world-ship was moored in the Thames, and the hearts of Londoners were stirred by it to their depths. It meant to them a new ideal for commerce and for English rule. And it meant something even greater, a new ideal of national life. Shakespeare was inspired to give forth this new ideal, and though his feet probably never trod on foreign soil, his mind went out to what his great countrymen were doing, and he trod upon foreign soil as it was represented by Drake's ship. Mr Fairman Ordish in his masterly account of Shakespeare's London has explained its inward significance: "Strong and new life upon a background of heaped remains of a recent past: this was what greeted Shakespeare on every hand." It greeted him on the Thames. The great antiquary, William Camden, becomes eloquent when he speaks of the Thames as "a sure and most beautiful Roade for shipping," and then goes on to say that "a man would say that seeth the shipping there, that it is, as it were, very wood of trees disbranched to make glades and let in light, so shaded it is with masts and sailes."1 This may be hyperbole, as Mr Ordish suggests, but it is from a strain that stretches back into the remote past of London. Fitzstephen in the twelfth century wrote that "to this city from every nation under heaven merchants bring their commodities," and then quotes verses to describe the kind of wares which came up the Thames at this date. The Thames of Tudor London not only repeated the spectacle of the 1 Ordish, Shakespeare's London, p. 12.

a

eleventh century, but added to it new characteristics of its own.

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A few direct insights into London life may most profitably be noted from contemporary documents which contain not formal descriptions, but incidental notings of places and their occupants. The Tudor period is extraordinarily rich in such material, and contrasts strangely, in this respect as in others, with the period which preceded it. Thus in the examination of Gabriel Tomlinson, aged twenty-one or thereabouts, servant to Richard Edwards, draper, in connection with the Essex Rebellion, it is stated that upon Sunday the eighth of February, being then in a window in his master's house in Gracious Street, about 12 o'clock of the day, did there see the Earl of Essex with a great company of men about him, and did hear the Earl with a very loud voice say that the crown of England was sold to Spain," and his master, Richard Edwards, draper, also deposed that he "could not certainly hear every word that the Earl of Essex did speak, but he saw him and heard him speak with a 'gast' countenance and like a man forlorn, and said, with a loud voice, You should not be cosined so or conicatched so'; and then spake of Sir Walter Raleigh, he could not certainly understand what, the confusion of the noise was so great; but heard him say that the crown of England was sold to the Infanta or King of Spain, or words to that effect, and that they should believe honest and religious men and not be conicatched,' and used much speech