ing the goodliest river in the whole kingdom into the broadest street to walk in."
So much for the generality of all sorts of fun. Rich and poor, in town and country alike, looked upon or took part in the pageants connected with progresses and days of festivity. The dramatic productions which the popular mind readily recalls to-day as the most characteristic form of Elizabethan amusement, have been described elsewhere by the present writer and are therefore omitted from the following pages. Doubtless hawking and hunting, the most popular rural sports of the time, lent more colour to the language than all the other sports combined. In the hey-dey of Elizabeth's reign it was as incumbent on the fashionable gentleman to be able to speak with facility the technical language of venery as it had been a few years earlier to be able to mimic the elaborate phrases of Lyly's Euphues. Yet, in the long list of diversions that follows, there are many others that claimed an almost equal share of the attention of Shakespeare's people.
