Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/861

Rh of the city of London. One composed for Sir Wolstone Dixie, Lord Mayor of London, 29 October, 1595, is curious, as it describes the flourishing condition of the metropolis in the days of Queen Elizabeth. About 1593 Peele seems to have been taken into the patronage of the Earl of Northumberland, to whom he dedicated in that year The Honour of the Garter. In The Puritan, a play attributed but erroneously to Shakespeare, and acted by the children of S. Paul's, printed in 1607, is a character, George Pieboard, that was meant to be George Peele. Peele died before the year 1598, and left behind him a widow and a daughter. In 1591 Queen Elizabeth visited Theobalds. Lord Burleigh had lost his mother in 1587, and his wife, to whom he was deeply attached, in 1589; and his daughter, Lady Oxford, had also expired, and depressed by his misfortunes, he retired in 1591 to Theobalds. Queen Elizabeth, to revive his spirits, visited him there; and Peele was commissioned to write the speeches delivered by Robert Cecil, dressed as a hermit, and others, to be addressed to the Queen. Besides the hermit, another performer was the gardener, and a third the molecatcher. The latter begins, "Good Lady, and the best that ever I saw, or any shall, give me leave to tell a plain tale in which there is no device, but desert enough," and it ends, "Now, for that the Gardiner twitteth me with my vocation, I could prove it a mystery not mechanical, and tell a tale of the Giant's daughter which was turned to a mole because she would eat fairer bread than is made of wheat, wear finer clothes than is made of wool, drink sweeter wine than is made of grapes; why she was blind, and yet light of hearing; how good clerks told me that moles in fields are like ill subjects in commonwealths, which are always turning up the place