"
SIR THOMAS.
"Thou! why, how could that happen? Oxford! chapel-royal!"
WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.
"And to whom I said (your worship will forgive my forwardness), 'I
HAVE THE HONOUR, SIR, TO LIVE WITHIN TWO MEASURED MILES OF THE VERY
SIR THOMAS LUCY WHO SPAKE THAT.' And I vow I said it without any
hope or belief that he would invite me, as he did, to dine with him
thereupon."
SIR THOMAS.
"There be nigh upon three miles betwixt this house and Stratford
bridge-end."
WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.
"I dropt a mile in my pride and exultation, God forgive me! I would
not conceal my fault."
SIR THOMAS.
"Wonderful! that a preacher so learned as to preach before majesty
in the chapel-royal should not have caught thee tripping over a
whole lawful mile,--a good third of the distance between my house
and the cross-roads. This is incomprehensible in a scholar."
WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.
"God willed that he should become my teacher, and in the bowels of
his mercy hid my shame."
SIR THOMAS.
"How camest thou into the converse of such eminent and ghostly men?"
WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.
"How, indeed?--everything against me!"
He sighed, and entered into a long discourse, which Master Silas
would at sundry times have interrupted, but that Sir Thomas more
than once frowned upon him, even as he had frowned heretofore on
young Will, who thus began and continued his narration:-
"Hearing the preacher preach at Saint Mary's (for being about my
father's business on Saturday, and not choosing to be a-horseback on
Sundays, albeit time-pressed, I footed it to Oxford for my
edification on the Lord's day, leaving the sorrel with Master Hal
Webster of the Tankard and Unicorn)--hearing him preach, as I was
saying, before the University in St.
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