importance, being added to the above, the total number of references to the oak by Shakspere, appears to be thirty-one, or excluding the repetitions in the Merry Wives, twenty-four. No other tree is mentioned so often, and thus, upon his own showing, it was his favourite; though we must not forget that the oak has in all ages held a front place in metaphor, the various names under which it appears denoting several species not British, as in the case of the Hebrew 'allon, and the Greek opus, the word employed in that famous line in the Odyssey:

"For thou art not of the oak of ancient story."

Chapter Third.

THE WILLOW.

This above all, To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou can'st not then be false to any man.

Hamlet, i., 3.

HE willow, like the oak, is placed before us by Shakspere both as an object of natural beauty and as an emblem. It is interesting to observe, at the outset, that, excepting a slight reference in Virgil to the form and colour, he is the first poet by whom it is substantially so employed.

QUEEN: Your sister's drowned, Laertes!

LAERTES: Drowned! O, where?

QUEEN: There is a willow grows ascaunt the brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There, with fantastic garlands did she come,
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long-purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.

There, on the pendent boughs, her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang--an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element. But long it could not be,
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay,
To muddy death.-Hamlet, iv., 7.

The tree particularly alluded to in this most beautiful and tender description, is that well-known lovely ornament of the river side—the white willow, Salix alba—a species similar to the common S. fragilis, or "Crack willow," but at once distinguished by the long and narrow leaves being overspread with shining silvery hairs. Enamoured of quiet streams such as Shakspere was familiar with in Warwickshire, upon the Avon it still accentuates many a reach, and to-day we may see it reflected just as he did. When growing on the very margin, and at a point where the current newly presses, the trunk cannot help but lose its hold upon the soil, which is undermined and worn away, so that at last it quite leans over, the boughs then often forming a light canopy, beneath which the little fishes play. Favourably circumstanced, it attains a stature of thirty feet, and the branches are then strong enough to bear the weight of one who climbs them. Mark now the supreme art of the master in telling us that the water was deep enough