Shakspeare, as an ill-bred uncultivated fellow, who made people laugh or cry as he thought proper-in short, quite unsuited for the refinement of the present age. It is said to have been a highly-amusing exhibition, though many of the audience, unable to understand a joke, and believing it a real onslaught upon Shakspeare, testified visibly their dissatisfaction. An epilogue addressed to the ladies, and delivered by Garrick, closed this part of the ceremonial, which did not terminate without a mishap-the composure of the meeting being unexpectedly disturbed by the giving way of a number of the benches on which the audience sat, with a terrible crash. A nobleman was at the same time hurt by the falling of a door, but fortunately no one received any serious detriment. The remainder of Thursday was, like the previous day, spent in dining, listening to a concert, and witnessing illuminations and fireworks. At midnight commenced a grand masquerade, said to have been one of the finest entertainments of the kind ever witnessed in Britain. Three ladies, we are informed, who personated Macbeth's witches, and another, who appeared as Dame Quickly, excited universal admiration. An Oxford gentleman assumed, with great effect, the character of Lord Ogleby; but a person dressed as the Devil gave inexpressible offence! One individual, whose costume attracted special attention, was James Boswell, already referred to, whom the accompanying engraving represents as he appeared at the Stratford jubilee masquerade, in the character of an armed chief of Corsica, an island of which he had published an account, and regarding which he had, as his countrymen in the north would say, 'a bee in his bonnet.' The dress consisted of a short, dark-coloured coat of coarse cloth, scarlet waistcoat and breeches, and black spatterdashes, and a cap of black cloth, bearing on its front, embroidered in gold letters, VIVA LA LIBERTA, and on its side a blue feather and cockade. The device was in allusion to the struggles of the Corsicans for national independence under General Paoli, Boswell's friend. On the breast of the coat was sewed a Moor's head, the crest of Corsica, surrounded with branches of laurel. Mr Boswell wore also a cartridge-pouch, into which was stuck a stiletto, and on his left side a pistol. A musket was slung across his shoulder, and his hair, which was unpowdered, hung plaited down his neck, ending in a knot of blue ribbons. SHAKSPEARE FESTIVAL. poetical address, sufficiently grandiose and Cambysean, on the united subjects of Corsica and the Stratford jubilee. There can be no doubt, as Mr Croker remarks, that poor Bozzy made a sad fool of himself, both on this and other occasions during the jubilee, and would have done well to have followed the advice of his blunt-spoken Mentor, 'to clear his head of Corsica.' During his stay at Stratford, he is said to have gone about with the words CORSICA BOSWELL printed in large letters outside his hat, that no one might remain in ignorance of the presence of so illustrious a per sonage. On the masquerade revellers awaking from their slumbers on the following day (Friday), they found a deluge of rain, which had continued unintermittedly from the previous night, descending on the town of Stratford. All prospect, therefore, of carrying out the proposed Shakspeare pageant, in which the principal characters in his plays were to have been represented in a triumphal procession, al fresco, with chariots, banners, and all proper adjuncts, was rendered hopeless. There was, however, a jubilee horse-race, which was well attended, though the animals were up to their knees in THE STRATFORD JUBILEE. water. THE BOOK OF DAYS. In the evening another grand ball took place in the town-hall, in which the graceful minuet-dancing of Mrs Garrick, who in her youth had been a distinguished Terpsichorean performer on the London stage, won the highest encomiums. The assembly broke up at four o'clock on Saturday morning, and so ended the Stratford jubilee. As might have been expected, this festive celebration did not escape satire and animadversion, both before and after the event; the jealousy felt against its author, Garrick, being sufficient to call forth many pungent attacks. In the Devil on Two Sticks, Foote introduced the following sarcastic description: A jubilee, as it hath lately appeared, is a public invitation, circulated and urged by puffing, to go post without horses, to an obscure borough without representatives, governed by a mayor and aldermen who are no magistrates, to celebrate a great poet, whose own works have made him immortal, by an ode without poetry, music without melody, dinners without victuals, and lodgings without beds; a masquerade where half the people appeared barefaced, a horse-race up to the knees in water, fireworks extinguished as soon as they were lighted, and a gingerbread amphitheatre, which, like a house of cards, tumbled to pieces as soon as it was finished.' Other squibs appeared in the form of parodies and epigrams; and also a farce, entitled The Stratford Jubilee, intended to have been performed at Foote's theatre, in the Haymarket, but which, though printed and published, seems to have never been placed on the boards. Strictures of a different description were passed on the whole festival by certain of the inhabitants of Stratford, who imputed the violent rains which fell during the jubilee to the judgment of Heaven on such impious demonstrations. This circumstance may recall to some of our readers the worthy minister of Leith, recorded by Hugh Miller in his Schools and Schoolmasters, who ascribed the great fire in Edinburgh in 1824, to the Musical Festival which had a short time previously been celebrated there! In the month of October following the Stratford jubilee, the Shakspeare pageant devised by Garrick, but the representation of which had been prevented by the unfavourable weather, was brought out by him with great magnificence and success at Drury Lane Theatre, and had a run of nearly a hundred nights. On the 6th of September in the ensuing year, the anniversary of the ceremonial was celebrated at Stratford with great festivity; but the custom seems afterwards to have fallen into desuetude, and no further public commemoration of our great national poet was attempted in the place of his birth for upwards of fifty years. At last, in 1824, the Shakspeare Club was established, and an annual celebration in his honour appointed to be held on the 23d of April, the (erroneously) assumed day of his birth, and which we know, upon good evidence, to have been that of his death. Under the auspices of this association, a splendid gala, after the manner of the jubilee of 1769, was conducted in Stratford, on 23d April 1827 and two following days. A similarly magnificent commemoration took place in 1830, when, among other festive ceremonies, an ode, written for the occasion by Mr Alaric A. Watts, was recited, and a series of * See Book of Days, i. 543. ARTHUR YOUNG. dramatic performances exhibited, in which the principal characters were sustained by the rising tragedian of the age, Mr Charles Kean. At the celebration in 1836, an oration was delivered in the theatre by Mr George Jones, the American tragedian, and in 1837 by Mr Sheridan Knowles. The Shakspeare jubilee was the first of those commemorative festivals which have since become so familiar to all of us. Sixteen years afterwards, in 1785, a grand musical celebration took place in Westminster Abbey in honour of Handel, and a similar tribute to the memory of the great composer has been recently paid in our own day. The centenary festivities, performed in nearly every part of the world, in honour of Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland, in January 1859, must be fresh in the recollection of every one. And it is quite possible that, a few twelvemonths hence, the year 1871 may witness a similar jubilee in honour of the natal-day of the Great Magician of the North, Sir Walter Scott. SEPTEMBER 7. St Regina or Reine, virgin and martyr, 3d century. St Evurtius, bishop of Orleans, confessor, about 340. St Grimonia or Germana, virgin and martyr. St Eunan, first bishop of Raphoe, in Ireland. St Cloud, confessor, 560. St Madelberte, virgin, about 705. Saints Alchmund and Tilberht, confessors, 8th century. Born.-Queen Elizabeth of England, 1533, Greenwich; Thomas Erpenius, celebrated orientalist, 1584, Gorcum, Holland; Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, great commander, 1621, Paris; George Louis, Count de Buffon, distinguished naturalist, 1707, Montbard, Burgundy; Dr Samuel Johnson, lexicographer and author, 1709, Lichfield; Arthur Young, agricultural writer, 1741. Died.-Emperor Frederick IV. of Germany, 1493, Vienna; Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, historical writer, 1644, Rome; Captain Porteous, murdered by the Edinburgh mob, 1736; Dr John Armstrong, author of The Art of Preserving Health, 1779, London; Leonard Euler, eminent mathematician, 1783, St Petersburg; Mrs Hannah More, religious and moral writer, 1833, Clifton. ARTHUR YOUNG. The most popular and prolific of writers on rural affairs was Arthur Young. No great discovery or improvement in agriculture bears his name his merit consists in the fact, that he was an agitator. He had a passion for novelties, and such was the vigour of his mind, that he succeeded in affecting the most stolid and conservative of classes with something of his own enthusiasm. He set landlords thinking, enticed and drove them into experiments, and persuaded farmers everywhere to break from the dull routine of centuries. More than any man, England owes to Arthur Young that impulse which, within the last hundred years, has transformed her wastes into rich pastures and fruitful fields, and multiplied the produce of her harvests by many fold. Young was the son of a Suffolk clergyman, and was born in 1741. He was apprenticed to a merchant in Lynn, but an inordinate taste for reading and scribbling interfered sadly with his mercantile progress. At the age of seventeen, he wrote a pamphlet on the war against the French in America, for which a publisher gave him ten pounds' worth of books. He next started a periodical, called the Universal Museum, which, by the advice of Dr Johnson, he discontinued at the sixth number. Four novels, about the same time, flowed from his facile pen. At his father's death, in 1769, he wished to enter the army, but at his mother's entreaty refrained, and turned farmer instead, without any practical knowledge of husbandry, and, as he afterwards confessed, with his head bursting with wild notions of improvements. Farming supplied matter and direction for his literary activity, and in 1770 he published, in two thick volumes quarto, A Course of Experimental Agriculture, containing an exact Register of the Business transacted during five years on near 300 acres of various Soils. A few years before, he had printed A Tour through the Southern Counties of England, which proved so popular that he was led to undertake similar surveys in the east, west, and north, and Ireland. These tours excited the liveliest interest in all connected with agriculture: soils, methods of culture, crops, farm-buildings, cattle, plantations, roads, were all discussed in a most vivacious style, and praised or blamed with bluff honesty. Between 1766 and 1775, he relates that he realised £3000 by his agricultural writings, a large sum for works of that order in those times. His own farming was far from profitable, and the terms in which he describes a hundred acres he rented in Hertfordshire, may be taken as a fair specimen of his outspoken manner: 'I know not what epithet to give this soil; sterility falls short of the idea; a hungry vitriolic gravel-I occupied for nine years the jaws of a wolf. A nabob's fortune would sink in the attempt to raise good arable crops in such a country: my experience and knowledge had increased from travelling and practice; but all was lost when exerted on such a spot. I hardly wonder at a losing account, after fate had fixed me on land calculated to swallow, without return, all that folly or imprudence could bestow upon it.' Finding that his income was barely sufficient to meet his expenditure, he engaged to report the parliamentary debates for the Morning Post. This he continued to perform for several years; and after the labours of the week, he walked every Saturday evening to his wretched farm, a distance of seventeen miles from London, from which he as regularly returned every Monday morning. This was the most anxious and laborious part of his life. 'I worked,' he writes, 'like a coal-heaver, though without his reward.' In 1784, he commenced a periodical work under the title of the Annals of Agriculture, which he continued through forty-five volumes. He admitted no papers unless signed by the author, a regulation which added alike to the interest and authority of the publication. The rule was relaxed, however, in the case of the king, George III., who contributed to the seventh volume a description of the farm of Mr Ducket at Petersham, under the signature of 'Ralph Robinson of Windsor.' Young's English Tours possess considerable historic interest, which will increase with the lapse of years; but their present, and probably future, value in that respect is thrown into the shade by his Agricultural Survey of France, made OLD SAYINGS AS TO CLOTHES. on horseback, in 1788. The French admit that Young was the first who opened their eyes to the very low condition of their husbandry, but his observations on the social and political state of the peasantry, their poverty and hardships, are of peculiar and unique importance, as made on the very verge of the revolution; and no student of the circumstances which led up to that tremendous catastrophe, will ever neglect Arthur Young's Survey. In his French travel he displays a liberal and reforming spirit, but the excesses and atrocities of the revolutionists drove Young, as it did Burke and a host of others, into Toryism, and a pamphlet he published in 1793, entitled The Example of France a Warning to Britain, had a great sale, and attests the depth of his horror and disgust. The fame of Young as an agriculturist was greater even abroad than at home, and many were the tokens of admiration he received. The French Directory, in 1801, ordered the translation of all his agricultural writings, and in twenty volumes they were published in Paris, under the title of Le Cultivateur Anglais. The Empress Catherine sent three young Russians to be instructed by him, and made him the present of a gold snuff-box, with rich ermine cloaks for his wife and daughter. His son, too, was employed by the Czar Alexander, in 1805, to make an agricultural survey around Moscow, and was rewarded with a sum which enabled him to purchase an estate of 10,000 acres of very fertile land in the Crimea, where he settled. Pupils flocked to Arthur Young from all parts of the world. The Duke of Bedford one morning, at his breakfast-table, counted representatives from France, Poland, Austria, Russia, Italy, Portugal, and America. Sir John Sinclair, in 1793, persuaded the government to establish a Board of Agriculture, of which Young was appointed secretary, with a free house and a salary of £400 a year. It was a post for which he was admirably suited, and was the means of preserving him from a very hazardous speculation-a tract of Yorkshire moorland he purposed cultivating. What a change in the destination of a man's life!' he exclaims. Instead of entering, as I proposed, the solitary lord of 4000 acres, in the keen atmosphere of lofty rocks and mountain torrents, with a little creation rising gradually around me, making the desert smile with cultivation, and grouse give way to industrious population, active and energetic, though remote and tranquil, and every instant of my existence making two blades of grass to grow where not one was found before-behold me at a desk in the fog, the smoke, the din of Whitehall!' About 1808, his sight grew dim, terminating in blindness, but his busy career did not close until the 12th of April 1820, when he had nearly reached his eightieth year. OLD SAYINGS AS TO CLOTHES. stockings, inside out: but if you wish the omen to It is lucky to put on any article of dress, particularly hold good, you must continue to wear the reversed portion of your attire in that condition, till the regular time comes for putting it off-that is, either bedtime or cleaning yourself." If you set it right, you will 'change the luck.' It will be of no use to put on anything with the wrong side out on purpose. It is worthy of remark, in connection with this superstition, that when William the Conqueror, in arming himself for the battle of Hastings, happened to put on his shirt of mail with the hind-side before, the bystanders seem to have been shocked by it, as by an ill omen, till William claimed it as a good one, betokening that he was to be changed from a duke to a king. The phenomenon of the hind-side before' is so closely related to that of 'inside out,' that one can hardly understand their being taken for contrary omens. The clothes of the dead will never wear long. When a person dies, and his or her clothes are given away to the poor, it is frequently remarked: Ah, they may look very well, but they won't wear; they belong to the dead.' If a mother gives away all the baby's clothes she has (or the cradle), she will be sure to have another baby, though she may have thought herself above such vanities. If a girl's petticoats are longer than her frock, that is a sign that her father loves her better than her mother does-perhaps because it is plain that her mother does not attend so much to her dress as she ought to do, whereas her father may love her as much as you please, and at the same time be very ignorant or unobservant of the rights and wrongs of female attire. If you would have good-luck, you must wear something new on Whitsun-Sunday' (pronounced Wissun-Sunday). More generally, Easter Day is the one thus honoured, but a glance round a church or Sunday-school in Suffolk, on Whitsunday, shews very plainly that it is the one chosen for beginning to wear new things.' While upon the subject of clothes, I may mention a ludicrous Suffolk phrase descriptive of a person not quite so sharp as he might be: he is spoken of as short of buttons,' being, I suppose, considered an unfinished article. MISCELLANEOUS SAYINGS. It is unlucky to enter a house, which you are going to occupy, by the back-door. I knew of a family who had hired a house, and went to look over it, accompanied by an old Scotch servant. The family, innocently enough, finding the front-door 'done up,' went in at the back-door, which was open; but great was their surprise to see the servant burst into tears, and sit down on a stone outside, refusing to go in with them. If I recollect rightly (the circumstance happened several years ago), she had the front-door opened, and went in at that herself, hoping, I suppose, that the spell would be dissolved, if all the family did not go in at the back-door. The Cross was made of elder-wood. Speaking to some little children one day about the danger of taking shelter under trees during a thunderstorm, one of them said that it was not so with all trees, 'For,' said he, 'you will be quite safe under an eldern-tree, because the cross was made of that, and so the lightning never strikes it.' With this may be contrasted a superstition mentioned by Dean Trench in one of the notes to his Sacred Latin Poetry, and accounting for the trembling of the leaves of the aspen-tree, by saying that the cross was made of its wood, and that, since then, the tree has never ceased to shudder. Hot cross-buns, if properly made, will never get mouldy. To make them properly, you must do the whole of the business on the Good-Friday itself; the materials must be mixed, the dough made, and the buns baked on that day, and this, I think, before a certain hour; but whether this hour is sunrise or church-time, I cannot say. Perhaps the spice which enters into the MISCELLANEOUS SAYINGS. composition of hot cross-buns, has as much to do with the result as anything, but, experto crede, you may keep them for years without their getting mouldy. In the appendix to Forby's Vocabulary of East Anglia, are given several local superstitions. One of them, regarding the cutting of the nails, is such a very elaborate one, that I give entire the formula in which it is embodied. The version that I have heard is nearly word for word the same as that which he has printed, and is as follows: 'Cut 'em on Monday, you cut 'em for health; morrow; Cut 'em on Sunday, and you'll have the devil with you all the week.' I must confess that I cannot divine the origin of any of these notions, but of the last two. Sunday is, of course, the chief day for courting among the labouringclasses, and what can be more natural than that the cutting of the nails on a Saturday, should be followed by the meeting of true-lovers on the next day? the most likely one for such an event, whether the nails had been cut or not. The last, again, seems to have arisen from considering the cutting of nails to be a kind of work, and so to be a sin, which would render the breaker of the Sabbath more liable to the attacks of the devil. This view is strengthened by the fact of the Sunday being placed not at the beginning, but at the end of the week, and thus identified with the Jewish Sabbath. Indeed, I have found that among poor people generally, it is reckoned as the seventh day, and that on the Sunday, they speak of the remainder of the week as the next week. Superstitions with respect to the cutting of the nails are of very ancient date. We find one in Hesiod's Works and Day (742-3), where he tells you: 'Not to cut from the five-branched with glittering iron the dry from the quick in the rich feast of the gods,' a direction which may be compared with the warning against Sunday nail-cutting in the EastAnglian saw given above. Mushrooms will not grow after they have been seen. Very naturally, the first person that sees them, gathers them. The price of corn rises and falls with Barton Merean eccentric piece of water, which varies in size from twelve or fourteen acres to a small pond, and is sometimes entirely dried up. It lies about four miles from Bury St Edmunds, and a worthy old farmer, now deceased, used frequently to ride to Barton Mere to observe the state of the water there, before proceeding to Bury market. I do not know of any one who does this now, but it is an observed fact that the price of corn, and the height of the water, frequently do vary together for instance, corn is now (October 1862) very low, and the mere is nearly dry. Probably the character of the weather may affect both in common, and in this manner the notion can be explained, as the saying that: If the rain-drops hang on the window, more will come to join them,' may be accounted for by the fact, that it is a sign of slow evaporation, of the presence of abundant moisture, which will be likely to precipitate itself in the form of more rain. : If, when you are fishing, you count what you have taken, you will not catch any more. This may be paralleled with the prejudice against counting lambs, mentioned in a former paper. It is a western superstition, and was communicated to me by a gentleman, who, when out with professional |