By the Uev. Chr. Wordsworth. 285 



wise policy of the great St. Gregory, who bade retain so much of 

 local custom as was harmless, and to consecrate it for the Christians' 

 Lord.^ Still, I must own that I, for one, am getting a little im- 

 patient of that ubiquitous priest of Nemi, and of having his golden 

 bough and gruesome story thrust under my nose at every turn. 

 With no lack of sympathy for 



" The lively Grecian, in a land of hills 

 Rivers, and fertile plains, and sounding shores," ^ 



I am a little tired of his Italian brother ; and I look forward to a 

 time when the Rex Nemorensis of Aricia will be — I do not say, 

 quite forgotten, but — put in a place proportionate to his deserts. 

 I do not wish him — after his own barbarous custom — to be slain : 

 but only, decently succeeded : by some newer favourite, and so 

 assisted to find his proper level — neither too retiring nor too 

 generally pervasive, along (let us say) with Max Miiller's solar 

 myths, Dr. Cheyne's Jerahmeel (who at one time seemed likely to 

 annex the interest of the entire Pentateuch), or the shadowy hero of 

 the " Shacon and Bakespeare" controversy, which has left some of us 

 not indeed convinced of an ingenious and industrious lady's theories 

 but inclined perhaps to suspect that "the man Shakespeare" was 

 probably a half-brother of Sir Francis Bacon, and that, while the 

 former was writing his Hamlet, the other was amusing himself by 

 perfecting his Morse code, in which he made some experiments, as 

 he tells us in the Advancement of Learning.^ But this is no place 

 for "more scandal about Q. Elizabeth," or for dwelling on the 

 proximity of Kenilworth to Stratford. Let us retrace our steps 

 to the banks of our Wiltshire Avon and Wylye. We must leave 

 Lago di Nemi for (xrovely Wood and Hamshill Ditches. For 

 Grovely, too, has its legends, its mysteries, and its tragedies. 

 Its legends : — and among them that of " the Maid and the 



' The Rev. A. N. Cooper has a short paper on Heathen Customs at Christian 

 Feasts in W. Andrews' Antiquities and Curiosities of the Church (1897), 

 pp. 58-70. 



- The Excursion, iv. 



•* Very shortly after this paper was read another claimant — Roger Manners 

 — was put forward for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. 



