things shall be peace."
]

His fellow writers feel the charm. No one of them can do work in so
many kinds nor of such kind in each. They recognise their master, they
are under his magic spell; the familiar stories from Plutarch and
Chaucer and Ovid take on a new meaning; the very holly on the walls
seems alive with the fairy folk, as indeed it should be, according to
the pretty, old superstition that elves and fairies hover about all
Christmas fetes. Hence, branches are hanging in hall and bower in
order that these invisible guests may "hang in each leaf and cling on
every bough." The holly, its prickly leaves symbolic of the crown of
thorns, and its red berries of the blood of Christ, banishes the ivy
and other greens, and becomes the popular favourite that it has since
remained, for Christmas decoration.

[Illustration: A Group of Morris Dancers

"The quaint-mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable."
]

A responsive audience truly. Roars of laughter greet the rollicking
humour of the clowns and their rude burlesque of things theatrical.
But longest and loudest is the applause over the new touches--those
portions that have been written in to please the court and the Queen.
To remodel a play written for a marriage celebration so that it shall
seem to praise the virginity of the Queen were surely no slight task,
but it has been accomplished.

Though the scene is laid in Greece, yet the play is full of the
English life that all know so well. "Merrie England" and not classic
Greece has given the poet the picture of the sweet country
school-girls working at one flower, warbling one song, growing
together like a double cherry. Of England, is the picture of the
hounds with "ears that sweep away the morning dew"; from England, all
this out-door woodland life, the clown's play and the clowns
themselves,--Bottom with his inimitable conceit, and his fellows,
Snug, Quince, and the rest. English is all Puck's fairy lore, the
cowslips tall, the red-hipt humble-bee, Oberon's bank, the pansy
love-in-idleness, and all the lovely imagery of the verse. English is
the whole scenic background, and the "Wood near Athens" is plainly the
Stratford boy's idealised memory of the Weir Brake that he knows so
well.

Mayhap, in very truth, on some mid-summer night the young poet, even
then of "imagination all compact," did indeed dream a dream or see a
vision like unto this, bringing it from Stratford