February and the beginning of March, which the shepherds have passed in the open fields and on the windy hills in the "lambing season," it gives one pleasure to see them still so happy. Many a lamb would have been lost but for the care they took of them: for there they waited night after night, amid sleet and storm, in their little temporary huts, ready to rush out in a moment, and pick up and shelter the young lambs, which would otherwise perchance have perished in the cold. Proud were they when finer days came, and they looked on and saw their new-born flocks, as Bloomfield has described them in his beautiful poem of the "Farmer's Boy," racing in the meadows:

"A few begin a short but vigorous race,

And indolence abashed soon flies the place;
Thus challenged forth, see thither, one by one,
From every side assembling playmates run;
A thousand wily antics mark their stay-
A starting crowd, impatient of delay.

Like the fond dove, from fearful prison freed,
Each seems to say. 'Come, let us try our speed :'
Away they scour: impetuous, ardent, strong,
The green turf trembling as they bound along.
Adown the slope, then up the hillock climb,
Where every mole-hill is a bed of thyme,
Then panting stop; yet scarcely can refrain-
A bird, a leaf, will set them off again."

Now let us peep into that pretty parlour. There sit

What piles of cakes, honey,
What smiling faces; and

the farmer's daughters at tea. butter, eggs, ham, cold fowl! some of them are really beautiful,-pictures of rosy health. Now they are singing in the kitchen; now the fiddle is heard in the barn; there is giggling and laughter in the orchard; whisperings somewhere in the garden; children playing at hide-and-seek in the stack-yard. See where

those dark-eyed seducers, the gipsies, have congregated outside the farm-yard-somehow or another they have come in for their share of the feast: by-and-by they will become bolder; one bearing a child will venture into the barn, another will follow, and as the 'ale-horn circulates, it will, long before midnight, be "hail-fellow, well met.'

Then come the morris-dancers, Robin Hood and Maid Marian, with such poetry as is not to be found in the old ballads. Well, there is plenty for all: the ale for sheepshearing feast was brewed many a long month ago, and there are still half-a-dozen barrels untapped in the cellar.

But where is the old farmer?-he bade his men fall-to, and welcome, and we have not seen him since. No; he is in the large, old-fashioned summer-house at the bottom of his garden, with the butcher, and the miller, and the maltster, and the doctor, and the landlord from the Black Bull; and they have drawn the corks of a few bottles of choice port, and are enjoying themselves in their own way.

The young lawyer has brought his fiddle, for he is a gentleman-fiddler, and the young ladies in the parlour will come soon, and dance on the lawn, for even there the line of distinction is drawn. The wealthy farmer's daughter may condescend just to dance a turn or two in the barn; and when they have gone, the old one-eyed hired common fiddler will strike up "Bob and Joan,” just to show his contempt for such "proud, stuck-up, thingumterrys," as he will call them; with "their waltzes, and quadrilles, and such-like outlandish fal-the-rals, as their grandmothers would have been ashamed to have been seen in."

But a few old-fashioned farmers, with their wives,

soon drop in, and all is forgotten. The world has undergone a great change since Shakspeare's time: even in our own day we have seen many an alteration; and, saving the county in which we were born, we know not another spot in England that would read SHAKSPERE AND SHEEP

"When the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth, and many a maid,
Dancing in the chequered shade;

And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday."

MILTON'S "L'ALLEGRO."

HERE we are at liberty to walk over hill and valley, under the shadows of tall elm trees, and along avenues of broad-branching chesnuts, where the antlered deer are ever

crossing your path with stately tread, or some old Greenwich pensioner, leaning on his staff, peeps out from the most picturesque corner of the landscape. Here children from stifling parish-schools, in the close streets of London, are brought once a year to breathe the pure air, and look enviously on the joyous games of others of their own age, who have no keen-eyed governor over them, to keep their mirth within bounds. Here lovers bring their lasses, husbands their wives and children, while grey old grandams are seen seated on the hill side, recounting the changes which have taken place since they first ran down that steep green hill, many a long, long Whitsuntide ago.

And those old pensioners who sit in the sunshine for hours apart, or conversing with each other, who look upon this regal domain as their own-what must their feelings be when they contrast this green quietude to the stormy seas and thunder of battles through which they have passed? Many a time have we watched them, as they stood on some breezy summit, calmly gazing over the Thames, while ship after ship glided by, on their way to some far distant shore— and we have wondered whether memory carried them back to their own early years, when the love of home was yet warm in their hearts, and their hands were unstained with blood? And those men are the ruins which war has spared! some have lost both legs, others their arms! Look what they are now, and turn to what they were then! That meek, pale, venerable countenance was then brown and weather-beaten; that trembling voice was the first to cry "Forward," while, with pistol and cutlass in hand, he boarded the vessel, and shot a fellow-creature dead, and at a blow brought another down, pale and bleeding, upon the slippery deck. And Nelson, who knew not "what fear was," the man whom "kings delighted to honour," who basked in the sunshine of beauty, and moved "sole star”