YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

From the Estate of
MARY E. DAY
Gift of
SHERMAN DAY '96
and
HARRY V.DAY '95 S
1939

o^^/^'^*/?^

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

BY

WILLIAM WINTER

New Edition, Revised, with Illustrations

MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND LONDON
1893
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1892,
By MACMILLAN & CO.
libisiraied Edition-,
Copyright, 1893,
By MACMILLAN AND CO.

First published elsewhere.
Set up and electrotyped by Macmillan & Co., April, 1892.
Reprinted November, 1892; January, 1893.
Illustrated edition, revised throughout, in crown 8vo, set up and
electrotyped June, 1893. Reprinted Oct., 1893.

Edea
rriKe

Norbjooti ^rcss :
J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith.
Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

Smt)ttelato Lxcilr

IN HONOUR OF EXALTED VIRTUES
ADORNING A LIFE OF
NOBLE ACHIEVEMENT AND PATIENT KINDNESS
AND IN REMEMBRANXE OF
FAITHFUL AXD GENTLE FRIENDSHIP
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

" Tiiin ineae, si quid hqitar aiidiendiim,
Vocis accedet bona pars "

W^^p

/'".'^T^J

#^#T

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PREFACE TO THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION
OF SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

The favour ivitJi which this book has been received,
alike in Great Britain and America, is thought to
warrant a reproduction of it with pictorial embellish-
nient, and accordingly it is offered in tlie present form.
I have revised the text for this reprint, and my friend
Mr. George P. Brett, of the house of ilessrs. Mac
millan and Company, — at whose suggestion the pictorial
edition was undertaken, — lias supervised the choice of
pictures for its adornment. Tlie approval that the work
lias elicited is a source of deep gratification. It signifies
that my endeavour to reflect tlie gentle sentiment of
English landscape and the romantic character of English
rural life has not proved altogether in vain. It also
slioivs that an appeal may confidently be made, — irre
spective of transitory literary fashions and of popular
caprice, — to the love of the ideal, the taste for simplicity,
and tlie sentiment of veneratioji. In these writings there
ts, I hope, a profound practical deference to tlie perfect
standard of style that is represented by such illustrious
exemplars as Addison, Goldsmith, Sterne, and Gray.

2 PREFACE
This frail fabric may perish : that standard is im
mortal , and luliatever merit this book may possess is
due to an instinctive and passionate devotion to the
ideal denoted by those shining names. Tliese sketches
li'crc written out of love for the subject. The first
book of them, called The Trip to England, reprinted,
with changes, from the New York Tribune, was made
for me, at the De J ^inne Press. The subsequent
groivth of the work is traced in the earlier Preface,
hereivnth reprinted. The title of Shaliespeare's Eng
land ivas given to it zvhcn the first English edition
was published, by Mr. David Douglas, of Edinburgh.
It has been my privilege to make various tours of
the British islands, since those of 1877 and 1882,
recorded here; and my later books. Gray Days and
Gold, and Old Shrines and Ivy, should be read in
association with this one, by those persons who care
for a wider glimpse of the same delightful field, in
tlie same companionship, and especially by those zvho
like to follow the record of exploration and change in
Shakespeare's home. As to the question of accuracv, —
and indeed, as to all other questions, — it is my wish
that this book may be judged by the text of the present
edition, which is the latest and the best. u: jr
June 6, 1893.

Beautiful and storied scenes that have soothed and
elevated the mind naturaUy inspire a feeling of gratitude.
Prompted by that feeling the present author has written
this record of his rambles in England. It was his wish,
in dwelling upon the rural loveliness and the literary
and historical associations of that delightful realm, to
afford sympathetic guidance and useful suggestion to other
American travellers zvho, like himself, might be attracted
to roam among the shrines of the mother land. There
is no pursuit more fascinating or in a high intellectual
sense more remunerative ; since it serves to define and
regidate knowledge, to correct misapprehensions of fact, to
broaden the mental vision, to ripen and refine the judg-
3

4 PREFACE
ment and the taste, and to fill the memory zvith ennobling
recollections. These papers commemorate two visits to
England, the first made in i^jy, the second in 1882;
they occasionally touch upon the same place or scene as
observed at different times ; and especially they describe
tiuo distinct journeys, separated by an interval of five
years, through the region associated zvith the great name
of Shakespeare. Repetitions of the same reference, which
nozv and then occur, zvere found unavoidable by the
zvritcr, but it is hoped that they zvill not be found tedious
by the reader. Those zvho zvalk tzvicc in the same patli-
zvays should be pleased, and not pained, to find the same
zvild-flozuers grozving beside them. The first American
edition of this zvork consisted of tzvo volumes, published
in 1879, 1 88 1, and 1884, called The Trip to England
and English Rambles. The former book zvas embel
lished with poetic illustrations by Joseph Jefferson, the
famous comedian, my life-long friend. The paper on
Shakespeare's Home, — zvritten to record for Ameri
can readers the- dedication of the Shakespeare Memorial
at Stratford, — zvas first printed in Harper's Magazine,
in May 1879, zuith delicate illustrative pictures from
the graceful pencil of Edzoin Abbey. This compen
dium of the Trip and the Rambles, zvith the title of
Shakespeare's England, zvas first published by David
Douglas of Edinburgh. That title zvas chosen for the
reason that the book relates largely to Warzvickshirc and
because it depicts not so much the England of fact as the

PREFACE S
England created and hallozved by the spirit of her poetry,
of zvliich Shakespeare is the soul. Several months after
the publication of Shakespeare's England the writer
zvas told of a zvork, published many years ago, bearing a
similar title, though relating to a different theme — the
physical state of England in Shakespeare' s time. He
had never heard of it and has never seen it. The text
for the present reprint has been carefully revised. To
his British readers the author would say that it is neither
from lack of sympathy zvith the happiness around him
7ior from lack of faith in the future of his country that
his writings have drifted toward the pathos in human
experience and toward the hallowing associations of an
old historic land. Temperament is the explanation of
style : and he has written thus of England because she
has filled his mind zuith beauty and his heart with
mingled joy and sadness: and surely some -memory of
her venerable ruins, her ancient shrines, her rustic salens,
her gleaming rivers, and her flower-spangled meadows
will mingle zuith the last thoughts that glimmer through
his brain, when the shadows of the eternal night are
falling and the ramble of life is done.
W. W.

CONTENTS

Preface to Illustr.ated Edition
Old Preface CHAPTER I.
The Voyage CHAPTER II.
The Beauty of England CHAPTER III.
Great Historic Places CHAPTER IV
Rambles in London CHAPTER V.
A Visit to Windsor CHAPTER VI.
The Palace of Westminster CHAPTER VII.
Warwick and Kenilworth CHAPTER VIII.
First View of Stratford-upox-Avon CHAPTER IX.
London Nooks and Corners .
7

FACE 3

15

32
• 38 5162 71
¦ 78 90

8 CONTENTS PAGE
CHAPTER X.
Relics of Lord Byron ... 98
CHAPTER XL
West.minster Abbey . . . 104
CHAPTER XII.
Shakespeare's Home . . 118
CHAPTER XIIL
Up to LdXDox . 167
CHAPTER XIV.
Old Churches of London . . . .176
CHAPTER XV.
Literary Shrines of London . .186
CHAPTER XVI.
A Haunt of Edmund Kean . . . 195
CHAPTER XVII.
Stoke-Pogis and Thomas Gray' . . 200
CHAPTER XVIII.
At the Grave of Coleridge . . 208
CHAPTER XIX.
0.\ BARNET B.A.TTLE-FIELD CHAPTER XX.
A Glhipse of C,\xterbury CHAPTER XXI.
The Shrines of Warwickshire CHAPTER XXII.
A Borrower of the Night

215

230

244

Portrait of William Winter — from a crayon by Arthur Jule Good
man . . ... Frontispiece
The Anchor Inn . . . . . 19
Old House at Bridport . . ... 20
Restoration House, Rochester ... 25
Charing Cross . . ¦ '^1
Kensington Palace . . . . • 29
The Tower of London . . facing 34
Old Water Gate  . 37
Approach to Cheshire Cheese . . 39
St. Clement Danes . ... '41
Temple Church . . . 43
Gower's Monument . 46
Andrews's Monument . . . . 48
Old Tabard Inn, Southwark . . 5°
Windsor Castle .... • 5^
St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle 55
Windsor Forest and Park . . 57
The Curfew Tower ... • ¦ 59
The Sign of the Swan . • 61
Westminster HaU ... 63
The Mace . • • .64
Greenwich Hospital . . ..... facing 68
Queen Elizabeth's Cradle ......••• 7°
9

10

ILLUSTRATIONS

Warwick Castle
Old Inn . .
Washington Irving's Parlour
From the Warwick Shield
Holy Trinity Church, Stratford
The Inglenook
Approach to Shottery
Distant View of Stratford
Whitehall Gateway .
Lambeth Palace
Dulwich College
The Crown Inn, Dulwich .
Oriel Window .
From the Triforium, Westminster Abbey
Chapel of Henry VII.
Chapel of Edward the Confessor
The Poets' Corner
The North Ambulatory
The Spaniards, Hampstead
The Dome of St. Paul's
The Grange
Shakespeare's Birthplace .
Anne Hathaway's Cottage
Charlecote ....
Meadow Walk by the Avon
Antique Font
Monument Gable Window .
Peveril Peak
St. Paul's, from Maiden Lane
The Charter-house
St. Giles', Cripplegate

facingfacing

PAGE 72
7576
77
79
82

facing 92
facing 94
facing 96
• 97
¦ 103105
. 107
. no
. 112114
. 116117119122
¦ 139143
146160
162166168170
173
facing 180

ILLUSTRATIONS

11

Sir John Crosby's Monument
Gresham's Monument
Goldsmith's House .
St. Helen's Church
A Bit from Clare Court
Fleet Street in 1780
Gray's Inn Square
Stoke-Pogis Church ....
Old Church
The White Hart
Column on Barnet Battle-field
Farm-house . ...
Falstaff Inn and West Gate, Canterbury
Butchery Lane, Canterbury
Flying-horse Inn, Canterbury .
Canterbury Cathedral
Stratford-upon-AvonStratford Church
Washington Irving's Chair
The Stratford Memorial
Mary Arden's Cottage
Church of St. Martin
Westminster Abbey .
Middle Temple Lane

182¦83184
185188191^93
202207212218220222224
227228
¦ 231
facing 232237
facing 240
. 242
• 245
¦ 249
¦ 251

facing

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise.
This fortress built by iVature for herself . . .
This precious stone set in the silver sea, . . .
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, . . .
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land^
Dear for her reputation through the world!
Shakespeare.

All that I saw returns upon my view ;
All that I heard comes back upon my ear ;
All that I felt this moment doth renew.
Fair land! by Timers parental love made free.
By Social Order''s watchful arms embraced.
With unexampled union nieet iji thee.
For eye and mind, the present and the past ;
With golden prospect for futurity,
If that be reverenced which ought to last.
Wordsworth.
13

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

CHAPTER I

THE VOYAGE

jIHE coast-line recedes and disappears, and
night comes down upon the ocean. Into
what dangers will the great ship plunge ?
Through what mysterious waste of waters
will she make her viewless path ? The
black waves roll up around her. The strong blast fills
her sails and whistles through her creaking cordage.
Overhead the stars shine dimly amid the driving clouds.
Mist and gloom close in the dubious prospect, and a
strange sadness settles upon the heart of the voyager —
who has left his home behind, and who now seeks, for
the first time, the land, the homes, and the manners of
the stranger. Thoughts and images of the past crowd
thick upon his remembrance. The faces of absent
friends rise before him, whom, perhaps, he is destined
nevermore to behold. He sees their smiles ; he hears
15

16 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
their voices ; he fancies them by familiar hearth-stones,
in the light of the evening lamps. They are very
far away now ; and already it seems months instead of
hours since the parting moment. Vain now the pang
of regret for misunderstandings, unkindness, neglect ;
for golden moments slighted and gentle courtesies left
undone. He is alone upon the wild sea — all the more
alone because surrounded with new faces of unknown
companions — and the best he can do is to seek his
lonely pillow and lie down with a prayer in his heart
and on his lips. Never before did he so clearly know
— never again will he so deeply feel — the vmcertainty
of human life and the weakness of human nature. Yet,
as he notes the rush and throb of the vast ship and the
noise of the breaking waves around her, and thinks of
the mighty deep beneath, and the broad and melancholy
expanse that stretches away on every side, he cannot
miss the impression — grand, noble, and thrilling — of
human courage, skill, and power. For this ship is the
centre of a splendid conilict. Man and the elements
are here at war ; and man makes conquest of the ele
ments by using them as weapons against themselves.
Strong and brilliant, the head-light streams over the
boiling surges. Lanterns gleam in the tops. Dark
figures keep watch upon the prow. The officer of the
night is at his post upon the bridge. Let danger
threaten howsoever it may, it cannot come unawares ;
it cannot subdue, without a tremendous struggle, the
brave minds and hardy bodies that are here arrayed to
meet it. With this thought, perhaps, the weary voyager
sinks to sleep ; and this is his first night at sea.
There is no tediousness of solitude to him who has

1 THE VOYAGE 17
within himself resources of thought and dream, the
pleasures and pains of memory, the bliss and the torture
of imagination. It is best to have few acquaintances
— or none — on shipboard. Human companionship,
at some times, and this is one of them, distracts by its
pettiness. The voyager should yield himself to nature
now, and meet his own soul face to face. The routine
of everyday life is commonplace enough, equally upon
sea and land. But the ocean is a continual pageant,
filling and soothing the mind with unspeakable peace.
Never, in even the grandest words of poetry, was the
grandeur of the sea expressed. Its vastness, its free
dom, its joy, and its beauty overwhelm the mind. All
things else seerri puny and momentary beside the life
that this immense creation unfolds and inspires. Some
times it shines in the sun, a wilderness of shimmering
silver. Sometimes its long waves are black, smooth,
glittering, and dangerous. Sometimes it seems instinct
with a superb wrath, and its huge masses rise, and clash
together, and break into crests of foam. Sometimes it
is gray and quiet, as if in a sullen sleep. Sometimes
the white mist broods upon it and deepens the sense of
awful mystery by which it is forever enwrapped. At
night its surging billows are furrowed with long streaks
of phosphorescent fire ; or, it may be, the waves roll
gently, under the soft light of stars ; or all the waste
is dim, save where, beneath the moon, a glorious path
way, broadening out to the far horizon, allures and
points to heaven. One of the most exquisite delights
of the voyage, whether by day or night, is to lie upon
the deck in some secluded spot, and look up at the tall,
tapering spars as they sway with the motion of the

18 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
ship, while over them the white clouds float, in ever-
changing shapes, or the starry constellations drift, in
their eternal march. No need now of books, or news
papers, or talk! The eyes are fed by e-very object
they behold. The great ship, with all her white wings
spread, careening like a tiny sail-boat, dips and rises,
with sinuous, stately grace. The clank of her engines
— fit type of steadfast industry and purpose — goes
steadily on. The song of the sailors — " Give me
some time to blow the man down" — rises in cheery
melody, full of audacious, light-hearted thoughtlessness,
and strangely tinged with the romance of the sea. Far
out toward the horizon many whales come sporting and
spouting along. At once, out of the distant bank of
cloud and mist, a little vessel springs into view, and
with convulsive movement — tilting up and down like
the miniature barque upon an old Dutch clock — -dances
across the vista and vanishes into space. Soon a tem
pest bursts upon the calm ; and then, safe-housed from
the fierce blast and blinding rain, the voyager exults
over the stern battle of winds and waters and the stal
wart, undaunted strength with which his ship bears
down the furious floods and stems the gale. By and
by a quiet hour is given, when, met together with the
companions of his journey, he stands in the hushed
cabin and hears the voice of prayer and the hymn of
praise, and, in the pauses, a gentle ripple of waves
against the ship, which now rocks lazily upon the sunny
deep ; and, ever and anon, as she dips, he can discern
through her open ports the shining sea and the wheel
ing and circling gulls that have come out to welcome
her to the shores of the old world.

THE VOYAGE

19

The present writer, when flrst he saw the distant and
dim coast of Britain, felt, with a sense of forlorn lone
liness that he was a stranger; but when last he saw
that coast he beheld it through a mist of tears and knew
that he had parted from many cherished friends, from
many of the gentlest men and women upon the earth,
and from a land henceforth as dear to him as his own.
England is a country which to see is to love. As you
draw near to her shores you are pleased at once with
the air of careless flnish
and negligent grace that
everywhere overhangs the
prospect. The grim, wind-
beaten hills of Ireland have
flrst been passed — hills
crowned, here and there,
with dark, flerce towers
that look like strongholds
of ancient bandit chiefs,
and cleft by dim valleys
that seem to promise end
less mystery and romance,
hid in their sombre depths.
Passed also is white
Queenstown, with its lovely
little bay, its circle of green
hillsides, and its valiant fort; and picturesque Fastnet,
with its gaily painted tower, has long been left behind.
It is off the noble crags of Holyhead that the voyager
first observes with what a deft skill the hand of art has
here moulded nature's luxuriance into forms of seeming
chance-born beauty; and from that hour, wherever in

The Anchor Inn.

20

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

rural England the footsteps of the pilgrim may roam,
he will behold nothing but gentle rustic adornment,
that has grown with the grass and the roses — greener
grass and redder roses than ever we see in our western
world! In the English nature a love of the beautiful
is spontaneous, and the operation of it is as fluent
as the blowing of the summer wind. Portions of
English cities, indeed, are hard and harsh and coarse
enough to suit the most utilitarian taste ; yet even in
those regions of dreary monotony the national love of
flowers will flnd ex-
"* "' J•^ pression, and the peo-
,i^ y W pie, without being
^,^r^ ¦ -v./^^p-> aware of it, will, in
^-/.;F"' /~5. many odd little ways,
X^- beautify their homes
and make their sur
roundings pictorial,
at least to stranger
eyes. There is a tone
of rest and home
like comfort even in
murky Liverpool; and
great magnificence is
there — as well of
architecture and opulent living as of enterprise and
action. "Towered cities" and "the busy hum of men,"
however, are soon left behind by the wise traveller in
England. A time will come for those ; but in his first
sojourn there he soon discovers the two thino-s that are
utterly to absorb him — which cannot disappoint  and
which are the fulfilment of all his dreams. These thincrs

Old ho7ise at Bridport.

I THE VOYAGE 21
are — the rustic loveliness of the land and the charm of
its always vital and splendid antiquity. The green lanes,
the thatched cottages, the meadows glorious with wild-
flowers, the little churches covered with dark-green ivy,
the Tudor gables festooned with roses, the devious foot
paths that wind across wild heaths and long and lone
some flelds, the narrow, shining rivers, brimful to their
banks and crossed here and there with gray, moss-grown
bridges, the stately elms whose low-hanging branches
droop over a turf of emerald velvet, the gnarled beech-
trees "that wreathe their old, fantastic roots so high,"
the rooks that caw and circle in the air, the sweet winds
that blow from fragrant woods, the sheep and the deer
that rest in shady places, the pretty children who cluster
round the porches of their cleanly, cosy homes, and peep
at the wayfarer as he passes, the numerous and often
brilliant birds that at times fill the air with music, the
brief, light, pleasant rains that ever and anon refresh
the landscape — these are some of the everyday joys of
rural England ; and these are wrapped in a climate that
makes life one serene ecstasy. Meantime, in rich valleys
or on verdant slopes, a thousand old castles and monas
teries, ruined or half in ruins, allure the pilgrim's gaze,
inspire his imagination, arouse his memory, and fill his
mind. The best romance of the past and the best
reality of the present are his banquet now ; and nothing
is wanting to the perfection of the feast. I thought
that life could have but few moments of content in store
for me like the moment — never to be forgotten ! — when,
in the heart of London, on a perfect June day, I lay
upon the grass in the old Green Park, and, for the first
time, looked up to the towers of Westminster Abbey.

CHAPTER II

THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND

T is not Strange that Englishmen should
be — as certainly they are — passionate
lovers of their country ; for their country
is, almost beyond parallel, peaceful, gen
tle, and beautiful. Even in vast London,
where practical life asserts itself with such prodigious
force, the stranger is impressed, in every direction, with
a sentiment of repose and peace. This sentiment seems
to proceed in part from the antiquity of the social
system here established, and in part from the affection
ate nature of the English people. Here are flnished
towns, rural regions thoroughly cultivated and exqui
sitely adorned ; ancient architecture, crumbling in slow
decay ; and a soil so rich and pure that even in its idlest
mood it lights itself up with flowers, just as the face of
a sleeping child lights itself up with smiles. Here,
also, are soft and kindly manners, settled principles,
good laws, wise customs — wise, because rooted in the
universal attributes of human nature ; and, above all,
here is the practice of tr)"ing to live in a happy condi-

CHAP. II THE BEAUTY OF ENGL.\ND 23
tion instead of trying to make a noise about it. Here,
accordingly, life is soothed and hallowed with the
comfortable, genial, loving spirit of home. It would,
doubtless, be easily possible to come into contact here
with absurd forms and pernicious abuses, to observe
absurd individuals, and to discover veins of sordid
selfishness and of evil and sorrow. But the things that
first and most deeply impress the observer of England
and English society are their potential, manifold, and
abundant sources of beauty, refinement, and peace.
There are, of course, grumblers. Mention has been
made of a person who, even in heaven, would complain
that his cloud was damp and his halo a misfit. We
cannot have perfection ; but the man who could not be
happy in England — in so far, at least, as happiness
depends upon external objects and influences — could
not reasonably expect to be happy anywhere.
Summer heat is perceptible for an hour or two each
day, but it causes no discomfort. Fog has refrained ;
though it is understood to be lurking in the Irish sea
and the English channel, and waiting for November,
when it will drift into town and grime all the new paint
on the London houses. Meantime, the sky is softly
blue and full of magnificent bronze clouds ; the air is
cool, and in the environs of the city is fragrant with the
scent of new-mown hay ; and the grass and trees in the
parks — those copious and splendid lungs of London —
are green, dewy, sweet, and beautiful. Persons " to the
manner born " were lately calling the season " back
ward," and they went so far as to grumble at the haw-
thorne, as being less brilliant than in former seasons.
But, in fact, to the unfamiliar sense, this tree of odorous

24 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
coral has been delicious. We have nothing comparable
with it in northern America, unless, perhaps, it be the
elder, of our wild woods ; and even that, with all its
fragrance, lacks equal charm of colour. They use the
hawthorne, or some kindred shrub, for hedges in this
country, and hence their fields are seldom disfigured
with fences. As you ride through the land you see
miles and miles of meadow traversed by these green
and blooming hedgerows, which give the country a
charm quite incommunicable in words. The green of
the foliage — enriched by an uncommonly humid air
and burnished by the sun — is in perfection, while the
flowers bloom in such abundance that the whole realm
is one glowing pageant. I saw near Oxford, on the
crest of a hill, a single ray of at least a thousand feet of
scarlet poppies. Imagine that glorious dash of colour
in a green landscape lit by the afternoon sun ! Nobody
could help loving a land that woos him with such
beauty. English flowers are exceptional for substance and
pomp. The roses, in particular — though some of them,
it should be said, are of French breeds — surpass all
others. It may seem an extravagance to say, but it is
certainly true, that these rich, firm, brilliant flowers af
fect you like creatures of flesh and blood. They are, in
this respect, only to be described as like nothing in the
world so much as the bright lips and blushing cheeks
of the handsome English women who walk among them
and vie with them in health and loveliness. It is easy
to perceive the source of those elements of warmth and
sumptuousness that are so conspicuous in the results of
English taste. It is a land of flowers. Even in the

THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND

25

busiest parts of London the people decorate their houses
with them, and set the sombre, fog-grimed fronts ablaze
with scarlet and gold. These are the prevalent colours —
radically so, for they have become national
— and, when placed against the black tint
with which this climate stains the
buildings, they have the advan-

Restoratioji House. Rochester.
tage of a vivid contrast that much augments their splen
dour. All London wears crape, variegated with a tra
cery of white, like lace upon a pall. In some instances
the effect is splendidly pompous. There cannot be a
grander artificial object in the world than the front of

26 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND CHAP.
St. Paul's cathedral, which is especially notable for this
mysterious blending of light and shade. It is to be
deplored that a climate which can thus beautify should
also destroy; but there can be no doubt that the stones
of England are steadily defaced by the action of the
damp atmosphere. Already the delicate carvings on
the palace of Westminster are beginning to crumble.
And yet, if one might judge the climate by this glitter
ing July, England is_a land of sunshine as well as of
flowers. Light comes before three o'clock in the morn
ing, and it lasts, through a dreamy and lovely gloaming,
till nearly ten o'clock at night. The morning sky is
usually light blue, dappled with slate-coloured clouds.
A few large stars are visible then, lingering to outface
the dawn. Cool winds whisper, and presently they
rouse the great, sleepy, old elms ; and then the rooks —
which are the low comedians of the air in this region
— begin to grumble ; and then the sun leaps above the
horizon, and we sweep into a day of golden, breezy
cheerfulness and comfort, the like of which is rarely
or never known in northern America, between June
and October. Sometimes the whole twenty-four hours
have drifted past, as if in a dream of light, and fra
grance, and music. In a recent moonlight time there
was scarce any darkness at all ; and more than once I
have lain awake all night, within a few miles of Charing
Cross, listening to a twitter of birds that is like the lapse
and fall of silver water. It used to be difficult to under
stand why the London season should begin in May and
last through most of the summer ; it is not difficult to
understand the custom now.
The elements of discontent and disturbance which are

THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND

27

visible in English society are found, upon close examina
tion, to be merely superflcial. Underneath them there
abides a sturdy, immutable, inborn love of England.
Those croakings, grumblings, and bickerings do but
denote the process by which
the body politic frees itself
from the headaches and
fevers that embarrass the
national health. The Eng
lishman and his country are
one; and when the English
man complains against his
country it is not because he
believes that either there is
or can be a better country
elsewhere, but because his
instinct of justice and order
makes him crave perfection
in his own. Institutions and
principles are, with him, by
nature, paramount to indi
viduals ; and individuals only
possess importance — and that conditional on abiding
rectitude — who are their representatives. Everything
is done in England to promote the permanence and
beauty of the home; and the permanence and beauty
of the home, by a natural reaction, augment in the
English people solidity of character and peace of life.
They do not dwell in a perpetual fret and fume as
to the acts, thoughts, and words of other nations : for
the English there is absolutely no public opinion outside
of their own land : they do not live for the sake of work-

Charing Cross.

28 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, ii
ing, but they work for the sake of living; and, as the
necessary preparations for living have long since been
completed, their country is at rest. This is the secret of
England's first, and continuous, and last, and all-pervad
ing charm and power for the stranger — the charm and
power to soothe.
The efficacy of endeavouring to make a country a
united, comfortable, and beautiful home for all its
inhabitants, — binding every heart to the land by the
same tie that binds every heart to the fireside, — is
something well worthy to be considered, equally by the
practical statesman and the contemplative observer.
That way, assuredly, lie the welfare of the human race
and all the tranquillity that human nature — warped as
it is by evil — will ever permit to this world. This
endeavour has, through long ages, been steadily pursued
in England, and one of its results — which is also one
of its indications — is the vast accumulation of what
may be called home treasures in the city of London.
The mere enumeration of them would fill large volumes.
The description of them could not be completed in a
lifetime. It was this copiousness of historic wealth and
poetic association, combined with the flavour of char
acter and the sentiment of monastic repose, that bound
Dr. Johnson to Fleet Street and made Charles Lamb
such an inveterate lover of the town. Except it be to
correct a possible insular narrowness there can be no
need that the Londoner should travel. Glorious sights,
indeed, await him, if he journeys no further away than
Paris ; but, aside from ostentation, luxury, gaiety, and
excitement, Paris will give him nothing that he may not
find at home. The great cathedral of Notre Dame will

;||7^iJi^^

30 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
awe him ; but not more than his own Westminster
Abbey. The grandeur and beauty of the Madeleine
will enchant him ; but not more than the massive
solemnity and stupendous magnificence of St. Paul's.
The embankments of the Seine will satisfy his taste
with their symmetrical solidity ; but he will not deem
them superior in any respect to the embankments of the
Thames. The Pantheon, the Hotel des Invalides, the
Luxembourg, the Louvre, the Tribunal of Commerce,
the Opera-House, — all these will dazzle and delight
his eyes, arousing his remembrances of history and
firing his imagination of great events and persons ; but
all these will fail to displace in his esteem the grand
Palace of Westminster, so stately in its simplicity, so
strong in its perfect grace ! He will ride through the
exquisite Park of Monceau, — one of the loveliest spots
in Paris, — and onward to the Bois de Boulogne, with
its sumptuous pomp of foliage, its romantic green vistas,
its many winding avenues, its hillside hermitage, its
cascades, and its affluent lakes whereon the white
swans beat the water with their joyous wings ; but still
his soul will turn, with unshaken love and loyal prefer
ence to the sweetly sylvan solitude of the gardens of
Kensington and Kew. He will marvel in the museums
of the Louvre, the Luxembourg, and Cluny ; and prob
ably he will concede that of paintings, whether ancient
or modern, the French display is larger and finer than
the English ; but he will vaunt the British Museum as
peerless throughout the world, and he will still prize
his National Gallery, with its originals of Hogarth,
Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Turner, its spirited, ten
der, and dreamy Murillos, and its dusky glories of

II THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 31
Rembrandt. He will admire, at the Theatre Frangais,
the photographic perfection of French acting ; but he
will be apt to reflect that English dramatic art, if it
sometimes lacks flnish, often has the effect of nature ;
and he will certainly perceive that the playhouse itself
is not superior to either Her Majesty's Theatre or
Covent Garden. He will luxuriate in the Champs
Elysees, in the superb Boulevards, in the glittering
pageant of precious jewels that blazes in the Rue de la
Paix and the Palais Royal, and in that gorgeous pano
rama of shop-windows for which the French capital is
unrivalled and famous ; and he will not deny that, as
to brilliancy of aspect, Paris is prodigious and une
qualled — the most radiant of cities — the sapphire in
the crown of Solomon. But, when all is seen, either
that Louis the Fourteenth created or Buonaparte
pillaged, — when he has taken his last walk in the
gardens of the Tuileries, and mused, at the foot of the
statue of Caesar, on that Titanic strife of monarchy and
democracy of which France has seemed destined to be
the perpetual theatre, — sated with the glitter of showy
opulence and tired with the whirl of frivolous life he
will gladly and gratefully turn again to his sombre,
mysterious, thoughtful, restful old London ; and, like
the Syrian captain, though in the better spirit of truth
and right, declare that Abana and Pharpar, rivers of
Damascus, are better than all the waters of Israel.

CHAPTER III

GREAT HISTORIC PLACES

HERE is so much to be seen in London
that the pilgrim scarcely knows where to
choose and certainly is perplexed by what
Dr. Johnson called "the multiplicity of
agreeable consciousness." One spot to
which I have many times been drawn, and which the
mention of Dr. Johnson instantly calls to mind, is the
stately and solemn place in Westminster Abbey where
that great man's ashes are buried. Side by side, under
the pavement of the Abbey, within a few feet of earth,
sleep Johnson, Garrick, Sheridan, Henderson, Dickens,
Cumberland, and Handel. Garrick's wife is buried in
the same grave with her husband. Close by, some
brass letters on a little slab in the stone floor mark the
last resting-place of Thomas Campbell. Not far off is
the body of Macaulay ; while many a stroller through
the nave treads upon the gravestone of that astonishing
old man Thomas Parr, who lived in the reigns of nine
princes (1483-1635), and reached the great age of 152.
All parts of Westminster Abbey impress the reverential
32

CHAP. Ill GREAT HISTORIC PLACES 33
mind. It is an experience very strange and full of awe
suddenly to find your steps upon the sepulchres of such
illustrious men as Burke, Pitt, Fox, and Grattan ; and
you come, with a thrill of more than surprise, upon
such still fresh antiquity as the grave of Anne Neville,
the daughter of Warwick and queen of Richard the
Third. But no single spot in the great cathedral can
so enthral the imagination as that strip of storied stone
beneath which Garrick, Johnson, Sheridan, Henderson,
Cumberland, Dickens, Macaulay, and Handel sleep,
side by side. This writer, when lately he visited the
Abbey, found a chair upon the grave of Johnson, and
sat down there to rest and muse. The letters on the
stone are fast wearing away ; but the memory of that
sturdy champion of thought can never perish, as long
as the votaries of literature love their art and honour
the valiant genius that battled — through hunger, toil,
and contumely — for its dignity and renown. It was
a tender and right feeling that prompted the burial of
Johnson close beside Garrick. They set out together
to seek their fortune in the great city. They went
through privation and trial hand in hand. Each found
glory in a different way; and, although parted after
ward by the currents of fame and wealth, they were
never sundered in affection. It was fit they should at
last find their rest together, under the most glorious
roof that greets the skies of England.
Fortune gave me a good first day at the Tower of
London. The sky lowered. The air was very cold.
The wind blew with angry gusts. The rain fell, now
and then, in a chill drizzle. The river was dark and
sullen. If the spirits of the dead come back to haunt

34 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
any place they surely come back to haunt that one;
and this was a day for their presence. One dark ghost
seemed near, at every step — the ominous shade of the
lonely Duke of Gloster. The little room in which the
princes are said to have been murdered, by his com
mand, was shown, and the oratory where king Henry
the Sixth is supposed to have met a violent death, and
the council chamber, in which Richard — after listening,
in an ambush behind the arras — -denounced the
wretched Hastings. The latter place is now used as an
armoury ; but the same ceiling covers it that echoed the
bitter invective of Gloster and the rude clamour of his
soldiers, when their frightened victim was plucked forth
and dragged downstairs, to be beheaded on " a timber-
log " in the courtyard. The Tower is a place for such
deeds, and you almost wonder that they do not happen
still, in its gloomy chambers. The room in which the
princes were killed (if killed indeed they were) is par
ticularly grisly in aspect. It is an inner room, small
and dark. A barred window in one of its walls fronts
a window on the other side of the passage by which
you approach it. This is but a few feet from the floor,
and perhaps the murderers paused to look through it as
they went to their helHsh work upon the children of
king Edward. The entrance was indicated to a secret
passage by which this apartment could be approached
from the foot of the Tower. In one gloomy stone
chamber the crown jewels are exhibited, in a large
glass case. One of the royal relics is a crown of velvet
and gold that was made for poor Anne Boleyn. You
may pass across the courtyard and pause on the spot
where that miserable woman was beheaded, and you

Ill GREAT HISTORIC PLACES 35
may walk thence over the ground that her last trem
bling footsteps traversed, to the round tower in which,
at the close, she lived. Her grave is in the chancel of
the little antique church, close by. I saw the cell of
Raleigh, and that direful chamber which is scrawled all
over with the names and emblems of prisoners who
therein suffered confinement and lingering agony,
nearly always ending in death ; but I saw no sadder
place than Anne Boleyn's tower. It seemed in the
strangest way eloquent of mute suffering. It seemed
to exhale grief and to plead for love and pity. Yet —
what woman ever had greater love than was lavished
on her ? And what woman ever trampled more royally
and recklessly upon human hearts .''
The Tower of London is degraded by being put to
commonplace uses and by being exhibited in a common
place manner. They use the famous White Tower now
as a store-house for arms, and it contains about one
hundred thousand guns, besides a vast collection of old
armour and weapons. The arrangement of the latter
was made by J. R. Blanche, the dramatic author, —
famous as an antiquarian and a herald. [That learned,
able, brilliant, and honoured gentleman died, May 29,
1880, aged 84.] Under his tasteful direction the effigies
and gear of chivalry are displayed in such a way that
the observer may trace the changes that war fashions
have undergone, through the reigns of successive
sovereigns of England, from the earliest period until
now. A suit of mail worn by Henry the Eighth is
shown, and also a suit worn by Charles the First. The
suggestiveness of both figures is remarkable. In a
room on the second floor of the White Tower they keep

36 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND CHAP.
many gorgeous oriental weapons, and they show the
cloak in which General Wolfe died, on the Plains of
Abraham. It is a gray garment, to which the active
moth has given a share of his assiduous attention. The
most impressive objects to be seen there, however, are
the block and axe that were used in beheading the
Scotch lords, Kilmarnock, Balmerino, and Lovat, after
the defeat of the pretender, in 1746. The block is of
ash, and there are big and cruel dents upon it, showing
that it was made for use rather than ornament. It is
harmless enough now, and this writer was allowed to
place his head upon it, in the manner prescribed for the
victims of decapitation. The door of Raleigh's bed
room is opposite to these baleful relics, and it is said
that his History of the U'oi'ld was written in the room in
which these implements are now such conspicuous
objects of gloom. ¦* The place is gloomy and cheerless
beyond expression, and great must have been the
fortitude of the man who bore, in that grim solitude, a
captivity of thirteen years — not failing to improve it
by producing a book so excellent for quaintness, philos
ophy, and eloquence. A " beef-eater," arrayed in a
dark tunic, trousers trimmed with red, and a black
velvet hat adorned with bows of blue and red ribbon,
precedes each group of visitors, and drops information
and the letter h, from point to point. The centre of
what was once the Tower green is marked with a brass
plate, naming Anne Boleyn and giving the date when
she was there beheaded. They found her body in an
1 JIanyof these reHcs have since been disposed in a different way. —
Raleigh was incarcerated in various parts of the Tower, in the course of his
several imprisonments.

GREAT HISTORIC PLACES

37

elm-wood box, made to hold arrows, and it now rests,
with the ashes of other noble sufferers, under the stones
of the church of St. Peter, about fifty feet from the
place of execution. The ghost of Anne Boleyn is
said to haunt that part of the Tower where she lived,
and it is likewise whispered that the spectre of Lady
Jane Grey was seen, not long ago, on the anniversary
of the day of her execution [Obiit February 12, 1554],
to glide out upon a balcony adjacent to the room in
which she lodged during nearly eight months, at the
last of her wasted, unfortunate, but gentle and noble
life. [That room was in the house of Thomas Brydges,
brother and deputy of Sir John Brydges, Lieutenant of
the Tower, and its windows command an unobstructed
view of the Tower green, which was the place of the
block.] It could serve no good purpose to relate the
particulars of those visitations ; but nobody doubts them
— while he is in the Tower. It is a place of mystery
and horror, notwithstanding all that the practical spirit
of to-day has done to make it trivial and to cheapen its
grim glories by association with the commonplace.

CHAPTER IV

RAMBLES IN LONDON

LL old cities get rich in association, as
a matter of course and whether they will
or no ; but London, by reason of its great
extent, as well as its great antiquity, is
richer in association than any modern
place on earth. The stranger scarcely takes a step
without encountering a new object of interest. The
walk along the Strand and Fleet Street, in particular,
is continually on storied ground. Old Temple Bar still
stands (July 1877), though "tottering to its fall," and
marks the junction of the two streets. The statues of
Charles the First and Charles the Second on its western
front would be remarkable anywhere, as characteristic
portraits. You stand beside that arch and quite forget
the passing throng, and take no heed of the tumult
around, as you think of Johnson and Boswell leaning
against the Bar after midnight in the far-off timgs and
waking the echoes of the Temple Garden with their
frolicsome laughter. The Bar is carefully propped
now, and they will nurse its age as long as they can ;
38

chap. IV

RAMBLES IN LONDON

39

but it is an obstruction to travel — and it must dis
appear. (It was removed in the summer of 1878.)
They will probably set it up, newly built, in another
place. They have
left untouched a lit
tle piece of the origi
nal scaffolding built
around St. Paul's ;
and that fragment
of decaying wood
may still be seen,
high upon the side
of the cathedral.
The Rainbow, the
Mitre, the Cheshire
Cheese, Dolly's
Chop -House, the
Cock, and the
Round Table — tav
erns or public-
houses that were
frequented by the
old wits — - are still
extant (1877). The
Cheshire Cheese is
scarcely changed
from what it was
when Johnson, Gold
smith, and their com
rades ate beefsteak pie and drank porter there, and the
Doctor " tossed and gored several persons," as it was
his cheerful custom to do. The benches in that room

Approach to Cheshire Cheese.

40 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, iv
are narrow, incommodious, penitential ; mere ledges
of well-worn wood, on which the visitor sits bolt up
right, in difficult perpendicular ; but there is, probably,
nothing on earth that would induce the owner to alter
them — and he is right. The conservative principle in
the English mind, if it has saved some trash, has saved
m.ore treasure. At the foot of Buckingham Street, in
the Strand, — where was situated an estate of George
Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, assassinated in
1628, whose tomb may be seen in the chapel of Henry
the Seventh in Westminster Abbey, — still stands the
slowly crumbling ruin of the old Water Gate, so often
mentioned as the place where accused traitors were
embarked for the Tower. The river, in former times,
flowed up to that gate, but the land along the margin
of the Thames has been redeemed, and the magniflcent
Victoria and Albert embankments now border the river
for a long distance on both sides. The Water Gate, in
fact, stands in a little park on the north bank of the
Thames. Not far away is the Adelphi Terrace, where
Garrick lived and died (Obiit January 20, 1779, aged
63), and where, on October i, 1822, his widow expired,
aged 98. The house of Garrick is let in "chambers"
now. If you walk up the Strand towards Charing Cross
you presently come near to the Church of St. Martin-in-
the-Fields, which is one of the works of James Gibbs, a
pupil of Sir Christopher Wren, and entirely worthy of
the master's hand. The fogs have stained that buildine
with such a deft touch as shows the caprice of nature to
be often better than the best design of art. Nell Gwyn's
name is connected with St. Martin. Her funeral oc
curred in that church, and was pompous, and no less a

St. tlary-le-Strand— The Strand.

42 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, iv
person than Tenison (afterwards Archbishop of Canter
bury) preached the funeral sermon. ^ That prelate's
dust reposes in Lambeth church, which can be seen,
across the river, from this part of Westminster. If you
walk down the Strand, through Temple Bar, you pres
ently reach the Temple ; and there is no place in Lon
don where the past and the present are so strangely
confronted as they are here. The venerable church, so
quaint with its cone-pointed turrets, was sleeping in the
sunshine when flrst I saw it ; sparrows were twittering
around its spires and gliding in and out of the crevices
in its ancient walls ; while from within a strain of organ
music, low and sweet, trembled forth, till the air became
a benediction and every common thought and feeling
was purified away from mind and heart. The grave
of Goldsmith is close to the pathway that skirts this
church, on a terrace raised above the foundation of the
building and above the little graveyard of the Templars
that nestles at its base. As I stood beside the resting-
place of that sweet poet it was impossible not to feel
both grieved and glad : grieved at the thought of all he
suffered, and of all that the poetic nature must always
suffer before it will utter its immortal music for man
kind : glad that his gentle spirit found rest at last, and
that time has given him the crown he would most have
prized — the affection of true hearts. A gray stone,
coffin-shaped and marked with a cross, — after the fash
ion of the contiguous tombs of the Templars, — is im
posed upon his grave. One surface bears the inscrip-
^ This was made the occasion of a complaint against him, to Queen
Mary, who gently expressed her unshaken confidence in his goodness and
truth.

Ff]:FfnTT^'^

-! "X *.

Teviplc Church.

44 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
tion, " Here lies Oliver Goldsmith " ; the other presents
the dates of his birth and death. (Born Nov. lo, 1728 ;
died April 4, 1774.) I tried to call up the scene of his
burial, when, around the open grave, on that tearful
April evening, Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Beauclerk,
Boswell, Davies, Kelly, Palmer, and the rest of that
broken circle, may have gathered to witness
" The duties by the lawn-robed prelate paid,
And the last rites that dust to dust conveyed."
No place could be less romantic than Southwark is
now ; but there are few places in England that possess
a greater charm for the literary pilgrim. Shakespeare
lived there, and it was there that he wrote for a theatre
and made a fortune. Old London Bridge spanned the
Thames at this point, in those days, and was the only
road to the Surrey side of the river. The theatre stood
near the end of the bridge and was thus easy of access
to the wits and beaux of Londofi. No trace of it now
remains ; but a public-house called the Globe, which
was its name, is standing near, and the old church of
St. Saviour — into which Shakespeare must often have
entered — still braves the storm and still resists the
encroachments of time and change. In Shakespeare's
day there were houses on each side of London Bridge ;
and as he walked on the bank of the Thames he could
look across to the Tower, and to Baynard Castle, which
had been the residence of Richard, Duke of Gloster,
and could see, upHfted high in air, the spire of old St.
Paul's. The borough of Southwark was then but thinly
peopled. Many of its houses, as may be seen in an
old picture of the city, were surrounded by flelds or

IV RAMBLES IN LONDON 45
gardens ; and life to its inhabitants must have been
comparatively rural. Now it is packed with buildings,
gridironed with railways, crowded with people, and to
the last degree resonant and feverish with action and
effort. Life swarms, traffic bustles, and travel thunders
all round the cradle of the British drama. The old
church of St. Saviour alone preserves the sacred
memory of the past. I made a pilgrimage to that
shrine, with Arthur Sketchley (George Rose), one of
the kindliest humourists in England. (Obiit November
13, 1882.) We embarked at Westminster Bridge and
landed close by the church in Southwark, and we were
so fortunate as to get permission to enter it without a
guide. The oldest part of it is the Lady chapel —
which, in English cathedrals, is almost invariably placed
behind the choir. Through this we strolled, alone and
in silence. Every footstep there falls upon a gra\'e.
The pavement is one mass of gravestones ; and through
the tall, stained windows of the chapel a solemn light
pours in upon the sculptured names of men and women
who have long been dust. In one corner is an ancient
stone coffin — a relic of the Roman days of Britain.
This is the place in which Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of
Winchester, in the days of cruel Queen Mary, held his
ecclesiastical court and doomed many a dissentient
devotee to the rack and the fagot. Here was con
demned John Rogers, — afterwards burnt at the stake,
in Smithfield. Queen Mary and Queen Ehzabeth may
often have entered this chapel. But it is in the choir
that the pilgrim pauses with most of reverence ; for
there, not far from the altar, he stands at the graves of
Edmund Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Philip Mas-

Gower's Momtment.

chap. IV RAMBLES IN LONDON 47
singer. They apparently rest almost side by side, and
only their names and the dates of their death are cut
in the tablets that mark their sepulchres. Edmund
Shakespeare, the younger brother of William, was an
actor in his company, and died in 1607, aged twenty-
seven. I'he great poet must have stood at that grave,
and suffered and wept there ; and somehow the lover
of Shakespeare comes very near to the heart of the
master when he stands in that place. Massinger was
buried there, March 18, 1638, — the parish register
recording him as "a stranger." Fletcher — of the
Beaumont and Fletcher alliance — was buried there, in
1625 : Beaumont's grave is in the Abbey. The dust of
Henslowe the manager also rests beneath the pavement
of St. Saviour's. Bishop Gardiner was buried there,
with pompous ceremonial, in 1555, — but subsequently
his remains were removed to the cathedral at Win
chester. The great prelate Lancelot Andrews, com
memorated by Milton, found his grave there, in 1626.
The royal poet King James the First, of Scotland, was
married there, in 1423, to Jane, daughter of the Earl of
Somerset and niece of Cardinal Beaufort. In the south
transept of the church is the tomb of John Gower, the
old poet — whose effigy, carved and painted, reclines
upon it and is not attractive. A formal, severe aspect
he must have had, if he resembled that image. The
tomb has been moved from the spot where it first stood
— a proceeding made necessary by a fire that destroyed
part of the old church. It is said that Gower caused
the tomb to be erected during his lifetime, so that it
might be in readiness to receive his bones. The bones
are lost, but the memorial remains — sacred to the

48

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

CHAP.

memory of t"he father of English song. This tomb was
restored by the Duke of Sutherland, in 1832. It is
enclosed by a little grill made of iron spears, painted
brown and gilded at their points. I went into the new
part of the church, and, alone, knelt in one of the

Andrews lifnniifneni.

pews and long remained there, overcome with thoughts
of the past and of the transient, momentary nature of
this our earthly life and the shadows that we pursue.
One object of merriment attracts a passing glance in
that old church. There is a tomb in a corner of it
that commemorates Dr. Lockyer, a maker of patent

RAMBLES IN LONDON

49

physic, in the time of Charles the Second. This elabo
rate structure presents an effigy of the doctor, together
with a sounding epitaph which declares that
" His virtues and his pills are so well known
That envy can't confine them under stone."
Shakespeare once lived in Clink Street, in the bor
ough of Southwark. Goldsmith practised medicine
there. Chaucer came there, with his Canterbury Pil
grims, and lodged at the Tabard inn, which has dis
appeared. It must have been a romantic region in
the old times. It is anything but romantic now.

CHAPTER V

A VISIT TO WINDSOR

F the beauty of England were only super
ficial it would produce only a superficial
effect. It would cause a passing pleasure
and would be forgotten. It certainly
would not — as now in fact it does — in
spire a deep, joyous, serene and grateful contentment,
and linger in the mind, a gracious and beneficent re
membrance. The conquering and lasting potency of it
resides not alone in loveliness of expression but in love
liness of character. Having first greatly blessed the
British islands with the natural advantages of position,
climate, soil, and products, nature has wrought their de
velopment and adornment as a necessary consequence
of the spirit of their inhabitants. The picturesque vari
ety and pastoral repose of the English landscape spring,
in a considerable measure, from the imaginative taste
and the affectionate gentleness of the English people.
The state of the country, like its social constitution,
flows from principles within, which are constantly sug
gested, and it steadily comforts and nourishes the mind
51

CHAP, v A VISIT TO WINDSOR S3
with a sense of kindly feeling, moral rectitude, solidity,
and permanence. Thus in the' peculiar beauty of Eng
land the ideal is made the actual — is expressed in things
more than in words, and in things by which words are
transcended. Milton's " L'Allegro," flne as it is, is not so
flne as the scenery — the crystallised, embodied poetry
— out of which it arose. All the delicious rural verse
that has been written in England is only the excess and
superflux of her own poetic opulence : it has rippled from
the hearts of her poets just as the fragrance floats away
from her hawthorn hedges. At every step of his prog
ress the pilgrim through English scenes is impressed with
this sovereign excellence of the accomplished fact, as con
trasted with any words that can be said in its celebration.
Among representative scenes that are eloquent with
this instructive meaning, — scenes easily and pleasurably
accessible to the traveller in what Dickens expressively
called "the green, English summer weather," — is the
region of Windsor. The chief features of it have often
been described ; the charm that it exercises can only be
suggested. To see Windsor, moreover, is to compre
hend as at a glance the old feudal system, and to feel
in a profound and special way the pomp of English
character and history. More than this : it is to rise to the
ennobling serenity that always accompanies broad, retro
spective contemplation of the current of human affairs.
In this quaint, decorous town — nestled at the base of
that mighty and magniflcent castle which has been the
home of princes for more than five hundred years — ¦
the imaginative mind wanders over vast tracts of the
past and beholds as in a mirror the pageants of chivalry,
the coronations of kings, the strife of sects, the battles

54 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND CHAP. V
of armies, the schemes of statesmen, the decay of tran
sient systems, the growth of a rational civilisation, and
the everlasting march of thought Every prospect of
the region intensifies this sentiment of contemplative
grandeur. As you look from the castle walls your gaze
takes in miles and miles of blooming country, sprinkled
over with little hamlets, wherein the utmost stateliness
of learning and rank is gracefully commingled with all
that is lovely and soothing in rural life. Not far away
rise the " antique towers " of Eton —
'¦ Where grateful science still adores
Her Henry's holy shade."
It was in Windsor Castle that her Henry was born ; and
there he often held his court ; and it is in St. George's
chapel that his ashes repose. In the dim distance
stands the church of Stoke-Pogis, about which Gray
used to wander,
" Beneath those ragged elms, that yew-tree's shade."
You recognise now a deeper significance than ever be
fore in the "solemn stillness" of the incomparable
Elegy. The luminous twilight mood of that immortal
poem — its pensive reverie and solemn passion — is in
herent in the scene ; and you feel that it was there, and
there only, that the genius of its exceptional author —
austerely gentle and severely pure, and thus in perfect
harmony with its surroundings — could have been moved
to that sublime strain of inspiration and eloquence.
Near at hand, in the midst of your reverie, the mellow
organ sounds from the chapel of St. George, where,
under "fretted vault" and over "long-drawn aisle,"
depend the ghostly, mouldering banners of ancient

56 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, v
knights — as still as the bones of the dead-and-gone
monarchs that crumble in the crypt below. In this
church are many of the old kings and nobles of Eng
land. The handsome and gallant Edward the Fourth
here found his grave ; and near it is that of the accom
plished Hastings — his faithful friend, to the last and
after. Here lies the dust of the stalwart, impetuous,
and savage Henry the Eighth, and here, at midnight,
by the light of torches, they laid beneath the pavement
the mangled body of Charles the First. As you stand
on Windsor ramparts, pondering thus upon the storied
past and the evanescence of " all that beauty, all that
wealth e'er gave," your eyes rest dreamily on green
fields far below, through which, under tall elms, the
brimming and sparkling river flows on without a sound,
and in which a few figures, dwarfed by distance, flit here
and there, in seeming aimless idleness ; while, warned
homeward by impending sunset, the chattering birds
circle and float around the lofty towers of the castle ;
and delicate perfumes of seringa and jasmine are wafted
up from dusky, unknown depths at the base of its ivied
steep. At such an hour I stood on those ramparts and
saw the shy villages and rich meadows of fertile Berk
shire, all red and golden with sunset light ; and at such
an hour I stood in the lonely cloisters of St. George's
chapel, and heard the distant organ sob, and saw the
sunlight fade up the gray walls, and felt and knew
the sanctity of silence. Age and death have made this
church illustrious ; but the spot itself has its own innate
charm of mystical repose.
" No use of lanterns ; and in one place lay
Feathers and dust to-day and yesterday."

Wiiidsor Forest and Park.

58 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
The drive from the front of Windsor Castle is through
a broad and stately avenue, three miles in length, straight
as an arrow and level as a standing pool ; and this white
highway through the green and fragrant sod is sumptu
ously embowered, from end to end, with double rows of
magnificent elms and oaks. The Windsor avenue,
like the splendid chestnut grove at Bushey Park, long
famous among the pageants of rural England, has often
been described. It is after leaving this that the rambler
comes upon the rarer beauties of Windsor Park and
Forest. From the far end of the avenue — where, in
a superb position, the equestrian statue of King George
the Third rises on its massive pedestal of natural rock,
— the road winds away, through shaded dell and ver
dant glade, past great gnarled beeches and under boughs
of elm, and yew, and oak, till its silver thread is lost in
the distant woods. At intervals a sinuous pathway
strays off to some secluded lodge, half hidden in foliage
— the property of the Crown, and the rustic residence
of a scion of the royal race. In one of those retreats
dwelt poor old George the Third, in the days of his
mental darkness; and the memory of the agonising
king seems still to cast a shadow on the mysterious and
melancholy house. They show you, under glass, in one
of the lodge gardens, an enormous grapevine, owned
by the Queen — a vine which, from its single stalwart
trunk, spreads its teeming branches, laterally, more
than a hundred feet in each direction. So come use
and thrift, hand in hand with romance ! Many an aged
oak is passed, in your progress, round which, " at still
midnight," Heme the Hunter might yet take his ghostly
prowl, shaking his chain " in a most hideous and dread-

A VISIT TO WINDSOR

59

ful manner." The wreck of the veritable Heme's Oak,
it is said, was rooted out, together with other ancient
and decayed trees, in the time of George the Third,
and in somewhat too literal fulfilment of his Majesty's

The Cnrfew Tower.
misinterpreted command. This great park is fourteen
miles in circumference and contains nearly four thou
sand acres, and many of the youngest trees that adorn
it are more than one hundred and fifty years old. Far
in its heart you stroll by Virginia Water — an artificial
lake, but faultless in its gentle beauty — and perceive

60 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
it SO deep and so breezy that a full-rigged ship-of-war,
with armament, can navigate its wind-swept, curling
billows. This lake was made by that sanguinary Duke
of Cumberland who led the English forces at Culloden.
In the dim groves that fringe its margin are many nests
wherein pheasants are bred, to fall by the royal shot and
to supply the royal table ; those you may contemplate
but not approach. At a point in your walk, sequestered
and lonely, they have set up and skilfully disposed the
fragments of a genuine ruined temple, brought from the
remote East — relic perchance of " Tadmor's marble
waste," and certainly a most solemn memorial of the
morning twilight of time. Broken arch, storm-stained
pillar, and shattered column are here shrouded with
moss and ivy; and should you chance to see them as the
evening shadows deepen and the evening wind sighs
mournfully in the grass your fancy will not fail to
drink in the perfect illusion that one of the stateliest
structures of antiquity has slowly crumbled where now
its fragments remain.
" Quaint " is a descriptive epithet that has been
much abused, but it may, with absolute propriety, be
applied to Windsor. The devious little streets there
visible, and the carved and timber-crossed buildings,
often of great age, are uncommonly rich in the expres
siveness of imaginative character. The emotions and
the fancy, equally with the sense of necessity and the in
stinct of use, have exercised their influence and uttered
their spirit in the shaping and adornment of the town.
While it constantly feeds the eye — with that pleasing
irregularity of lines and forms which is so delicious and
refreshing — it quite as constantly nurtures the sense

A VISIT TO WINDSOR

61

of romance that ought to play so large a part in our
lives, redeeming us from the tyranny of the common
place and intensifying all the high feelings and noble
aspirations that are possible to human nature. England
contains many places like Windsor ; some that blend
in even richer amplitude the elements of quaintness,
loveliness, and magniflcence. The meaning of them
all is the same: that romance, beauty, and gentleness
are forever vital ; that their forces are within our souls,
and ready and eager to flnd their way into our thoughts,
actions, and circumstances, and to brighten for every
one of us the face of every day ; that they ought neither
to be relegated to the distant and the past nor kept for
our books and day-dreams alone; but — in a calmer and
higher mood than is usual in this age of universal medi
ocrity, critical scepticism, and miscellaneous tumult —
should be permitted to flow forth into our architecture,
adornments, and customs, to hallow and preserve our
antiquities, to soften our manners, to give us tranquillity,
patience, and tolerance, to make our country loveable
for our own hearts, and so to enable us to bequeath it,
sure of love and reverence, to succeeding ages.

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CHAPTER VI
THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER
HE American who, having been a careful
and interested reader of English history,
visits London for the flrst time, half expects
to flnd the ancient city in a state of mild
decay ; and consequently he is a little
startled at flrst, upon realising that the present is quite
as vital as ever the past was, and that London antiquity
is, in fact, swathed in the robes of everyday action and
very much alive. When, for example, you enter West
minster Hall — "the great hall of William Rufus" —
you are beneath one of the most glorious canopies in
the world — one that was built by Richard the Second,
whose grave, chosen by himself, is in the Abbey, just
across the street from where you stand. But this old
hall is now only a vestibule to the palace of Westmin
ster. The Lords and the Commons of England, on their
way to the Houses of Parliament, pass every day over
the spot on which Charles the First was tried and con
demned, and on which occurred the trial of Warren
Hastings. It is a mere thoroughfare — glorious though
62
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^^ g-Ti^^M  /
g* x>? .ta-jSR, iiiiM I I .

64

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

4?„

:ti

it be, alike in structure and historic renown.
The Palace Yard, near by, was the scene of
the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh. In
Bishopsgate Street stands Crosby House ;
the same to which, in Shakespeare's tragedy,
the Duke of Gloster requests the retirement
of Lady Anne. It is a restaurant now, and
you may dine in the veritable throne-room of
Richard the Third. The house of Cardinal
Wolsey in Fleet Street is now a shop.
Milton once lived in Golden Lane, and
Golden Lane was a sweet and quiet spot.
It is a dingy and dismal street now, and
the visitor is glad to get out of it. To-day
makes use of yesterday, all the world over.
It is not in London, certainly, that you flnd
anything — except old churches — mouldering
in silence, solitude, and neglect.
Those who see every day during the Par
liamentary session the mace that is borne
through the lobby of the House of Com
mons, although they are obliged, on every
occasion, to uncover as it passes, do not,
probably, view that symbol with much inter
est. Yet it is the same mace that Oliver
Cromwell insulted,^ when he dissolved the
Parliament and cried out, " Take away that

^ An error. The House of Commons has had three maces.
The first one disappeared after the judicial slaughter of
Charles the First. The Cromwell mace was carried to the
island of Jamaica, and is there preserved in a museum at
Kingston. The third is the one now in use.

The j\lace.

VI THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER 65
bauble ! " I saw it one day, on its passage to the table
of the Commons, and was glad to remove the hat of
respect to what it signifies — the power and majesty
of the free people of England. The Speaker of the
House was walking behind it, very grand in his wig
and gown, and the members trooped in at his heels to
secure their places by being present at the opening
prayer. A little later I was provided with a seat, in
a dim corner, in that august assemblage of British sena
tors, and could observe at ease their management of the
public business. The Speaker was on his throne ; the
mace was on its table ; the hats of the Commons were on
their heads ; and over this singular, animated, impressive
scene the waning light of a summer afternoon poured
softly down, through the high, stained, and pictured
windows of one of the most symmetrical halls in the
world. It did not happen to be a day of excitement.
The Irish members had not then begun to impede the
transaction of business, for the sake of drawing atten
tion to the everlasting wrongs of Ireland. Yet it was a
lively day. Curiosity on the part of the Opposition and
a respectful incertitude on the part of Her Majesty's
ministers were the prevailing conditions. I had never
before heard so many questions asked — outside of the
French grammar — and asked to so little purpose.
Everybody wanted to know, and nobody wanted to tell.
Each inquirer took off his hat when he rose to ask, and
put it on again when he sat down to be answered.
Each governmental sphinx bared his brow when he
emerged to divulge, and covered it again when he
subsided without divulging. The superficial respect of
these interlocutors for each other steadily remained.

66 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
however, of the most deferential and considerate de
scription ; so that ¦ — without discourtesy — it was im
possible not to think of Byron's " mildest mannered
man that ever scuttled ship or cut a throat." Under
neath this velvety, purring, conventional manner the
observer could readily discern the fires of passion,
prejudice, and strong antagonism. They make no
parade in the House of Commons. They attend to
their business. And upon every topic that is brought
before their notice they have definite ideas, strong
convictions, and settled purposes. The topic of Army
Estimates upon this day seemed especially to arouse
their ardour. Discussion of this was continually diver
sified by cries of "Oh!" and of "Hear!" and of
" Order ! " and sometimes those cries savoured more of
derision than of compliment. Many persons spoke, but
no person spoke well. An off-hand, matter-of-fact,
shambling method of speech would seem to be the
fashion in the British House of Commons. I remem
bered the anecdote that De Quincey tells, about
Sheridan and the young member who quoted Greek.
It was easy to perceive how completely out of place the
sophomore orator would be, in that assemblage. Bri
tons like better to make speeches than to hear them,
and they will never be slaves to bad oratory. The
moment a windy gentleman got the floor, and began to
read a manuscript respecting the Indian Government,
as many as forty Commons arose and noisily walked
out of the House. Your pilgrim likewise hailed the
moment of his deliverance and was glad to escape to
the open air.
Books have been written to describe the Palace of

VI THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER 67
Westminster; but it is observable that this structure,
however much its magniflcence deserves commemora
tive applause, is deflcient, as yet, in the charm of asso
ciation. The old Palace of St. James, with its low,
dusky walls, its round turrets, and its fretted battle
ments, is more impressive, because history has freighted
it with meaning and time has made it beautiful. But
the Palace of Westminster is a splendid structure. It
covers eight acres of ground, on the bank of the
Thames ; it contains eleven quadrangles and five hun
dred rooms ; and when its niches for statuary have
been filled it will contain two hundred and twenty-six
statues. The monuments in St. Stephen's Hall — into
which you pass from Westminster Hall, which has been
incorporated into the Palace and is its only ancient and
therefore its most interesting feature — indicate, very
eloquently, what a superb art gallery this will one day
become. The statues are the images of Selden, Hamp
den, Falkland, Clarendon, Somers, Walpole, Chatham,
Mansfield, Burke, Fox, Pitt, and Grattan. Those of
Mansfield and Grattan present, perhaps, the most of
character and power, making you feel that they are
indubitably accurate portraits, and winning you by the
charm of personality. There are statues, also, in West
minster Hall, commemorative of the Georges, William
and Mary, and Anne ; but it is not of these you think,
nor of any local and everyday object, when you stand
beneath the wonderful roof of Richard the Second.
Nearly eight hundred years " their cloudy wings
expand" above that fabric, and copiously shed upon it
the fragrance of old renown. Richard the Second was
deposed there : Cromwell was there installed Lord

68 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
Protector of England : John Fisher, Sir Thomas More,
and Strafford were there condemned : and it was there
that the possible, if not usual, devotion of woman's
heart was so touchingly displayed by her
'• Whose faith drew strength from death,
And prayed her Russell up to God."
No one can realise, without personal experience, the
number and variety of pleasures accessible to the resi
dent of London. These may not be piquant to him
who has them always within his reach. I met with
several residents of the British capital who had always
intended to visit the Towdr but had never done so. But
to the stranger they possess a constant and keen fasci
nation. The Derby this year [1877 J was thought to be
comparatively a tame race ; but I know of one spectator
who saw it from the top of the grand stand and who
thought that the scene it presented was wonderfully
brilliant. The sky had been overcast with dull clouds
till the moment when the race was won ; but just as
Archer, rising in his saddle, lifted his horse forward
and gained the goal alone, the sun burst forth and shed
upon the downs a sheen of gold, and lit up all the
distant hills, and all the far-stretching roads that wind
away from the region of Epsom like threads of silver
through the green. Carrier-pigeons were instantly
launched off to London, with the news of the victory of
Silvio. There was one winner on the grand stand who
had laid bets on Silvio, for no other reason than because
that horse bore the prettiest name in the list. The
Derby, like Christmas, comes but once a year ; but
other allurements are almost perennial. Greenwich,

^r-^^'ywT.S—

^.. *-8fc'vr3j

< II.
tooI Xu ?z uaiO

^'I THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER 69
for instance, with its white-bait dinner, invites the
epicure during the best part of the London season. A
favourite tavern is the Trafalgar — in which each room
is named after some magnate of the old British navy;
and Nelson, Hardy, and Rodney are household words.
Another cheery place of resort is The Ship. The
Hospitals are at Greenwich that Dr. Johnson thought
to be too fine for a charity; and back of these — which
are ordinary enough now, in comparison with modern
structures erected for a kindred purpose — stands the
famous Observatory that keeps time for Europe. This
place is hallowed also by the grave of Clive and by that
of Wolfe — to the latter of whom, however, there is a
monument in Westminster Abbey. Greenwich makes
one think of Queen Elizabeth, who was born there, who
often held her court there, and who often sailed thence,
in her barge, up the river to Richmond — her favourite
retreat and the scene of her last days and her pathetic
death. Few spots can compare with Richmond, in
brilliancy of landscape. That place — the Shene of old
times — was long a royal residence. The woods and
meadows that you see from the terrace of the Star and
Garter tavern — spread upon a rolling plain as far as
the eye can reach — sparkle like emeralds ; and the
Thames, dotted with little toy-like boats, shines with all
the deep lustre of the blackest onyx. Richmond, for
those who honour genius and who love to walk in the
footsteps of renown, is full of interest. Dean Swift
once had a house there, the site of which is stfll indi
cated. Pope's rural home was in the adjacent vfllage
of Twickenham, — where it may still be seen. Horace
Walpole's stately mansion of Strawberry Hill is not far

70

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

off. The poet Thomson long resided at Richmond, in
a house now used as an hospital, and there he died.
Edmund Kean and the once famous Mrs. Yates rest
beneath Richmond church, and there also are the ashes
of Thomson. As I drove through the sweetly sylvan
Park of Richmond, in the late afternoon of a breezy
summer day, and heard the whispering of the great
elms, and saw the gentle, trustful deer couched at ease
in the golden glades, I heard all the while, in the still
chambers of thought, the tender lament of Collins —
which is now a prophecy fulfilled :
" Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore,
When Thames in summer wreaths is drest ;
And oft suspend the dashing oar,
To bid his gentle spirit rest."

Queeji Elizabeth's Cradle.

CHAPTER VII

WARWICK AND KENILWORTH

LL the way from London to Warwick it
rained ; not heavily, but with a gentle
fall. The gray clouds hung low over
the landscape and softly darkened it ; so
that meadows of scarlet and emerald, the
shining foliage of elms, gray turret, nestled cottage and
limpid river were as mysterious and evanescent as pic
tures seen in dreams. At Warwick the rain had fallen
and ceased, and the walk from the station to the inn
was on a road — or on a footpath by the roadside —
still hard and damp with the water it had absorbed. A
fresh wind blew from the flelds, sweet with the rain and
fragrant with the odour of leaves and flowers. The
streets of the ancient town — entered through an old
Norman arch — were deserted and silent. It was Sun
day when I flrst came to the country of Shakespeare ;
and over all the region there brooded a sacred stillness
peculiar to the time and harmonious beyond utterance
with the sanctity of the place. As I strive, after many
days, to call back and to fix in words the impressions
71

72 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
of that sublime experience, the same awe falls upon me
now that fell upon me then. Nothing else upon earth
— no natural scene, no relic of the past, no pageantry of
the present — can vie with the shrine of Shakespeare,
in power to impress, to humble, and to exalt the devout
spirit that has been nurtured at the fountain of his tran
scendent genius.
A fortunate way to approach Stratford-on-Avon is by
Warwick and Kenilworth. Those places are not on a
direct line of travel ; but the scenes and associations
that they successively present are such as assume a
symmetrical order, increase in interest, and grow to a
delightful culmination. Objects that Shakespeare him
self must have seen are still visible there ; and little by
little, in contact with these, the pilgrim through this
haunted region is mentally saturated with that atmos
phere of serenity and romance in which the youth of
Shakespeare was passed, and by which his works and
his memory are embalmed. No one should come
abruptly upon the poet's home. The mind needs to
be prepared for the impression that awaits it ; and in
this gradual approach it finds preparation, both suitable
and delicious. The luxuriance of the country, its fertile
fields, its brilliant foliage, its myriads of wild-flowers, its
pomp of colour and of physical vigour and bloom, do
not fail to announce, to every mind, howsoever heedless,
that this is a fit place for the birth and nurture of a great
man. But this is not all. As you stroll in the quaint
streets of Warwick, as you drive to Kenilworth, as you
muse in that poetic ruin, as you pause in the old grave
yard in the valley below, as you meditate over the crum
bling fragments of the ancient abbey, at every step of the

VII WARWICK AND KENILWORTH 73
way you are haunted by a vague sense of an impending
grandeur ; you are aware of a presence that fills and
sanctifies the scene. The emotion that is thus inspired
is very glorious ; never to be elsewhere felt ; and never
to be forgotten.
The cyclopaedias and the guide-books dilate, with
much particularity and characteristic eloquence, upon
Warwick Castle and other great features of Warwick
shire, but the attribute that all such records omit is the
atmosphere ; and this, perhaps, is rather to be indicated
than described. The prevailing quality of it is a certain
high and sweet solemnity — a feeling kindred with the
placid, happy melancholy that steals over the mind,
when, on a sombre afternoon in autumn, you stand in
the churchyard, and listen, amid rustling branches and
sighing grass, to the low music of distant organ and
chanting choir. Peace, haunted by romance, dwells
here, in reverie. The great tower of Warwick, based in
silver Avon and pictured in its slumbering waters, seems
musing upon the centuries over which it has watched,
and full of unspeakable knowledge and thought. The
dark and massive gateways of the town and the timber-
crossed fronts of its antique houses live on in the same
strange dream and perfect repose ; and all along the
drive to Kenilworth are equal images of rest — of a rest
in which there is nothing supine or sluggish, no element
of death or decay, but in which passion, imagination,
beauty, and sorrow, seized at their topmost poise, seem
crystalHsed in eternal calm. What opulence of splendid
life is vital for ever in Kenilworth's crumbling ruin there
are no words to say. What pomp of royal banners !
what dignity of radiant cavaliers ! what loveliness of

74 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
Stately and exquisite ladies ! what magnificence of ban
quets ! what wealth of pageantry ! what lustre of illu
mination ! The same festal music that the poet Gas
coigne heard there, three hundred years ago, is still
sounding on, to-day. The proud and cruel Leicester
still walks in his vaulted hall. The imperious face
of the Virgin Queen still from her dais looks down
on plumed courtiers and jewelled dames ; and still
the moonlight, streaming through the turret-window,
falls on the white bosom and the great, startled, black
eyes of Amy Robsart, waiting for her lover. The gaze
of the pilgrim, indeed, rests only upon old, gray, broken
walls, overgrown with green moss and ivy, and pierced
by irregular casements through which the sun shines,
and the winds blow, and the rains drive, and the birds
fly, amid utter desolation. But silence and ruin are
here alike eloquent and awful ; and, much as the place
impresses you by what remains, it impresses you far
more by what has vanished. Ambition, love, pleasure,
power, misery, tragedy — these are gone; and being
gone they are immortal. I plucked, in the garden of
Kenilworth, one of the most brilliant red roses that ever
grew ; and as I pressed it to my lips I seemed to touch
the lips of that superb, bewildering beauty who out
weighed England's crown (at least in story), and whose
spirit is the everlasting genius of the place.
There is a row of cottages opposite to the ruins of
the castle, in which contentment seems to have made
her home. The ivy embowers them. The roses cluster
around their little windows. The greensward slopes
away, in front, from big, flat stones that are embedded
in the mossy sod before their doors. Down in the val-

WARWICK AND KENILWORTH

75

ley, hard by, your steps stray through an ancient grave
yard — in which stands the parish church, a carefully
restored building of the eleventh century, with tower, and
clock, and bell — and past a few fragments of the Abbey
and Monastery of St. Mary, destroyed in 1538. At
many another point, on the roads betwixt Warwick and
Kenilworth and Stratford, I came upon such nests of
cosy, rustic quiet
and seeming hap
piness. They
build their coun
try houses low, in
England, so that
the trees over
hang them, and
the cool, friendly,
flower-gemmed
earth — parent,
and stay, and
bourne of mortal
life — is tenderly
taken into their
companionship. Here, at Kenil
worth, as elsewhere, at such places as Marlowe, Henley,
Richmond, Maidenhead, Cookham, and the region round
about Windsor, I saw many a sweet nook where tired
life might be content to lay down its burden and enter
into its rest. In all true love of country — a passion
that seems to be more deeply felt in England than any
where else upon the globe — there is love for the literal
soil itself: and surely that sentiment in the human heart

.•s^.-" -vi''5?*iiB:r-

Old Inn.

76 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
is equally natural and pious which inspires and per
petuates man's desire that where he found his cradle
he may also flnd his grave.
Under a cloudy sky and through a landscape still wet
and shining with recent rain the drive to Stratford was
a pleasure so exquisite that at last it became a pain.
Just as the carriage reached the junction of the War
wick and Snitterfleld roads a ray of sunshine, streaming
through a rift in the clouds, fell upon the neighbouring
hillside, scarlet with poppies, and lit the scene as with
the glory of a celestial benediction. This sunburst,
neither growing larger nor coming nearer, followed
all the way to Stratford ; and there, on a sudden, the
clouds were lifted and dispersed, and "fair daylight"
flooded the whole green countryside. The afternoon
sun was still high in heaven when I alighted at the
Red Horse and entered the little parlour of Wash
ington Irving. They keep the room much as it was
when he left it ; for they are proud of his gentle
genius and grateful for his commemorative words. In
a corner stands [1877] the small, old-fashioned hair
cloth arm-chair in which he sat, on that night of
memory and of musing which he has described in The
Sketch-Book. A brass plate is affixed to it, bearing
his name ; and the visitor observes, in token of its
age and service, that the hair-cloth of its seat is con
siderably worn and frayed. Every American pilgrim
to Stratford sits in that chair ; and looks with tender
interest on the old flreplace ; and reads the memorials
of Irving that are hung upon the walls : and it is
no small comfort there to reflect that our illustrious
countryman — whose name will be remembered with

a:DO_1<a.mb Z>zoz5w<

WARWICK AND KENILWORTH

77

honour, as long as literature is prized among men —
was the flrst, in modern days, to discover the beau
ties and to interpret the poetry of the birthplace of
Shakespeare.

Frovi the Warwick Shield.

CHAPTER VIII

FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON

INCE again, as it did on that delicious
summer afternoon which is for ever mem
orable in my life, the golden glory of the
westering sun burns on the gray spire of
Stratford church, and on the ancient
graveyard below, — wherein the mossy stones lean this
way and that, in sweet and orderly confusion, — and
on the peaceful avenue of limes, and on the burnished
water of silver Avon. The tall, pointed, many-coloured
windows of the church glint in the evening light. A
cool and fragrant wind is stirring the branches and the
grass. The small birds, calling to their mates or sport
ing in the wanton pleasure of their airy life, are circling
over the church roof or hiding in little crevices of its
walls. On the vacant meadows across the river stretch
away the long and level shadows of the pompous elms.
Here and there, upon the river's brink, are pairs of
what seem lovers, strolling by the reedy marge, or sit
ting upon the low tombs, in the Sabbath quiet. As the
sun sinks and the dusk deepens, two flgures of inflrm
78

Holy Trinity Church.

80 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
old women, clad in black, pass with slow and feeble
steps through the avenue of limes, and vanish around
an angle of the church — that now stands all in shadow :
and no sound is heard but the faint rustling of the
leaves. Once again, as on that sacred night, the streets of
Stratford are deserted and silent under the star-lit sky,
and I am standing, in the dim darkness, at the door of
the cottage in which Shakespeare was bom. It is
empty, dark, and still; and in all the neighbourhood
there is no stir nor sign of life ; but the quaint case
ments and gables of this haunted house, its antique
porch, and the great timbers that cross its front are
luminous as with a light of their own, so that I see
them with perfect vision. I stand there a long time,
and I know that I am to remember these sights for
ever, as I see them now. After a while, with lingering
reluctance, I turn away from this marvellous spot, and,
presently passing through a little, winding lane, I walk
in the High Street of the town, and mark, at the end
of the prospect, the illuminated clock in the tower of
the chapel of the Holy Cross. A few chance-directed
steps bring me to what was New Place once, where
Shakespeare died ; and there again I pause, and long
remain in meditation, gazing into the enclosed garden,
where, under screens of wire, are certain strange frag
ments of lime and stone. These — which I do not
then know — are the remains of the foundation of
Shakespeare's house. The night wanes ; and still I
walk in Stratford streets ; and by and by I am standing
on the bridge that spans the Avon, and looking down
at the thick-clustering stars reflected in its black and

VIII FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVUN 81
silent stream. At last, under the roof of the Red
Horse, I sink into a troubled slumber, from which soon
a strain of celestial music — strong, sweet, jubilant, and
splendid — awakens me in an instant; and I start up
in my bed — to flnd that all around me is still as death ;
and then, drowsily, far-off, the bell strikes three, in its
weird and lonesome tower.
Every pilgrim to Stratford knows, in a general way,
what he will there behold. Copious and frequent de
scription of its Shakespearean associations has made the
place familiar to all the world. Yet these Shake
spearean associations keep a perennial freshness, and are
equally a surprise to the sight and a wonder to the soul.
Though three centuries old they are not stricken with
age or decay. The house in Henley Street, in which,
according to accepted tradition, Shakespeare was born,
has been from time to time repaired ; and so it has been
kept sound, without having been materially changed
from what it was in Shakespeare's youth. The kind
ladies. Miss Maria and Miss Caroline Chataway, who
take care of it [1877], and with so much pride and
courtesy show it to the visitor, called my attention to a
bit of the ceiling of the upper chamber — the room of
Shakespeare's birth — which had begun to droop, and
had been skilfully secured with little iron laths. It is in
this room that the numerous autographs are scrawled
over the ceiling and walls. One side of the chimney-
piece here is called "The Actor's Pillar," so richly is it
adorned with the names of actors ; Edmund Kean's sig
nature being among them, and still legible. On one of
the window-panes, cut with a diamond, is the name of
" W. Scott " ; and all the panes are scratched with sig-

82

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

natures — making you think of Douglas Jerrold's re
mark on bad Shakespearean commentators, that they
resemble persons who write on glass with diamonds, and
obscure the light with a multitude of scratches. The
floor of this room, uncarpeted and almost snow-white
with much washing, seems still as hard as iron ; yet
its boards have been hollowed by wear, and the heads
of the old nails that
fasten it down gleam
like polished silver.
You can sit in an
antique chair, in a
corner of this room,
and think unutterable
things. There is, cer
tainly, no word that
can even remotely sug
gest the feeling with
which you are then
overwhelmed. You
can sit also in the
room below, in the
seat, in the corner of
the wide fireplace, that Shakespeare himself must often
have occupied. They keep but a few sticks of furni
ture in any part of the cottage. One room is devoted
to Shakespearean relics — more or less authentic ; one
of which is a schoolboy's desk that was obtained from
the old grammar-school in Church Street in which
Shakespeare was once a pupil. At the back of the
cottage, now isolated from contiguous structures, is a
pleasant garden, and at one side is a cosy, luxurious little

The htglenook.

VIII FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-A\'ON S3
cabin — the home of order and of pious decorum — for
the ladies who are custodians of the Shakespeare House.
If you are a favoured visitor, you may receive from that
garden, at parting, all the flowers, prettily mounted upon
a sheet of paper, that poor Ophelia names, in the scene
of her madness. " There's rosemary, that's for remem
brance : and there is pansies, that's for thoughts : there's
fennel for you, and columbines : there's rue for you :
there's a daisy : — I would give you some violets, but
they withered all when my father died."
The minute knowledge that Shakespeare had of plants
and flowers, and the loving appreciation with which he
describes pastoral scenery, are explained to the rambler
in Stratford, by all that he sees and hears. There is a
walk across the flelds to Shottery that the poet must
often have taken, in the days of his courtship of Anne
Hathaway. The path to this hamlet passes through
pastures and gardens, flecked everywhere with those
brilliant scarlet poppies that are so radiant and so be
witching in the English landscape. To have grown up
amid such surroundings, and, above all, to have expe
rienced amid them the passion of love, must have been,
for Shakespeare, the intuitive acquirement of ample and
specific knowledge of their manifold beauties. It would
be hard to find a sweeter rustic retreat than Anne Hatha
way's cottage is, even now. Tall trees embower it ; and
over its porches, and all along its picturesque, irregu
lar front, and on its thatched roof, the woodbine and the
ivy climb, and there are wild roses and the maiden's
blush. For the young poet's wooing no place could be
fitter than this. He would always remember it with
tender joy. They show you, in that cottage, an old

chap. VIII FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON 85
settle, by the fireside, whereon the lovers may have sat
together : it formerly stood outside the door : and in the
rude little chamber next the roof an antique, carved bed
stead, that Anne Hathaway once owned. This, it is
thought, continued to be Anne's home for several years
of her married life — her husband being absent in Lon
don, and sometimes coming down to visit her, at Shottery.
" He was wont," says John Aubrey, the antiquary, writ
ing in 1680, "to go to his native country once a year."
The last surviving descendant of the Hathaway family
— Mrs. Baker — lives in the house now, and welcomes
with homely hospitality the wanderers, from all lands,
who seek — in a sympathy and reverence most hon
ourable to human nature — the shrine of Shakespeare's
love. There is one such wanderer who will never for
get the farewell clasp of that kind woman's hand, and
who has never parted with her gift of woodbine and
roses from the porch of Anne Hathaway's cottage.
In England it is living, more than writing about it,
that is esteemed by the best persons. They prize good
writing, but they prize noble living far more. This is
an ingrained principle, and not an artificial habit, and
this principle doubtless was as potent in Shakespeare's
age as it is to-day. Nothing could be more natural
than that this great writer should think less of his
works than of the establishment of his home. He
would desire, having won a fortune, to dwell in his
native place, to enjoy the companionship and esteem
of his neighbours, to participate in their pleasures,
to help them in their troubles, to aid in the improve
ment and embellishment of the town, to deepen his
hold upon the affections of all around him, and to

86 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
feel that, at last, honoured and lamented, his ashes
would be laid in the village church where he had
worshipped — " Among familiar names to rest,
And in the places of his youth."
It was in 1 597, twelve years after he went to London,
that the poet began to buy property in Stratford, and it
was about eight years after his first purchase that he
finally settled there, at New Place. [J. O. Halliwell-
Phillips says that it was in 1609 : There is a record
alleging that as late as that year Shakespeare still
retained a residence in Clink Street, Southwark.] This
mansion was altered by Sir Hugh Clopton, who owned
it toward the middle of the eighteenth century, and it
was destroyed by the Rev. Francis Gastrell, in 1759.
The grounds, which have been reclaimed, — chiefly
through the zeal of J. O. Halliwell-Phillips, — are laid
out according to the model they are supposed to have
presented when Shakespeare owned them. His lawn,
his orchard, and his garden are indicated; and a scion
of his mulberry is growing on the spot where that
famous tree once flourished. You can see a part of the
foundation of the old house. It was made of brick and
timber, it seems to have had gables, and no doubt it
was fashioned with the beautiful curves and broken
lines of the Tudor architecture. They show, upon the
lawn, a stone of considerable size, that surmounted its
door. The site — still a central and commodious one —
is on the corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane ;
and on the opposite corner stands now, as it has stood
for eight hundred years, the chapel of the Holy Cross,
with square, dark tower, fretted parapet, pointed case-

VIII FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON 87
ments, and Norman porch — one of the most romantic
and picturesque little churches in England. It was easy,
when musing on that storied spot, to fancy Shakespeare,
in the gloaming of a summer day, strolling on the lawn,
beneath his elms, and listening to the soft and solemn
music of the chapel organ ; or to think of him as step
ping forth from his study, in the late and lonesome
hours of the night, and pausing to " count the clock,"
or note the " exhalations whizzing in the air."
The funeral train of Shakespeare, on that dark day
when it moved from New Place to Stratford Church,
had but a little way to go. The river, surely, must
have seemed to hush its murmurs, the trees to droop
their branches, the sunshine to grow dim — as that sad
procession passed ! His grave is under the gray
pavement of the chancel, near the altar, and his wife
and one of his daughters are buried beside him. The
pilgrim who reads upon the gravestone those rugged
lines of grievous entreaty and awful imprecation that
guard the p-oet's rest feels no doubt that he is listening
to his living voice — for he has now seen the enchant
ing beauty of the place, and he has now felt what
passionate affection it can inspire. Feeling and not
manner would naturally have prompted that abrupt,
agonised supplication and threat. Nor does such a
pilgrim doubt, when gazing on the painted bust, above
the grave, — made by Gerard Jonson, stonecutter, —
that he beholds the authentic face of Shakespeare. It
is not the heavy face of the portraits that represent it.
There is a rapt, transfigured quality in it, that those
copies do not convey. It is thoughtful, austere, and
yet benign. Shakespeare was a hazel-eyed man, with

88 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
auburn hair, and the colours that he wore were scarlet
and black. Being painted, and also being set up at a
considerable height on the church wall, the bust does
not disclose what is sufficiently perceptible in a cast
from it — that it is the copy of a mask from the dead
face. One of the cheeks is a little swollen and the
tongue, slightly protruded, is caught between the lips.
The idle theory that the poet was not a gentleman
of consideration in his own time and place falls utterly
and for ever from the mind when you stand at his
grave. No man could have a more honourable or
sacred place of sepulture ; and while it illustrates the
profound esteem of the community in which he lived it
testifies to the religious character by which that esteem
was confirmed. " I commend my soul into the hands
of God, my Creator, hoping, and assuredly believing,
through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to
be made partaker of life everlasting." So said Shake
speare, in his last Will, bowing in humble reverence the
mightiest mind — as vast and limitless in the power to
comprehend as to express! — that ever wore the gar
ments of mortality.^
Once again there is a sound of organ music, very low
and soft, in Stratford Church, and the dim light, broken
^ It ought perhaps to be remarked that this prelude to Shakespeare's
Will may not have been intended by him as a profession of faith, but may
have been signed simply as a legal formula. His works denote a mind of
high and broad spiritual convictions, untrammelled by creed or doctrine.
Llis inclination, probably, was toward the Roman Catholic church, because
of the poetry that is in it : but such a man as Shakespeare would have
viewed all religious beliefs in a kindly spirit, and would have made no em
phatic professions. The Will was executed on March 25, 1616. It covers
three sheets of paper; it is not in Shakespeare's hand-writing, but each
sheet bears his signature. It is in the British Museum.

FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON

89

by the richly stained windows, streams across the dusky
chancel, filling the still air with opal haze and flooding
those gray gravestones with its mellow radiance. Not
a word is spoken ; but, at intervals, the rustle of the
leaves is audible in a sighing wind. What visions are
these, that suddenly flll the region ! What royal faces
of monarchs, proud with power, or pallid with anguish !
What sweet, imperial women, gleeful with happy youth
and love, or wide-eyed and rigid in tearless woe ! What
warriors, with serpent diadems, defiant of death and
hell! The mournful eyes of Hamlet; the wild counte
nance of Lear ; Ariel with his harp, and Prospero with
his wand ! Here is no death ! All these, and more,
are immortal shapes ; and he that made them so,
although his mortal part be but a handful of dust in
yonder crypt, is a glorious angel beyond the stars.

Distant View of Stratford.

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CHAPTER IX

LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS

HOSE persons upon whom the spirit of
the past has power — and it has not power
upon every mind ! — are aware of the
mysterious charm that invests certain
familiar spots and objects, in all old cities.
London, to observers of this class, is a never-ending
delight. Modern cities, for the most part, reveal a
definite and rather a commonplace design. Their main
avenues are parallel. Their shorter streets bisect their
main avenues. They are diversified with rectangular
squares. Their configuration, in brief, suggests the
sapient, utilitarian forethought of the land-surveyor
and civil engineer. The ancient British capital, on the
contrary, is the expression — slowly and often narrowly
made — of many thousands of characters. It is a city
that has happened — and the stroller through the old
part of it comes continually upon the queerest imagina
ble alleys, courts, and nooks. Not far from Drury Lane
Theatre, for instance, hidden away in a clump of dingy
houses, is a dismal little graveyard — the same that

chap. IX LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS 91
Dickens has chosen, in his novel of Bleak House, as the
sepulchre of little Jo's friend, the first love of the unfor
tunate Lady Dedlock. It is a doleful spot, draped in
the robes of faded sorrow, and crowded into the twilight
of obscurity by the thick-clustering habitations of men.^
The Cripplegate church, St. Giles's, a less lugubrious
spot and less difficult of access, is nevertheless strangely
sequestered, so that it also affects the observant eye as
equally one of the surprises of London. I saw it, for
the first time, on a gray, sad Sunday, a little before
twilight, and when the service was going on within its
venerable walls. The footsteps of John Milton were
sometimes on the threshold of the Cripplegate, and his
grave is in the nave of that ancient church. A simple
flat stone marks that sacred spot, and many a heedless
foot tramples over that hallowed dust. From Golden
Lane, which is close by, you can see the tower of this
church ; and, as you walk from the place where Milton
lived to the place where his ashes repose, you seem,
with a solemn, awe-stricken emotion, to be actually
following in his funeral train. At St. Giles's occurred
the marriage of Cromwell.^ I remembered — as I stood
there and conjured up that scene of golden joy and
hope — the place of the Lord Protector's coronation
in Westminster Hall ; the place, still marked, in West
minster Abbey, where his body was buried ; and old
Temple Bar, on which (if not on Westminster Hall) his
1 That place has been renovated and is no longer a disgrace.
2 The church of St. Giles was built in 1117 by Queen Maud. It was
demolished in 1623 and rebuilt in 1731. The tomb of Richard Pendrell,
who saved Charles the Second, after Worcester fight, in 1651, is in the
churchyard.

92 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
mutilated corse was flnally exposed to the blind rage of
the fickle populace. A little time — a very little time
— serves to gather up equally the happiness and the
anguish, the conquest and the defeat, the greatness and
the littleness of human life, and to cover them all with
silence. But not always with oblivion. Those quaint churches,
and many other mouldering relics of the past, in Lon
don, are haunted with associations that never can perish
out of remembrance. In fact the whole of the old city
impresses you as densely invested with an atmosphere
of human experience, dark, sad, and lamentable. Walk
ing, alone, in ancient quarters of it, after midnight, I
was aware of the oppressive sense of tragedies that
have been acted and misery that has been endured in
its dusky streets and melancholy houses. They do not
err who say that the spiritual life of man leaves its
influence in the physical objects by which he is sur
rounded. Night-walks in London will teach you that,
if they teach you nothing else. I went more than once
into Brooke Street, Holborn, and traced the desolate
footsteps of poor Thomas Chatterton to the scene of his
self-murder and agonised, pathetic, deplorable death.
It is more than a century (1770), since that "marvellous
boy" was driven to suicide by neglect, hunger, and
despair. They are tearing down the houses on one
side of Brooke Street now (1877); it is doubtful which
house was No. 4, in the attic of which Chatterton died,
and doubtful whether it remains : his grave — a pauper's
grave, that was made in a workhouse burial-ground, in
Shoe Lane, long since obliterated — is unknown ; but his
presence hovers about that region ; his strange and

IX LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS 93
touching story tinges its commonness with the mystical
moonlight of romance ; and his name is blended with it
for ever. On another night I walked from St. James's
Palace to Whitehall (the York Place of Cardinal Wol
sey), and viewed the ground that Charles the First must
have traversed, on his way to the scaffold. The story
of the slaughter of that king, always sorrowful to
remember, is very grievous to consider, when you
realise, upon the actual scene of his ordeal and death,
his exalted fortitude and his bitter agony. It seemed
as if I could almost hear his voice, as it sounded on
that fateful morning, asking that his body might be
more warmly clad, lest, in the cold January air, he
should shiver, and so, before the eyes of his enemies,
should seem to be trembling with fear. The Puritans,
having brought that poor man to the place of execution,
kept him in suspense from early morning till after two
o'clock in the day, while they debated over a proposition
to spare his life — upon any condition they might choose
to make — - that had been sent to them by his son. Prince
Charles. Old persons were alive in London, not very
long ago, who remembered having seen, in their child
hood, the window, in the end of the Whitehall Banquet
House — now a Chapel Royal and all that remains of
the ancient palace — through which the doomed mon
arch walked forth to the block. It was long ago walled
up, and the palace has undergone much alteration since
the days of the Stuarts. In the rear of Whitehall
stands a bronze statue of James the Second, by Roubiliac
(whose marbles are numerous, in the Abbey and else
where in London, and whose grave is in the church of
St. Martin), one of the most graceful works of that

94 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
spirited sculptor. The flgure is flnely modelled. The
face is dejected and full of reproach. The right hand
points, with a truncheon, toward the earth. It is impos
sible to mistake the ruminant, melancholy meaning of
this memorial ; and equally it is impossible to walk
without both thought that instructs and emotion that
elevates through a city which thus abounds with traces
of momentous incident and representative experience.
The literary pilgrim in London has this double
advantage — that while he communes with the past he
may enjoy in the present. Yesterday and to-day are
commingled here, in a way that is almost ludicrous.
When you turn from Roubiliac' s statue of James your
eyes rest upon the retired house of Disraeli. If you
walk in Whitehall, toward the Palace of Westminster,
some friend may chance to tell you how the great Duke
of Wellington walked there, in the feebleness of his
age, from the Horse Guards to the House of Lords;
and with what pleased complacency the old warrior
used to boast of his skill in threading a crowded thor
oughfare, — unaware that the police, acting by particu
lar command, protected his revered person from errant
cabs and pushing pedestrians. As I strolled one day
past Lambeth Palace it happened that the palace gates
were suddenly unclosed and that His Grace the Arch
bishop of Canterbury came forth, on horseback, from
that episcopal residence, and ambled away towards the
House of Lords. It is the same arched portal through
which, in other days, passed out the stately train of
Wolsey. It is the same towered palace that Queen
Elizabeth looked upon as her barge swept past, on its
watery track to Richmond. It is for ever associated

IX LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS 95
with the memory of Thomas Cromwell. In the church,
hard by, rest the ashes of men distinguished in the most
diverse directions — Jackson, the clown; and Tenison,
the archbishop, the " honest, prudent, laborious, and
benevolent " primate of William the Third, who was
thought worthy to succeed in office the illustrious
Tillotson. The cure of souls is sought here with just
as vigorous energy as when Tillotson wooed by his
goodness and charmed by his winning eloquence. Not
a great distance from this spot you come upon the
college at Dulwich that Edward Alleyn founded, in the
time of Shakespeare, and that still subsists upon the old
actor's endowment. It is said that Alleyn — who was
a man of fortune, and whom a contemporary epigram
styles the best actor of his day — gained the most of
his money by the exhibition of bears. But, howsoever
gained, he made a good use of it. His tomb is in the
centre of the college. Here may be seen one of the
best picture-galleries in England. One of the cherished
paintings in that collection is the famous portrait, by
Sir Joshua Reynolds, of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic
Muse — remarkable for its colour, and splendidly expos
itive of the boldness of feature, brilliancy of counte
nance, and stately grace of posture for which its original
was distinguished. Another represents two renowned
beauties of their day — the Linley sisters — who became
Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickel. You do not wonder,
as you look on those fair faces, sparkling with health,
arch with merriment, lambent with sensibility, and soft
with goodness and feeling, that Sheridan should have
fought duels for such a prize as the lady of his love ; or
that those fascinating creatures, favoured alike by the

96 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
Graces and the Muse, should in their gentle lives have
been, " like Juno's swans, coupled and inseparable."
Mary, Mrs. Tickel, died flrst; and Moore, in his Life of
Sheridan, has preserved a lament for her, written by
Eliza, Mrs. Sheridan, which — for deep, true sorrow
and melodious eloquence — is worthy to be named with
Thomas Tickel's monody on Addison or Cowper's
memorial lines on his mother's picture : —
" Shall all the wisdom of the world combined
Erase th)- image, Mary, from my mind,
Or bid me hope from others to receive
The fond affection thou alone couldst give?
Ah no, my best beloved, thou still shalt be
iVIy friend, my sister, all the world to me ! "
Precious also among the gems of the Dulwich gallery
are certain excellent specimens of the gentle, dreamy
style of Murillo. The pilgrim passes on, by a short
drive, to Sydenham, and dines at the Crystal Palace —
and still he flnds the faces of the past and the present
confronted, in a manner that is almost comic. Nothing
could be more aptly representative of the practical, osten
tatious phase of the spirit of to-day than is this enor
mous, opulent, and glittering " palace made of windows."
Yet I saw there the carriage in which Napoleon Buona
parte used to drive, at St. Helena — a vehicle as sombre
and ghastly as were the broken fortunes of its death-
stricken master ; and, sitting at a table close by, I saw
the son of Buonaparte's flery champion, William
Hazlitt. It was a gray and misty evening. The plains below
the palace terraces were veiled in shadow, through
which, here and there, twinkled the lights of some

LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS

97

peaceful villa. Far away the spires and domes of Lon
don, dimly seen, pierced the city's nightly pall of smoke.
It was a dream too sweet to last. It ended when all
the illuminations were burnt out ; when the myriads of
red and green and yellow stars had fallen ; and all the
silver fountains had ceased to play.

The Crown Inn, Dulwich.

CHAPTER X

RELICS OF LORD BYRON

HE Byron Memorial Loan Collection, that
was displayed at the Albert Memorial
Hall, for a short time in the summer of
1877, did not attract much attention: yet
it was a vastly impressive show of relics.
The catalogue names seventy-four objects, together with
thirty-nine designs for a monument to Byron. The
design that has been chosen presents a seated flgure, of
the young sailor-boy type. The right hand supports
the chin; the left, resting on the left knee, holds an
open book and a pencil. The dress consists of a loose
shirt, open at the throat and on the bosom, a flowing
neckcloth, and wide, marine trousers. Byron's dog.
Boatswain — commemorated in the well-known misan
thropic epitaph —
" To mark a friend's remains these stones arise,
I never knew but one, and here he lies " —
is shown, in effigy, at the poet's feet. The treatment
of the subject, in this model, certainly deserves to be

chap. X RELICS OF LORD BYRON 99
called free, but the general effect of the work is flnical.
The statue will probably be popular ; but it will give no
adequate idea of the man. Byron was both massive
and intense ; and this image is no more than the usual
hero of nautical romance. (It was dedicated in May,
1880, and it stands in Hamilton Gardens, near Hyde
Park Corner, London.)
It was the treasure of relics, however, and not the
statuary, that more attracted notice. The relics were
exhibited in three glass cases, exclusive of large portraits.
It is impossible to make the reader — supposing him to
revere this great poet's genius and to care for his mem
ory — feel the thrill of emotion that was aroused by
actual sight, and almost actual touch, of objects so inti
mately associated with the living Byron. Five pieces
of his hair were shown, one of which was cut off, after
his death, by Captain Trelawny — the remarkable gentle
man who says that he uncovered the legs of the corse,
in order to ascertain the nature and extent of their de
formity. All those locks of hair are faded and all pre
sent a mixture of gray and auburn. Byron's hair was
not, seemingly, of a fine texture, and it turned gray early
in life. Those tresses were lent to the exhibition by
Lady Dorchester, John Murray, H. M. Robinson, D.D.,
and E. J. Trelawny. A strangely interesting memorial
was a little locket of plain gold, shaped like a heart, that
Byron habitually wore. Near to this was the cruciflx
found in his bed at Missolonghi, after his death. It is
about ten inches long and is made of ebony. A small
bronze figure of Christ is displayed upon it, and at the
feet of the figure are cross-bones and a skull, of the
same metal. A glass beaker, that Byron gave to his

100 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
butler, in 1815, attracted attention by its portly size and,
to the profane fancy, hinted that his lordship had formed
a liberal estimate of that butler's powers of suction.
Four articles of head-gear occupied a prominent place
in one of the cabinets. Two are helmets that Byron
wore when he was in Greece, in 1824 — and very
queer must have been his appearance when he wore
them. One is light blue, the other dark green ; both
are faded ; both are fierce with brass ornaments and
barbaric with brass scales like those of a snake. A
comelier object is the poet's " boarding-cap " — a leather
slouch, turned up with green velvet and studded with
brass nails. Many small articles of Byron's property
were scattered through the cases. A corpulent little
silver watch, with Arabic numerals upon its face, and a
meerschaum pipe, not much coloured, were among
them. The cap that he sometimes wore, during the
last years of his life, — the one depicted in a well-known
sketch of him by Count D'Orsay, — was exhibited, and
so was D'Orsay's portrait. The cap is of green velvet,
not much tarnished, and is encircled by a gold band and
faced by an ugly visor. The face in the sketch is super
cilious and defiant. A better, and obviously truer
sketch is that made by Cattermole, which also was in
this exhibition. Strength in despair and a dauntless
spirit that shines through the ravages of irremediable
suffering are the qualities of this portrait ; and they
make it marvellously effective. Thorwaldsen's fine bust
of Byron, made for Hobhouse, and also the celebrated
Phillips portrait — that Scott said was the best likeness
of Byron ever painted — occupied places in this group.
The copy of the New Testament that Lady Byron gave

X RELICS OF LORD BYRON 101
to her husband, and that he, in turn, presented to Lady
Caroline Lamb, was there, and is a pocket volume,
bound in black leather, with the inscription, " From a
sincere and anxious friend," written in a stiff, formal
hand, across the fly-leaf. A gold ring that the poet
constantly wore, and the collar of his dog Boatswain — a
discoloured band of brass, with sharply jagged edges
— should also be named as among the most interesting
of the relics.
But the most remarkable objects of all were the
manuscripts. These comprise the original draft of the
third canto of " Childe Harold," written on odd bits of
paper, during Byron's journey from London to Venice,
in 1816; the flrst draft of the fourth canto, together
with a clean copy of it ; the notes to " Marino Faliero " ;
the concluding stage directions — much scrawled and
blotted — in " Heaven and Earth " ; a document con
cerning the poet's matrimonial trouble ; and about flf teen
of his letters. The passages seen are those beginning
" Since my young days of passion, joy, or pain " ; " To
bear unhurt what time cannot abate"; and in canto
fourth the stanzas 118 to 129 inclusive. The writing is
free and strong, and it still remains legible although the
paper is yellow with age. Altogether those relics were
touchingly signiflcant of the strange, dark, sad career of
a wonderful man. Yet, as already said, they attracted
but little notice. The memory of Byron seems darkened,
as with the taint of lunacy. "He did strange things,"
one Englishman said to me ; " and there was something
queer about him." The London house in which he was
born, in Holies Street, Cavendish Square, is marked
with a tablet, — according to a custom instituted by a

102 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
society of arts. (It was torn down in 1890 and its site is
now occupied by a shop, bearing the name of John Lewis
& Co.) Two houses in which he lived. No. 8 St. James
Street, near the old palace, and No. 139 Piccadilly,
are not marked. The house of his birth was occupied
in 1877 by a descendant of Elizabeth Fry, the philan
thropist. The custom of marking the houses associated with
great names is obviously a good one, and it ought to
be adopted in other countries. Two buildings, one in
Westminster and one in the grounds of the South Ken
sington Museum, bear the name of Franklin ; and I
also saw memorial tablets to Dryden and Burke in
Gerrard Street, to Dryden in Fetter Lane, to Mrs.
Siddons in Baker Street, to Sir Joshua Reynolds and
to Hogarth in Leicester Square, to Garrick in the Adel
phi Terrace, to Louis Napoleon, and to many other
renowned individuals. The room that Sir Joshua occu
pied as a studio is now an auction mart. The stone
stairs leading up to it are much worn, but they remain
as they were when, it may be imagined, Burke, Johnson,
Goldsmith, Langton, Beauclerk, and Boswell walked
there, on many a festive night in the old times.
It is a breezy, slate-coloured evening in July. I look
from the window of a London house that fronts a spa
cious park. Those great elms, which in their wealth
of foliage and irregular and pompous expanse of limb
are finer than all other trees of their class, fill the pros
pect, and nod and murmur in the wind. Through a
rift in their heavy-laden boughs is visible a long vista
of green field, in which many children are at play.
Their laughter and the rustle of leaves, with now and

RELICS OF LORD BYRON

103

then the click of a horse's hoofs upon the road near by,
make up the music of this hallowed hour. The sky is
a little overcast but not gloomy. As I muse upon this
delicious scene the darkness slowly gathers, the stars
come out, and presently the moon rises, and blanches
the meadow with silver light. Such has been the
English summer, with scarce a hint of either heat or
storm.

CHAPTER XI

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

1

^^V>

»,

l^>
T is strange that the life of the past, in
its unfamiliar remains and fading traces,
should so far surpass the life of the pres
ent, in impressive force and influence.
Human characteristics, although mani
fested under widely different conditions, were the same
in old times that they are now. It is not in them,
surely, that we are to seek for the mysterious charm
that hallows ancient objects and the historical antiquities
of the world. There is many a venerable, weather-
stained church in London, at sight of which your steps
falter and your thoughts take a wistful, melancholy
turn — though then you may not know either who built
it, or who has worshipped in it, or what dust of the
dead is mouldering in its vaults. The spirit which thus
instantly possesses and controls you is not one of asso
ciation, but is inherent in the place. Time's shadow
on the works of man, like moonlight on a landscape,
gives only graces to the view — tingeing them, the
while, with sombre sheen — and leaves all blemishes in
104
Westminster Abbey, from the Trifoy

106 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, xi
darkness. This may suggest the reason that relics of
bygone years so sadly please and strangely awe us, in
the passing moment ; or it may be that we involuntarily
contrast their apparent permanence with our own eva
nescent mortality, and so are dejected with a sentiment
of dazed helplessness and solemn grief. This sentiment
it is — allied to bereaved love and a natural wish for
remembrance after death — that has fllled Westminster
Abbey, and many another holy mausoleum, with sculp
tured memorials of the departed ; and this, perhaps, is
the subtle power that makes us linger beside them,
"with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls."
When the gentle angler Izaak Walton went into
Westminster Abbey to visit the grave of Casaubon, he
scratched his initials on the scholar's monument, where
the record, "I. W., 165S," may still be read by the
stroller in Poets' Corner. One might well wish to follow
that example, and even thus to associate his name with
the great cathedral. And not in pride but in humble
reverence ! Here if anywhere on earth self-assertion
is rebuked and human eminence set at nought. Among
all the impressions that crowd upon the mind in this
wonderful place that which oftenest recurs and longest
remains is the impression of man's individual insignifi
cance. This is salutary, but it is also dark. There
can be no enjoyment of the Abbey till, after much
communion with the spirit of the place, your soul is
soothed by its beauty rather than overwhelmed by its
majesty, and your mind ceases from the vain effort to
grasp and interpret its tremendous meaning. You can
not long endure, and you never can express, the sense
of grandeur that is inspired by Westminster Abbey;

^

108 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
but, when at length its shrines and tombs and statues
become familiar, when its chapels, aisles, arches, and
cloisters are grown companionable, and you can stroll
and dream undismayed " through rows of warriors and
through walks of kings," there is no limit to the pensive
memories they awaken and the poetic fancies they
prompt. In this church are buried, among generations
of their nobles and courtiers, fourteen monarchs of
England — beginning with the Saxon Sebert and end
ing with George the Second. Fourteen queens rest
here, and many children of the royal blood who never
came to the throne. Here, confronted in a haughty
rivalry of solemn pomp, rise the equal tombs of Eliza
beth Tudor and Mary Stuart. Queen Eleanor's dust
is here, and here, too, is the dust of the grim Queen
Mary. In one little chapel you may pace, with but
half a dozen steps, across the graves of Charles the
Second, William and Mary, and Queen Anne and her
consort Prince George. At the tomb of Henry the
Fifth you may see the helmet, shield, and saddle that
were worn by the valiant young king at Agincourt;
and close by — on the tomb of Margaret Woodeville,
daughter of Edward the Fourth — the sword and shield
that were borne, in royal state, before the great Edward
the Third, five hundred years ago. The princes who
are said to have been murdered in the Tower are com
memorated here by an altar, set up by Charles the
Second, whereon the inscription — blandly and almost
humorously oblivious of the incident of Cromwell —
states that it was erected in the thirtieth year of
Charles's reign. Richard the Second, deposed and
assassinated, is here entombed ; and within a few feet

XI WESTMINSTER ABBEY 109
of him are the relics of his uncle, the able and powerful
Duke of Gloster, treacherously ensnared and betrayed
to death. Here also, huge, rough, and gray, is the
stone sarcophagus of Edward the First, which, when
opened, in 1771, disclosed the skeleton of departed
majesty, still perfect, wearing robes of gold tissue and
crimson velvet, and having a crown on the head and a
sceptre in the hand. So sleep, in jewelled darkness
and gaudy decay, what once were monarchs ! And all
around are great lords, holy prelates, famous statesmen,
renowned soldiers, and illustrious poets. Burleigh, Pitt,
Fox, Burke, Canning, Newton, Barrow, Wilberforce —
names forever glorious ! — are here enshrined in the
grandest sepulchre on earth.
The interments that have been effected in and around
the Abbey since the remote age of Edward the Con
fessor must number thousands ; but only about six
hundred are named in the guide-books. In the south
transept, which is Poets' Corner, rest Chaucer, Spenser,
Drayton, Cowley, Dryden, Beaumont, Davenant, Prior,
Gay, Congreve, Rowe, Dr. Johnson, Campbell, Macau
lay, and Dickens. Memorials to many other poets and
writers have been ranged on the adjacent walls and
pillars ; but these are among the authors that were
actually buried in this place. Ben Jonson is not here,
but — in an upright posture, it is said — under the
north aisle of the Abbey ; Addison is in the chapel of
Henry the Seventh, at the foot of the monument of
Charles Montague, the great Earl of Halifax; and
Bulwer is in the chapel of St. Edmund. Garrick,
Sheridan, Henderson, Cumberland, Handel, Parr, Sir
Archibald Campbell, and the once so mighty Duke of

110

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

Argyle are almost side by side ; while in St. Edward's
chapel sleep Anne of Cleves, the divorced wife of
Henry the Eighth, and Anne Neville, queen of Rich-

•r^.;

Chapel of Edward the Confessor.
ard the Third. Betterton and Spranger Barry are in
the cloisters — where may be read, in four little words,
the most touching epitaph in the Abbey : "Jane Lister
— dear child." There are no monuments to either
Byron, Shelley, Swift, Pope, Bolingbroke, Keats, Cow-

XI WESTMINSTER ABBEY III
per, Moore, or Young ; but Mason and Shadwell are
commemorated ; and Barton Booth is splendidly in-
urned ; while hard by, in the cloisters, a place was
found for Mrs. Cibber, Tom Brown, Anne Bracegirdle,
Anne Oldfield, and Aphra Behn. The destinies have
not always been stringently fastidious as to the admis
sion of lodgers to this sacred ground. The pilgrim is
startled by some of the names that he finds in West
minster Abbey, and pained by reflection on the absence
of some that he will seek in vain. Yet he will not fail
to moralise, as he strolls in Poets' Corner, upon the
inexorable justice with which time repudiates fictitious
reputations and twines the laurel on only the worthiest
brows. In well-nigh five hundred years of English
literature there have lived only about a hundred and
ten poets whose names survive in any needed chronicle ;
and not all of those possess life outside of the library.
To muse over the literary memorials in the Abbey is
also to think upon the seeming caprice of chance with
which the graves of the British poets have been
scattered far and wide throughout the land. Gower,
Fletcher, and Massinger (to name but a few of them)
rest in Southwark ; Sydney and Donne in St. Paul's
cathedral; More (his head, that is, while his body
moulders in the Tower chapel) at Canterbury ; Drum
mond in Lasswade church ; Dorset at Withyham, in
Sussex ; Waller at Beaconsfield ; Wither, unmarked, in
the church of the Savoy ; Milton in the church of the
Cripplegate — where his relics, it is said, were despoiled ;
Swift at Dublin, in St. Patrick's cathedral; Young at
Welwyn ; Pope at Twickenham ; Thomson at Rich
mond ; Gray at Stoke-Pogis ; Watts in Bunhill-Fields ;

/••4i*^.:-^ \

n Po^{oncr "^liDirnep

rAi? Toets' Corner.

CHAP. XI WESTMINSTER ABBEY ll3
Collins in an obscure little church at Chichester —
though his name is commemorated by a tablet in Chi
chester cathedral ; Cowper in Dereham church ; Gold
smith in the garden of the Temple ; Savage at Bristol ;
Burns at Dumfries ; Rogers at Hornsey ; Crabbe at
Trowbridge ; Scott in Dryburgh abbey ; Coleridge at
Highgate ; Byron in Hucknall church, near Notting
ham ; Moore at Bromham ; Montgomery at Sheffield ;
Heber at Calcutta ; Southey in Crossthwaite church
yard, near Keswick; Wordsworth and Hartley Cole
ridge side by side in the churchyard of Grasmere ; and
Clough at Florence — -whose lovely words may here
speak for all of them —
" One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose held, where'er they fare :
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas,
At last, at last, unite them there ! "
But it is not alone in the great Abbey that the
rambler in London is impressed by poetic antiquity and
touching historic association — always presuming that
he has been a reader of English literature and that his
reading has sunk into his mind. Little things, equally
with great ones, commingled in a medley, luxuriant and
delicious, so people the memory of such a pilgrim that
all his walks will be haunted. The London of to-day,
to be sure (as may be seen in Macaulay's famous third
chapter, and in Scott's Fortunes of Nigel), is very little
like even the London of Charles the Second, when the
great fire had destroyed eighty-nine churches and thir
teen thousand houses, and when what is now Regent
Street was a rural solitude in which sportsmen some
times shot the woodcock. Yet, though much of the

The North Avibulatory, jpSfWl't?

CHAP. XI WESTMINSTER ABBEY 115
old capital has vanished and more of it has been
changed, many remnants of its historic past exist, and
many of its streets and houses are fraught with a
delightful, romantic interest. It is not forgotten that
sometimes the charm resides in the eyes that see, quite
as much as in the object that is seen. The storied
spots of London may not be appreciable by all who
look upon them every day. The cab-drivers in the
region of Kensington Palace Road may neither regard,
nor even notice, the house in which Thackeray lived
and died. The shop-keepers of old Bond Street may,
perhaps, neither care nor know that in this famous
avenue was enacted the woful death-scene of Laurence
Sterne. The Bow Street runners are quite unlikely to
think of Will's Coffee House, and Dryden, or Button's,
and Addison, as they pass the sites of those vanished
haunts of wit and revelry in the days of Queen Anne.
The fashionable lounger through Berkeley Square,
when perchance he pauses at the corner of Bruton
Street, will not discern Colley Cibber, in wig and
ruffies, standing at the parlour window and drumming
with his hands on the frame. The casual passenger,
halting at the Tavistock, will not remember that this
was once Macklin's Ordinary, and so conjure up the
iron visage and ferocious aspect of the first great
Shylock of the British stage, formally obsequious to
his guests, or striving to edify them, despite the ban
ter of the volatile Foote, with discourse upon " the
Causes of Duelling in Ireland." The Barbican does
not to every one summon the austere memory of Mil
ton ; nor Holborn raise the melancholy shade of Chat
terton ; nor Tower Hill arouse the gloomy ghost of

116

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

Otway ; nor Hampstead lure forth the sunny figure of
Steele and the passionate face of Keats ; .nor old Nor
thumberland Street suggest the burly presence of "rare
Ben Jonson" ; nor opulent Kensington revive the stately
head of Addison ; nor a certain window in Wellington

¦^-iK-I'"' '•'"'^'

Street reveal in fancy's
---^i^l/ picture the rugged lin-

!)\

eaments and splendid
eyes of Dickens. Yet
London never disappoints ; and for him who knows
and feels its history these associations, and hundreds
like to these, make it populous with noble or strange
or pathetic figures, and diversify the aspect of its vital
present with pictures of an equally vital past. Such a
wanderer discovers that in this vast capital there is
literally no end to the themes that are to stir his imagi-

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

117

nation, touch his heart, and broaden his mind. Soothed
already by the equable English climate and the lovely
English scenery, he is aware now of an influence in
the solid English city that turns his intellectual life to
perfect tranquillity. He stands amid achievements that
are flnished, careers that are consummated, great deeds
that are done, great memories that are immortal ; he
views and comprehends the sum of all that is possible
to human thought, passion, and labour ; and then, —
high over mighty London, above the dome of St. Paul's
cathedral, piercing the clouds, greeting the sun, drawing
into itself all the tremendous life of the great city and
all the meaning of its past and present, — the golden
cross of Christ !

CHAPTER XII

SHAKESPEARE'S HOME

T is the everlasting glory of Stratford-
upon-Avon that it was the birthplace of
Shakespeare. Situated in the heart of
Warwickshire, which has been called " the
garden of England," it nestles cosily in an
atmosphere of tranquil loveliness and is surrounded
with everything that soft and gentle rural scenery can
provide to soothe the mind and to nurture contentment.
It stands upon a plain, almost in the centre of the
island, through which, between the low green hills that
roll away on either side, the Avon flows downward to
the Severn. The country in its neighbourhood is under
perfect cultivation, and for many miles around presents
the appearance of a superbly appointed park. Portions
of the land are devoted to crops and pasture; other
portions are thickly wooded with oak, elm, willow, and
chestnut ; the meadows are intersected by hedges of
fragrant hawthorn, and the region smiles with flowers.
Old manor-houses, half-hidden among the trees, and
thatched cottages embowered with roses are sprinkled
ii8

SHAKESPEARE'S HOME

119

through the surrounding landscape ; and all the roads
that converge upon this point — from Birmingham,
Warwick, Shipton, Bidford, Alcester, Evesham, Worces

ter, and other contiguous towns — wind, in sun and
shadow, through a sod of green velvet, swept by the
cool, sweet winds of the English summer. Such felici
ties of situation and such accessories of beauty, how-

120 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
ever, are not unusual in England; and Stratford, were
it not hallowed by association, though it would always
hold a place among the pleasant memories of the
traveller, would not have become a shrine for the
homage of the world. To Shakespeare it owes its
renown ; from Shakespeare it derives the bulk of its
prosperity. To visit Stratford is to tread with affec
tionate veneration in the footsteps of the poet. To
write about Stratford is to write about Shakespeare.
More than three hundred years have passed since
the birth of that colossal genius and many changes
have occurred in his native town within that period.
The Stratford of Shakespeare's time was built prin
cipally of timber, and it contained about fourteen hun
dred inhabitants. To-day its population numbers more
than eight thousand. New dwellings have arisen where
once were flelds of wheat, glorious with the shimmer
ing lustre of the scarlet poppy. Many of the older
buildings have been altered. Manufacture has been
stimulated into prosperous activity. The Avon has
been spanned by a new bridge, of iron — a path for
pedestrians, adjacent to Clopton's bridge of stone.
(The iron bridge was opened November 23, 1827. The
Clopton Bridge was 376 yards long and about 16 yards
wide. Alterations of the west end of it were made in
1 8 14.) The streets have been levelled, swept, rolled
and garnished till they look like a Flemish drawing, of
the Middle Ages. Even the Shakespeare cottage, the
old Harvard house in High Street, and the two old
churches — authentic and splendid memorials of a dis
tant and storied past — have been "restored." If the
poet could walk again through his accustomed haunts.

xn SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 121
though he would see the same smiling country round
about, and hear, as of old, the ripple of the Avon
murmuring in its summer sleep, his eyes would rest on
but few objects that once he knew. Yet, there are the
paths that Shakespeare often trod ; there stands the
house in which he was born ; there is the school in
which he was taught ; there is the cottage in which he
wooed his sweetheart ; there are the traces and relics of
the mansion in which he died ; and there is the church
that keeps his dust, so consecrated by the reverence of
mankind '• That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.''
In shape the town of Stratford somewhat resembles
a large cross, which is formed by High Street, running
nearly north and south, and Bridge Street and Wood
Street, running nearly east and west. From these,
which are main avenues, radiate many and devious
branches. A few of the streets are broad and straight
but many of them are narrow and crooked. High and
Bridge streets intersect each other at the centre of the
town, and there stands the market house, an ugly
building, of the period of George the Fourth, with
belfry and illuminated clock, facing eastward toward
the old stone bridge, with fourteen arches, — the bridge
that Sir Hugh Clopton built across the Avon, in the
reign of Henry the Seventh. A cross once stood at
the corner of High Street and Wood Street, and near
the cross was a pump and a well. From that central
point a few steps will bring the traveller to the birth
place of Shakespeare. It is a little, two-story cottage,
of timber and plaster, on the north side of Henley

to ^

CHAP, xii SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 123
Street, in the western part of the town. It must have
been, in its pristine days, flner than most of the
dwellings in its neighbourhood. The one-story house,
with attic windows, was the almost invariable fashion
of building, in English country towns, till the seven
teenth century. This cottage, besides its two stories,
had dormer-windows, a pent-house over its door, and
altogether was built and appointed in a manner both
luxurious and substantial. Its age is unknown ; but
the history of Stratford reaches back to a period three
hundred years antecedent to William the Conqueror,
and fancy, therefore, is allowed ample room to magnify
its antiquity. It was bought, or occupied, by Shake
speare's father in 1555, and in it he resided till his
death, in 1601, when it descended by inheritance to the
poet. Such is the substance of the complex documen
tary evidence and of the emphatic tradition that conse
crate this cottage as the house in which Shakespeare
was born. The point has never been absolutely settled.
John Shakespeare, the father, was the owner in 1564
not only of the house in Henley Street but of another
in Greenhill Street. William Shakespeare might have
been born at either of those dwellings. Tradition, how
ever, has sanctified the Henley Street cottage ; and this,
accordingly, as Shakespeare's cradle, will be piously
guarded to a late posterity.
It has already survived serious perils and vicissitudes.
By Shakespeare's will it was bequeathed to his sister
Joan — Mrs. William Hart — to be held by her, under
the yearly rent of twelvepence, during her life, and at
her death to revert to his daughter Susanna and her
descendants. His sister Joan appears to have been

124 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
living there at the time of his decease, in 1616. She is
known to have been living there in 1639 — twenty-three
years later, — and doubtless she resided there till her
death, in 1646. The estate then passed to Susanna —
Mrs. John Hall, — from whom in 1649 it descended to
her grandchild. Lady Barnard, who left it to her kins
men, Thomas and George Hart, grandsons of Joan. In
this line of descent it continued — subject to many of
those infringements which are incidental to poverty —
till 1806, when William Shakespeare Hart, the seventh
in collateral kinship from the poet, sold it to Thomas
Court, from whose family it was at last purchased for
the British nation. Meantime the property, which
originally consisted of two tenements and a consider
able tract of adjacent land, had, little by little, been
curtailed of its fair proportions by the sale of its gardens
and orchards. The two tenements — two in one, that
is — had been subdivided. A part of the building
became an inn — at first called "The Maidenhead,"
afterward " The Swan," and finally " The Swan and
Maidenhead." Another part became a butcher's shop.
The old dormer-windows and the pent-house disap
peared. A new brick casing was foisted upon the
tavern end of the structure. In front of the butcher's
shop appeared a sign announcing " William Shakespeare
was born in this house: N.B. — A Horse and Taxed
Cart to Let." Still later appeared another legend,
vouching that " the immortal Shakespeare was born in
this house." From 1793 till 1820 Thomas and Mary
Hornby, connections by marriage with the Harts, lived
in the Shakespeare cottage — now at length become
the resort of literary pilgrims, — and Mary Hornby,

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 125
who set up to be a poet and wrote tragedy, comedy,
and philosophy, took delight in exhibiting its rooms to
visitors. During the reign of that eccentric custodian
the low ceilings and whitewashed walls of its several
chambers became covered with autographs, scrawled
thereon by many enthusiasts, including some of the
most famous persons in Europe. In 1820 Mary Hornby
was requested to leave the premises. She did not wish
tft go. She could not endure the thought of a successor.
" After me, the deluge ! " She was obliged to abdicate ;
but she conveyed away all the furniture and relics al
leged to be connected with Shakespeare's family, and
she hastily whitewashed the cottage walls. Only a
small part of the wall of the upper room, the chamber
in which " nature's darling " first saw the light, escaped
that act of spiteful sacrilege. On the space behind its
door may still be read many names, with dates affixed,
ranging back from 1820 to 1729. Among them is that
of Dora Jordan, the beautiful and fascinating actress,
who wrote it there June 2, 1809. Much of Mary
Hornby's whitewash, which chanced to be unsized, was
afterward removed, so that her work of obliteration
proved only in part successful. Other names have
been added to this singular, chaotic scroll of worship.
Byron, Scott, ^ Rogers, Thackeray, Kean, Tennyson,
and Dickens are among the votaries there and thus
recorded. The successors of Mary Hornby guarded
^Sir Walter Scott visited Shakespeare's birthplace in August, 1821, and
at that time scratched his name on the window-pane. He had previously,
in 1815, visited Kenilworth. He was in Stratford again in 1828, and on
April 8 he went to .Shakespeare's grave, and subsequently drove to Charle
cote. The visit of Lord Byron has been incorrectly assigned to the year
1816. It occurred qn August 28, possibly in 1812.

126 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
their charge with pious care. The precious value of
the old Shakespeare cottage grew more and more
evident to the English people. Washington Irving
made his pilgrimage to Stratford and recounted it in his
beautiful Sketch-Book. Yet it was not till P. T. Barnum,
from the United States, arrived with a proposition to
buy the Shakespeare house and convey it to America
that the literary enthusiasm of Great Britain was made
to take a practical shape, and this venerated and in
estimable relic became, in 1847, a national possession.
In 1856 John Shakespeare, of Worthington Field, near
Ashby-de-la-Zouche, gave a large sum of money to
restore it ; and within the next two years, under the
superintendence of Edward Gibbs and William Holtom
of Stratford, it was isolated by the demolition of the
cottages at its sides and in the rear, repaired wherever
decay was visible, and set in perfect order.
The builders of this house must have done their work
thoroughly well, for even after all these years of rough
usage and of slow but incessant decline the great tim
bers remain solid, the plastered walls are firm, the huge
chimney-stack is as permanent as a rock, and the ancient
flooring only betrays by the channelled aspect of its
boards, and the high polish on the heads of the nails
which fasten them down, that it belongs to a period of
remote antiquity. The cottage stands close upon the mar
gin of the street, according to ancient custom of build
ing throughout Stratford; and, entering through a little
porch, the pilgrim stands at once in that low-ceiled, flag-
stoned room, with its wide fire-place, so familiar in prints
of the chimney-corner of Shakespeare's youthful days.
Within the fire-place, on either side, is a seat fashioned

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 127
in the brick-work ; and here, as it is pleasant to imagine,
the boy-poet often sat, on winter nights, gazing dreamily
into the flames, and building castles in that fairyland of
fancy which was his celestial inheritance. You pres
ently pass from this room by a narrow, well-worn stair
case to the chamber above, which is shown as the place
of the poet's birth. An antiquated chair, of the sixteenth
century, stands in the right-hand corner. At the left is
a small flre-place. Around the walls are visible the
great beams which are the framework of the build
ing — beams of seasoned oak that will last forever.
Opposite to the door of entrance is a threefold case
ment (the original window) full of narrow panes of
glass scrawled all over with names that their worship
ful owners have written with diamonds. The ceiling is
so low that you can easily touch it with uplifted hand.
A portion of it is held in place by a network of little
iron laths. This room, and indeed the whole structure,
is as polished and orderly as any waxen, royal hall in
the Louvre, and it impresses observation much like old
lace that has been treasured up, in lavender or jasmine.
These walls, which no one is now permitted to mar,
were naturally the favourite scroll of the Shakespeare
votaries of long ago. Every inch of the plaster bears
marks of the pencil of reverence. Hundreds of names
are written there — some of them famous but most of
them obscure, and all destined to perish where they
stand. On the chimney-piece at the right of the flre
place, which is named The Actor's Pillar, many actors
have inscribed their signatures. Edmund Kean wrote
his name there — with what soulful veneration and
spiritual sympathy it is awful even to try to imagine.

128 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
Sir Walter Scott's name is scratched with a diamond on
the window — " W. Scott" That of Thackeray appears
on the ceiling, and upon the beam across the centre is
that of Helen Faucit. The name of Eliza Vestris is
written near the flreplace. Mark Lemon and Charles
Dickens are together on the opposite wall. Byron
wrote his name there, but it has disappeared. The list
would include, among others, EUiston, Buckstone, G. V.
Brooke, Charles Kean, Charles Mathews, and Fanny Fitz-
william. But it is not of these offerings of fealty that
you think when you sit and muse alone in that myste
rious chamber. As once again I conjure up that strange
and solemn scene, the sunshine rests in checkered
squares upon the ancient floor, the motes swim in the
sunbeams, the air is very cold, the place is hushed as
death, and over it all there broods an atmosphere of
grave suspense and mystical desolation — a sense of
some tremendous energy stricken dumb and frozen into
silence and past and gone forever.
Opposite to the birthchamber, at the rear, there is a
small apartment, in which is displayed " the Stratford
Port-rait " of the poet. This painting is said to have
been owned by the Clopton family, and to have fallen
into the hands of William Hunt, town clerk of Strat
ford, who bought the mansion of the Cloptons in 1758.
The adventures through which it passed can only be
conjectured. It does not appear to have been valued,
and although it remained in the house it was cast away
among lumber and rubbish. In process of time it was
painted over and changed into a different subject. Then
it fell a prey to dirt and damp. There is a story that
the little boys of the tribe of Hunt were accustomed to

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 129
use it as a target for their arrows. At last, after the
lapse of a century, the grandson of William Hunt
showed it by chance to Simon Collins, an artist, who
surmised that a valuable portrait might perhaps exist
beneath its muddy surface. It was carefully cleaned.
A thick beard was removed, and the face of Shakespeare
emerged upon the canvas. It is not pretended that this
portrait was painted in Shakespeare's time. The close
resemblance that it bears, — in attitude, dress, colours,
and other peculiarities, — to the painted bust of the
poet in Stratford church seems to indicate that it is a
modern copy of that work. Upon a brass plate affixed
to it is the following inscription : " This portrait of
Shakespeare, after being in the possession of Mr. William
Oakes Hunt, town-clerk of Stratford, and his family, for
upwards of a century, was restored to its original condi
tion by Mr. Simon Collins of London, and, being con
sidered a portrait of much interest and value, was given
by Mr. Hunt to the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, to be
preserved in Shakespeare's house, 23d April, 1862."
There, accordingly, it remains, and, in association with
several other dubious presentments of the poet, cheer
fully adds to the mental confusion of the pilgrim who
would form an accurate image of Shakespeare's appear
ance. Standing in its presence it was worth while to
reflect that there are only two authentic representations
of Shakespeare in existence — the Droeshout portrait
and the Gerard Jonson bust. They may not be perfect
works of art; they may not do justice to the original;
but they were seen and accepted by persons to whom
Shakespeare had been a living companion. The bust
was sanctioned by his children ; the portrait was sane-

130 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
tioned by his friend Ben Jonson, and by his brother
actors Heminge and Condell, who preflxed it, in 1623, to
the flrst folio of his works. Standing among the relics
that have been gathered into a museum in an apartment
on the ground-floor of the cottage it was essential also
to remember how often " the wish is father to the
thought " that sanctifles the uncertain memorials of the
distant past. Several of the most suggestive documents,
though, which bear upon the sparse and shadowy record
of Shakespeare's life are preserved in this place. Here
is a deed, made in 1596, which proves that this house
was his father's residence. Here is the only letter
addressed to him that is known to exist — the letter of
Richard Quiney (1598) asking for the loan of thirty
pounds. Here is a declaration in a suit, in 1604, to re
cover the price of some malt that he had sold to Philip
Rogers. Here is a deed, dated 1609, on which is the
autograph of his brother Gilbert, who represented him,
at Stratford, in his business affairs, while he was absent
in London, and who, surviving, it is dubiously said, al
most till the period of the Restoration, talked, as a very
old man, of the poet's impersonation of Adam in As
You Like It. (Possibly the reference of that legend is
not to Gilbert but to a son of his. Gilbert would have
been nearly a century old when Charles the Second
came to the throne.) Here likewise is shown a gold
seal ring, found many years ago in a field near Stratford
church, on which, delicately engraved, appear the letters
W. S., entwined with a true lovers' knot. It may have
belonged to Shakespeare. The conjecture is that it did,
and that, — since on the last of the three sheets which
contain his will the word " seal " is stricken out and the

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 131
word "hand" substituted, — he did not seal that docu
ment because he had only just then lost this ring. The
supposition is, at least, ingenious. It will not harm the
visitor to accept it. Nor, as he stands poring over the
ancient, decrepit school-desk which has been lodged in
this museum, from the grammar-school, will it greatly
tax his credulity to believe that the " shining morning
face " of the boy Shakespeare once looked down upon
it, in the irksome quest of his "small Latin and less
Greek." They call it Shakespeare's desk. It is old,
and it is known to have been in the school of the guild
three hundred years ago. There are other relics, more
or less indirectly connected with the great name that is
here commemorated. The inspection of them all would
consume many days ; the description of them would
occupy many pages. You write your name in the visi
tors' book at parting, and perhaps stroll forth into the
garden of the cottage, which encloses it at the sides and
in the rear, and there, beneath the leafy boughs of the
English lime, while your footsteps press "the grassy
carpet of this plain," behold growing all around you
the rosemary, pansies, fennel, columbines, rue, daisies,
and violets, which make the imperishable garland on
Ophelia's grave, and which are the fragrance of her
solemn and lovely memory.
Thousands of times the wonder must have been ex
pressed that while the world knows so much about
Shakespeare's mind it should know so little about his
life. The date of his birth, even, is established by an
inference. The register of Stratford church shows that
he was baptised there in 1564, on April 26. It was
customary to baptise infants on the third day after their

132 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
birth. It is presumed that the custom was followed in
this instance, and hence it is deduced that Shakespeare
was born on April 23 — a date which, making allow
ance for the difference between the old and new styles
of reckoning time, corresponds to our third of May.
Equally by an inference it is established that the boy
was educated in the free grammar-school. The school
was there ; and any boy of the town, who was seven
years old and able to read, could get admission to it
Shakespeare's father, an alderman of Stratford (elected
chief alderman, October 10, 1571), and then a man of
worldly substance, though afterward he became poor,
would surely have wished that his children should grow
up in knowledge. To the ancient school-house, accord
ingly, and the adjacent chapel of the guild — which are
still extant, at the south-east corner of Chapel Lane
and Church Street — the pilgrim confldently traces the
footsteps of the poet. Those buildings are of singular,
picturesque quaintness. The chapel dates back to
about the middle of the thirteenth century. It was a
Roman Catholic institution, founded in 1296, under the
patronage of the Bishop of Worcester, and committed
to the pious custody of the guild of Stratford. A hos
pital was connected with it in those days, and Robert
de Stratford was its flrst master. New privileges and
confirmation were granted to the guild by Henry the
Sixth, in 1403 and 1429. The grammar-school, estab
lished on an endowment of lands and tenements by
Thomas Jolyffe, was set up in association with it in
1482. Toward the end of the reign of Henry the
Seventh the whole of the chapel, excepting the chancel,
was torn down and rebuilt under the muniflcent direc-

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 133
tion of Sir Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor of London and
Stratford's chief citizen and benefactor. Under Henry
the Eighth, when came the stormy times of the Refor
mation, the priests were driven out, the guild was dis
solved, and the chapel was despoiled. Edward the
Sixth, however, granted a new charter to this ancient
institution, and with especial precautions reinstated the
school. The chapel itself was occasionally used as a
schoolroom when Shakespeare was a boy, and until as
late as the year 1595 ; and in case the lad did go thither
(in 1 571) as a pupil, he must have been from childhood
familiar with the series of grotesque paintings upon its
walls, presenting, in a pictorial panorama, the history
of the Holy Cross, from its origin as a tree at the be
ginning of the world to its exaltation at Jerusalem.
Those paintings were brought to light in 1804 in the
course of a renovation of the chapel which then occurred,
when the walls were relieved of thick coatings of white
wash, laid on them long before, in Puritan times, either
to spoil or to hide from the spoiler. They are not visi
ble now, but they were copied and have been engraved.
The drawings of them, by Fisher, are in the collection
of Shakespearean Rarities made by J. O. Halliwell-
Phillipps. This chapel and its contents constitute one
of the few remaining spectacles at Stratford that bring
us face to face with Shakespeare. During the last
seven years of his life he dwelt almost continually in
his house of New Place, on the corner immediately
opposite to this church. The configuration of the
excavated foundations of that house indicates what
would now be called a deep bay-window in its southern
front. There, probably, was Shakespeare's study ; and

134 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
through that casement, many and many a time, in
storm and in sunshine, by night and by day, he must
have looked out upon the grim, square tower, the
embattled stone wall, and the four tall Gothic windows
of that mysterious temple. The moment your gaze
falls upon it, the low-breathed, horror-stricken words
of Lady Macbeth murmur in your memory : —
" The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements."
New Place, Shakespeare's home at the time of his
death and the house in which he died, stood on the
north-east corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane.
Nothing now remains of it but a portion of its foun
dations — long buried in the earth, but found and
exhumed in comparatively recent days. Its gardens
have been redeemed, through the zealous and devoted
exertions of J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps and have been
restored to what is thought to have been almost their
condition when Shakespeare owned them. The crum
bling fragments of the foundation are covered with
screens of wood and wire. A mulberry-tree, a scion of
the famous mulberry that Shakespeare is known to
have planted, is growing on the lawn. There is no
authentic picture in existence that shows New Place as
it was when Shakespeare left it, but there is a sketch
of it as it appeared in 1740. The house was made of
brick and timber, and was built by Sir Hugh Clopton
nearly a century before it became by purchase the
property of the poet. Shakespeare bought it in 1597,
and in it he passed, intermittently, a considerable part

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 135
of the last nineteen years of his life. It had borne the
name of New Place before it came into his possession.
The Clopton family parted with it in 1563, and it was
subsequently owned by families of Bott and Underbill.
At Shakespeare's death it was inherited by his eldest
daughter, Susanna, wife of Dr. John Hall. In 1643,
Mrs. Hall, then seven years a widow, being still its
owner and occupant, Henrietta Maria, queen to Charles
the First, who had come to Stratford with a part of the
royal army, resided for three days at New Place, which,
therefore, must even then have been the most consider
able private residence in the town. (The queen arrived
at Stratford on July 11 and on July 13 she went to
Kineton.) Mrs. Hall, dying in 1649, aged sixty-six,
left it to her only child, Elizabeth, then Mrs. Thomas
Nashe, who afterward became Lady Barnard, wife to
Sir John Barnard, of Abingdon, and in whom the direct
line of Shakespeare ended. After her death the estate
was purchased by Sir Edward Walker, in 1675, who
ultimately left it to his daughter's husband. Sir John
Clopton (1638-1719), and so it once more passed into
the hands of the family of its founder. A second Sir
Hugh Clopton (1671-1751) owned it at the middle of
the eighteenth century, and under his direction it was
repaired, decorated, and furnished with a new front.
That proved the beginning of the end of this old
structure, as a relic of Shakespeare ; for this owner,
dying in 1751, bequeathed it to his son-in-law, Henry
Talbot, who in 1753 sold it to the most universally
execrated iconoclast of modern times, the Rev. Francis
Gastrell, vicar of Frodsham, in Cheshire, by whom it
was destroyed. Mr. Gastrell was a man of fortune,

136 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
and he certainly was one of insensibility. He knew
little of Shakespeare ; but he knew that the frequent
incursion, into his garden, of strangers who came to sit
beneath " Shakespeare's mulberry " was a troublesome
annoyance. He struck, therefore, at the root of the
vexation and cut down the tree. That was in 1756.
The wood was purchased by Thomas Sharp, a watch
maker of Stratford, who subsequently made the solemn
declaration that he carried it to his home and converted
it into toys and kindred memorial relics. The villagers
of Stratford, meantime, incensed at the barbarity of Mr.
Gastrell, took their revenge by breaking his windows.
In this and in other ways the clergyman was probably
made to realise his local unpopularity. It had been his
custom to reside during a part of each year in Lichfield,
leaving some of his servants in charge of New Place.
The overseers of Stratford, having lawful authority to
levy a tax, for the maintenance of the poor, on every
house in the town valued at more than forty shillings a
year, did not neglect to make a vigorous use of their
privilege in the case of Mr. Gastrell. The result of
their exactions in the sacred cause of charity was
significant In 1759 Mr. Gastrell declared that the
house should never be taxed again, pulled down the
building, sold the materials of which it had been
composed, and left Stratford forever. He repaired to
Lichfield and there died. In the house adjacent to the
site of what was once Shakespeare's home has been
established a museum of Shakespearean relics. Among
them is a stone mullion, found on the site, which may
have belonged to a window of the original mansion.
This estate, bought from different owners and restored

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 137
to its Shakespearean condition, became on April 17,
1876, the property of the corporation of Stratford.
The tract of land is not large. The visitor may traverse
the whole of it in a few minutes, although if he obey
his inclination he will linger there for hours. The
enclosure is an irregular rectangle, about two hundred
feet long. The lawn is perfect. The mulberry is
extant and tenacious, and wears its honours in con
tented vigour. Other trees give grateful shade to the
grounds, and the voluptuous red roses, growing all
around in rich profusion, load the air with fragrance.
Eastward, at a little distance, flows the Avon. Not far
away rises the graceful spire of the Holy Trinity. A
few rooks, hovering in the air and wisely bent on some
facetious mischief, send down through the silver haze
of the summer morning their sagacious yet melancholy
caw. The windows of the gray chapel across the street
twinkle, and keep their solemn secret. On this spot
was first waved the mystic wand of Prospero. Here
Ariel sang of dead men's bones turned into pearl and
coral in the deep caverns of the sea. Here arose into
everlasting life Hermione, " as tender as infancy and
grace." Here were created Miranda and Perdita, twins
of heaven's own radiant goodness, —
" Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of iVIarch with beauty ; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath."
To endeavour to touch upon the larger and more
august aspect of Shakespeare's life — when, as his
wonderful sonnets betray, his great heart had felt the

138 SHAKESPEARE-S ENGLAND chap, xh
devastating blast of cruel passions and the deepest
knowledge of the good and evil of the universe had
been borne in upon his soul — would be impious pre
sumption. Happily to the stroller in Stratford every
association connected with him is gentle and tender.
His image, as it rises there, is of smiling boyhood or
sedate and benignant maturity; always either joyous or
serene, never passionate, or turbulent, or dark. The
pilgrim thinks of him as a happy child at his father's
fireside ; as a wondering school-boy in the quiet, vener
able close of the old guild chapel, where still the only
sound that breaks the silence is the chirp of birds or
the creaking of the church vane ; as a handsome, daunt
less youth, sporting by his beloved river or roaming
through field and forest many miles around ; as the
bold, adventurous spirit, bent on frolic and mischief,
and not averse to danger, leading, perhaps, the wild
lads of his village in their poaching depredations on
the chace of Charlecote ; as the lover, strolling through
the green lanes of Shottery, hand in hand with the
darling of his first love, while round them the honey
suckle breathed out its fragrant heart upon the winds
of night, and overhead the moonlight, streaming
through rifts of elm and poplar, fell on their pathway
in showers of shimmering silver; and, last of all, as the
illustrious poet, rooted and secure in his massive and
shining fame, loved by many, and venerated and
mourned by all, borne slowly through Stratford church
yard, while the golden bells were tolled in sorrow and
the mourning lime-trees dropped their blossoms on his
bier, to the place of his eternal rest. Through all the
scenes incidental to this experience the worshipper of

140 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
Shakespeare's genius may follow him every step of the
way. The old foot-path across the flelds to Shottery
remains accessible. Wild-flowers are blooming along
its margin. The gardens and meadows through which
it winds are sprinkled with the gorgeous scarlet of the
poppy. The hamlet of Shottery is less than a mile
from Stratford, stepping toward the sunset ; and there,
nestled beneath the elms, and almost embowered in
vines and roses, stands the cottage in which Anne
Hathaway was wooed and won. This is even more
antiquated in appearance than the birthplace of Shake
speare, and more obviously a relic of the distant past.
It is built of wood and plaster, ribbed with massive
timbers, and covered with a thatch roof. It fronts
southward, presenting its eastern end to the road.
Under its eaves, peeping through embrasures cut in
the thatch, are four tiny casements, round which the
ivy twines and the roses wave softly in the wind of
June. The western end of the structure is higher than
the eastern, and the old building, originally divided into
two tenements, is now divided into three. In front of
it is a straggling garden. There is a comfortable air of
wildness, yet not of neglect, in its appointments and
surroundings. The place is still the abode of labour
and lowliness. Entering its parlour you see a stone
floor, a wide fireplace, a broad, hospitable hearth, with
cosy chimney-corners, and near this an old wooden
settle, much decayed but still serviceable, on which
Shakespeare may often have sat, with Anne at his side.
The plastered walls of this room here and there reveal
portions of an oak wainscot. The ceiling is low. This
evidently was the farm-house pf a substantial yeoman,

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 141
in the days of Henry the Eighth. The Hathaways had
lived in Shottery for forty years prior to Shakespeare's
marriage. The poet, then undistinguished, had just
turned eighteen, while his bride was nearly twenty-six,
and it has been foolishly said that she acted ill in wed
ding her boy-lover. They were married in November,
1582, and their first child, Susanna, came in the follow
ing May. Anne Hathaway must have been a wonder
fully fascinating woman, or Shakespeare would not so
have loved her ; and she must have loved him dearly —
as what woman, indeed, could help it.? — or she would
not thus have yielded to his passion. There is direct
testimony to the beauty of his person ; and in the light
afforded by his writings it requires no extraordinary
penetration to conjecture that his brilliant mind, spark
ling humour, tender fancy, and impetuous spirit must
have made him, in his youth, a paragon of enchanters.
It is not known where they lived during the first years
after their marriage. Perhaps in this cottage at Shot
tery. Perhaps with Hamnet and Judith Sadler, for
whom their twins, born in 1585, were named Hamnet
and Judith. Her father's house assuredly would have
been chosen for Anne's refuge, when presently (in 1585
-86), Shakespeare was obliged to leave his wife and
children, and go away to London to seek his fortune.
He did not buy New Place till 1597, but it is known
that in the meantime he came to his native town once
every year. It was in Stratford that his son Hamnet
died, in 1596. Anne and her children probably had
never left the town. They show a bedstead and other
bits of furniture, together with certain homespun sheets
of everlasting linen, that are kept as heirlooms in the

142 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, xh
garret of the Shottery cottage. Here is the room that
may often have welcomed the poet when he came home
from his labours in the great city. It is a homely and
humble place, but the sight of it makes the heart thrill
with a strange and incommunicable awe. You cannot
wish to speak when you are standing there. You are
scarcely conscious of the low rustling of the leaves out
side, the far-off sleepy murmur of the brook, or the
faint fragrance of woodbine and maiden's-blush that is
wafted in at the open casement and that swathes in
nature's incense a memory sweeter than itself.
Associations may be established by fable as well as
by fact. There is but little reason to believe the legen
dary tale, first recorded by Rowe, that Shakespeare,
having robbed the deer-park of Sir Thomas Lucy of
Charlecote (there was not a park at Charlecote then,
but there was one at Fullbrooke), was so severely
persecuted by that magistrate that he was compelled to
quit Stratford and shelter himself in London. Yet the
story has twisted itself into all the lives of Shakespeare,
and whether received or rejected has clung to the house
of Charlecote. That noble mansion — a genuine speci
men, despite a few modern alterations, of the architec
ture of Queen Elizabeth's time — is found on the west
bank of the Avon, about three miles north-east from
Stratford. It is a long, rambling, three-storied palace
— as finely quaint as old St. James's in London, and
not altogether unlike that edifice, in general character
— with octagon turrets, gables, balustrades, Tudor case
ments, and great stacks of chimneys, so closed in by
elms of giant growth that you can scarce distinguish it,
through the foliage, till you are close upon it. It was

(/ C(i'tI^(C > Jr.^ll'' ,
"1 &"'"«''»>.•''"

¦6

Charlecote.

144 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
erected in 1558 by Thomas Lucy, who in 1578 was
Sheriff of Warwickshire, who was elected to the Parlia
ments of 1 571 and 1584, and who was knighted by
Queen Elizabeth in 1565. The porch to this building
was designed by John of Padua. There is a silly ballad
in existence, idly attributed to Shakespeare, which, it is
said, was found affixed to Lucy's gate, and gave him
great offence. He must have been more than com
monly sensitive to low abuse if he could have been
annoyed by such a manifestly scurrilous ebullition of
the blackguard and the blockhead, — supposing, indeed,
that he ever saw it. The ballad, proffered as the work
of Shakespeare, is a forgery. There is but one existing
reason to think that the poet ever cherished a grudge
against the Lucy family, and that is the coarse allusion
to the "luces" which is found in the Merry Wives of
Windsor. There was apparently, a second Sir Thomas
Lucy, later than the Sheriff, who was more of the
Puritanic breed, while Shakespeare evidently was a
Cavalier. It is possible that in a youthful frolic the
poet may have poached on Sheriff Lucy's preserves.
Even so, the affair was trivial. It is possible, too, that
in after years he may have had reason to dislike the
ultra-Puritanical neighbour. Some memory of the tra
dition will, of course, haunt the traveller's thoughts as
he strolls by Hatton Rock and through the villages of
Hampton and Charlecote. But this discordant recollec
tion is soon smoothed away by the peaceful loveliness
of the ramble — past aged hawthorns that Shakespeare
himself may have seen, and under the boughs of
beeches, hmes, and drooping willows, where every foot
step falls on wild-flowers, or on a cool green turf that is

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 145
softer than Indian silk and as firm and elastic as the
sand of the sea-beaten shore. Thought of Sir Thomas
Lucy will not be otherwise than kind, either, when the
stranger in Charlecote church reads the epitaph with
which the old knight commemorated his wife : " All
the time of her Lyfe a true and faithfull servant of her
good God ; never detected of any crime or vice ; in
religion most sound; in love to her husband most
faithfull and true. In friendship most constant. To
what in trust was committed to her most secret ; in
wisdom excelling; in governing her House and bringing
up of Youth in the feare of God that did converse with
her most rare and singular; a great maintainer of hos
pitality ; greatly esteemed of her betters ; misliked of
none unless the envious. When all is spoken that can
be said, a Woman so furnished and garnished with
Virtue as not to be bettered, and hardly to be equalled
of any ; as she lived most virtuously, so she dyed most
godly. Set down by him that best did know what hath
been written to be true. Thomas Lucy." A narrow
formalist he may have been, and a severe magistrate in
his dealings with scapegrace youths, and perhaps a
haughty and disagreeable neighbour ; but there is a
touch of manhood, high feeling, and virtuous and self-
respecting character in those lines, that instantly wins
the response of sympathy. If Shakespeare really shot
the deer of Thomas Lucy the injured gentleman had a
right to feel annoyed. Shakespeare, boy or man, was
not a saint, and those who so account him can have
read his works to but little purpose. He can bear the
full brunt of his faults. He does not need to be
canonised.

146

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

The ramble to Charlecote — one of the prettiest walks
about Stratford — was, it may surely be supposed, often
taken by Shakespeare. Many another ramble was pos
sible to him and no doubt was made. He would cross
the miU bridge (new in 1599), which spans the Avon
a little way to the south of the church. A quaint,
sleepy mill no doubt it was — flecked with moss and

Meadow Walk by the Avon

ivy — and the gaze of Shakespeare assuredly dwelt on
it with pleasure. His footsteps may be traced, also, in
fancy, to the region of the old college building, demol
ished in 1799, which stood in the southern part of
Stratford, and was the home of his friend John Combe,
factor of Fulke Greville, Earl of Warwick. Still an
other of his walks must have tended northward through
Welcombe, where he was the owner of land, to the

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 147
portly manor of Clopton, or to the home of William,
nephew of John-a-Combo^ which stood where the
Phillips mansion stands now. On what is called the
Ancient House, which stands on the west side of
High Street, he may often have looked, as he strolled
past to the Red Horse. That picturesque building,
dated 1596, survives, notwithstanding some modern
touches of rehabilitation, as a beautiful specimen of
Tudor architecture in one at least of its most charming
traits, the carved and timber-crossed gable. It is a
house of three stories, containing parlour, sitting-room,
kitchen, and several bedrooms, besides cellars and brew-
shed; and when sold at auction, August 23, 1876, it
brought ;!^400. In that house was bom John Harvard,
who founded Harvard University. There are other
dwellings fully as old in Stratford, but they have been
covered with stucco and otherwise changed. This is a
genuine piece of antiquity and it vies with the grammar-
school and the hall of the Guild, under the pent-house
of which the poet would pass whenever he went abroad
from New Place. Julius Shaw, one of the flve wit
nesses to his will, lived in the house next to the present
New Place Museum, and there, it is reasonable to think,
Shakespeare would often pause, for a word with his
friend and neighbour. In the little streets by the river
side, which are ancient and redolent of the past, his
image seems steadily familiar. In Dead Lane (once
also called Walker Street, now called Chapel Lane) he
owned a cottage, bought of Walter Getley in 1602, and
only destroyed within the present century. These and
kindred shreds of fact, suggesting the poet as a living
man and connecting him, however vaguely, with our

148 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
everyday experience, are seized with peculiar zest by
the pilgrim in Stratford. Such a votary, for example,
never doubts that Shakespeare was a frequenter, in
leisure or convivial hours, of the ancient Red Horse
inn. It stood there, in his day, as it stands now, on the
north side of Bridge Street, westward from the Avon.
There are many other taverns in the town — the
Shakespeare, a delightful resort, the Falcon, the Rose
and Crown, the old Red Lion, and the Swan's Nest,
being a few of them, ---but the Red Horse takes prece
dence of all its kindred, in the fascinating because sug
gestive attribute of antiquity. Moreover it was the Red
Horse that harboured Washington Irving, the pioneer
of American worshippers at the shrine of Shakespeare ;
and the American explorer of Stratford would cruelly
sacriflce his peace of mind if he were to repose under
any other roof. The Red Horse is a rambling, three-
story building, entered through an archway that leads
into a long, straggling yard, adjacent to offices and
stables. On one side of the entrance is found the
smoking-room ; on the other is the coffee-room. Above
are the bed-rooms. It is a thoroughly old-fashioned
inn — such a one as we may suppose the Boar's Head
to have been, in the time of Prince Henry; such a one
as untravelled Americans only know in the pages of
Dickens. The rooms are furnished in neat, homelike
style, and their associations readily deck them with the
fragrant garlands of memory. When Drayton and
Jonson came down to visit " gentle Will " at Stratford
they could scarcely have omitted to quaff the humming
ale of Warwickshire in that cosy parlour. When Queen
Henrietta Maria was ensconced at New Place the gen-

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 149
eral of the royal forces quartered himself at the Red
Horse, and then doubtless there was enough and to
spare of revelry within its walls. A little later the old
house was soundly peppered by Roundhead bullets and
the whole town was overrun with the close-cropped,
psalm-singing soldiers of the Commonwealth. In 1742
Garrick and Macklin lodged in the Red Horse, and
thither again came Garrick in 1769, to direct the
Shakespeare Jubilee, which was then most dismally
accomplished but which is always remembered to the
great actor's credit and honour. Betterton, no doubt,
lodged there when he came to Stratford in quest of
reminiscences of Shakespeare. The visit of Washing
ton Irving, supplemented with his delicious chronicle,
has led to what might be called almost the consecration
of the parlour in which he sat and the chamber (No.
15) in which he slept. They still keep the poker —
now marked " Geoffrey Crayon's sceptre " — with which,
as he sat there in long, silent, ecstatic meditation, he
prodded the flre in the narrow, tiny grate. They keep
also the chair in which he sat — a plain, straight-backed
arm-chair, with a haircloth seat, marked, on a brass
plate, with his renowned and treasured name. Thus
genius can sanctify even the humblest objects,
•¦ And shed a something of celestial light
Round the familiar face of every day."
To pass rapidly in review the little that is known of
Shakespeare's life is, nevertheless, to be impressed not
only by its incessant and amazing literary fertility but
by the quick succession of its salient incidents. The
vitality must have been enormous that created in so

150 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
short a time such a number and variety of works of
the first class. The same quick spirit would naturally
have kept in agitation all the elements of his daily
experience. Descended from an ancestor who had
fought for the Red Rose on Bosworth Field, he was
born to repute as well as competence, and during his
early childhood he received instruction and training in
a comfortable home. He escaped the plague that was
raging in Stratford when he was an infant, and that
took many victims. He went to school when seven
years old and left it when about fourteen. He then had
to work for his living — his once opulent father having
fallen into misfortune — and he became an apprentice
to a butcher, or else a lawyer's clerk (there were seven
lawyers in Stratford at that time), or else a school
teacher. Perhaps he was all three — and more. It is
conjectured that he saw the players who from time to
time acted in the Guildhall, under the auspices of the
corporation of Stratford ; that he attended the religious
entertainments that were customarily given in the not
distant city of Coventry ; and that in particular he wit
nessed the elaborate and sumptuous pageants with which
in 1575 the Earl of Leicester welcomed Queen Elizabeth
to Kenilworth Castle. He married at eighteen ; and,
leaving a wife and three children in Stratford, he went
up to London at twenty-two. His entrance into theat
rical life followed — in what capacity it is impossible to
say. One dubious account says that he held horses for
the public at the theatre door ; another that he got
employment as a prompter to the actors. It is certain
that he had not been in the theatrical business long
before he began to make himself known. At twenty-

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOxME 151
eight he was a prosperous author. At twenty-nine he
had acted with Burbage before Queen Elizabeth ; and
while Spenser had extolled him in the " Tears of the
Muses," the hostile Greene had disparaged him in the
" Groat's-worth of Wit." At thirty-three he had ac
quired wealth enough to purchase New Place, the
principal residence in his native town, where now he
placed his family and cstabhshed his home, — himself
remaining in London, but visiting Stratford at frequent
intervals. At thirty-four he was heard of as the actor
of Knowell in Ben Jonson's comedy of Every Man in
his Humour} and he received the glowing encomium of
Meres in Wifs Treasury. At thirty-eight he had writ
ten Hamlet and As You Like It, and moreover he had
now become the owner of more estate in Stratford,
costing £,120. At forty-one he made his largest pur
chase, buying for ^440 the " unexpired term of a
moiety of the interest in a lease granted in 1554 for
ninety-two years of the tithes of Stratford, Bishopton,
and Welcombe." In the meantime he had smoothed
the declining years of his father and had followed him
with love and duty to the grave. Other domestic be
reavements likewise befell him, and other worldly cares
and duties were laid upon his hands, but neither grief
nor business could check the fertility of his brain.
Within the next ten years he wrote, among other great
plays, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. At
1 Jonson's famous comedy was first acted in 159S, "By the then Lord
Chamberlain his servants." Knowell is designated as " an old gentleman.''
The Jonson Foho of 1692 names as follows the principal comedians who
acted in that piece : " Will. Shakespeare. Aug. Philips. Hen. Condel. Will.
Slye. Will. Kempe. Ric. Burbadge. Joh. Ilemings. Tho. Pope. Chr. Beston.
Job. Duke."

152 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
about forty-eight he seems to have disposed of his
interest in the two London theatres with which he had
been connected, the Blackfriars and the Globe, and
shortly afterwards, his work as we possess it being
well-nigh completed, he retired flnally to his Stratford
home. That he was the comrade of many bright spirits
who glittered in "the spacious times" of Elizabeth sev
eral of them have left personal testimony. That he
was the king of them all is shown in his works. The
Sonnets seem to disclose that there was a mysterious,
almost a tragical, passage in his life, and that he was
called to bear the burden of a great and perhaps a
calamitous personal grief — one of those griefs, which,
being caused by sinful love, are endless in the punish
ment they entail. Happily, however, no antiquarian
student of Shakespeare's time has yet succeeded in com
ing near to the man. While .he was in London he used
to frequent the Falcon Tavern, in Southwark, and the
Mermaid, and he lived at one time in St. Helen's parish,
Aldersgate, and at another time in Clink Street, South
wark. As an actor his name has been associated with
his characters of Adam, Friar Lawrence, and the Ghost
of King Hamlet, and a contemporary reference declared
him " excellent in the quality he professes." Some of
his manuscripts, it is possible, perished in the fire that
consumed the Globe theatre in 1613. He passed his
last days in his home at Stratford, and died there, some
what suddenly, on his fifty-second birthday. That event,
it may be worth while to observe, occurred within thirty-
three years of the execution of Charles the First, under
the Puritan Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. The
Puritan spirit, intolerant of the play-house and of all

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 153
its works, must then have been gaining formidable
strength. His daughter Susanna, aged thirty-three at
the time of his death, survived him thirty-three years.
His daughter Judith, aged thirty-one at the time of his
death, survived him forty-six years. The whisper of
tradition says that both were Puritans. If so the strange
and seemingly unaccountable disappearance of whatever
play-house papers he may have left at Stratford should
not be obscure. This suggestion is likely to have been
made before ; and also it is likely to have been supple
mented with a reference to the great flre in London in
1666 — (which in consuming St. Paul's cathedral burned
an immense quantity of books and manuscripts that had
been brought from all the threatened parts of the city
and heaped beneath its arches for safety) — as prob
ably the final and effectual holocaust of almost every
piece of print or writing that might have served to
illuminate the history of Shakespeare. In his person
ality no less than in the fathomless resources of his
genius he baffles scrutiny and stands for ever alone.
" Others abide our question ; thou art free :
We ask, and ask ; thou smilest and art still —
Out-topping knowledge."
It is impossible to convey an adequate suggestion of
the prodigious and overwhelming sense of peace that
falls upon the soul of the pilgrim in Stratford church.
All the cares and struggles and trials of mortal life, all
its failures, and equally all its achievements, seem there
to pass utterly out of remembrance. It is not now an
idle reflection that "the paths of glory lead but to the
grave." No power of human thought ever rose higher

154 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
or went further than the thought of Shakespeare. No
human being, using the best weapons of intellectual
achievement, ever accomplished so much. Yet here he
lies — who was once so great ! And here also, gathered
around him in death, lie his parents, his children, his
descendants, and his friends. For him and for them
the struggle has long since ended. Let no man fear to
tread the dark pathway that Shakespeare has trodden
before him. Let no man, standing at this grave, and
seeing and feeling that all the vast labours of that
celestial genius end here at last in a handful of dust,
fret and grieve any more over the puny and evanescent
toils of to-day, so soon to be buried in oblivion ! In the
simple performance of duty and in the life of the affec
tions there may be permanence and solace. The rest
is an " insubstantial pageant." It breaks, it changes,
it dies, it passes away, it is forgotten ; and though a
great name be now and then for a little while remem
bered, what can the remembrance of mankind signify
to him who once wore it .'' Shakespeare, there is reason
to believe, set precisely the right value alike upon
contemporary renown and the homage of posterity.
Though he went forth, as the stormy impulses of his
nature drove him, into the great world of London, and
there laid the firm hand of conquest upon the spoils Df
wealth and power, he came back at last to the peaceful
home of his childhood ; he strove to garner up the
comforts and everlasting treasures of love at his hearth
stone ; he sought an enduring monument in the hearts
of friends and companions ; and so he won for his
stately sepulchre the garland not alone of glory but of
affection. Through the high eastern window of the

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 155
chancel of Holy Trinity church the morning sunshine,
broken into many-coloured light, streams in upon the
grave of Shakespeare and gilds his bust upon the wall
above it. He lies close by the altar, and every circum
stance of his place of burial is eloquent of his hold
upon the affectionate esteem of his contemporaries.
The line of graves beginning at the north wall of the
chancel and extending across to the south seems
devoted entirely to Shakespeare and his family, with
but one exception.^ The pavement that covers them is
of that blue-gray slate or freestone which in England is
sometimes called black marble. In the first grave under
the north wall rests Shakespeare's wife. The next is
that of the poet himself, bearing the world-famed words
of blessing and imprecation. Then comes the grave of
Thomas Nashe, husband to Elizabeth Hall, the poet's
granddaughter, who died April 4, 1647. Next is that
of Dr. John Hall (obiit November 25, 1635), husband to
his daughter Susanna, and close beside him rests
Susanna herself, who was buried on July 11, 1649.
The gravestones are laid east and west, and all but one
present inscriptions. That one is under the south wall,
and possibly it covers the dust of Judith — Mrs. Thomas
Quiney — the youngest daughter of Shakespeare, who,
surviving her three children and thus leaving no
descendants, died in 1662. Upon the gravestone of
Susanna an inscription has been intruded commemora
tive of Richard Watts, who is not, however, known
to have had any relationship with either Shakespeare
or his descendants. Shakespeare's father, who died in
i"The poet knew," says J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, "that as a tithe-
owner he would necessarily be buried in the chancel."

156 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
1601, and his mother, Mary Arden, who died in 1608,
were buried in or near this church. (The register
says, under Burials, " September 9, 1608, Mayry Shax-
spere, wydowe.") His infant sisters Joan, Margaret,
and Anne, and his brother Richard, who died, aged
thirty-nine, in 161 3, may also have been laid to rest in
this place. Of the death and burial of his brother
Gilbert there is no record. His sister Joan, the second
— Mrs. Hart — would naturally have been placed with
her relatives. His brother Edmund, dying in 1607,
aged twenty-seven, is under the pavement of St.
Saviour's church in Southwark. The boy Hamnet,
dying before his father had risen into local eminence,
rests, probably, in an undistinguished grave in the
churchyard. (The register records his burial on August
II, 1596.) The family of Shakespeare seems to have
been short-lived and it was soon extinguished. He
himself died at fifty-two. Judith's children perished
young. Susanna bore but one child — Elizabeth —
who became successively Mrs. Nashe and Lady Bar
nard, and she, dying in 1670, was buried at Abingdon,
near Oxford. She left no children by either husband,
and in her the race of Shakespeare became extinct.
That of Anne Hathaway also has nearly disappeared,
the last living descendant of the Hathaways being Mrs.
Baker, the present occupant of Anne's cottage at Shot
tery. Thus, one by one, from the pleasant gardened
town of Stratford, they went to take up their long abode
in that old church, which was ancient even in their
infancy, and which, watching through the centuries in
its monastic solitude on the shore of Avon, has seen
their lands and houses devastated by flood and flre, the

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 157
places that knew them changed by the tooth of time,
and almost all the associations of their lives obliterated
by the improving hand of destruction.
One of the oldest and most interesting Shakespearean
documents in existence is the narrative, by a traveller
named Dowdall, of his observations in Warwickshire,
and of his visit, on April lo, 1693, to Stratford church.
He describes therein the bust and the tombstone of
Shakespeare, and he adds these remarkable words :
" The clerk that showed me this church is above eighty
years old. He says that not one, for fear of the curse
above said, dare touch his gravestone, though his wife
and daughter did earnestly desire to be laid in the same
grave with him." Writers in modern days have been
pleased to disparage that inscription and to conjecture
that it was the work of a sexton and not of the poet;
but no one denies that it has accomplished its purpose
in preserving the sanctity of Shakespeare's rest. Its
rugged strength, its simple pathos, its fitness, and its
sincerity make it felt as unquestionably the utterance
of Shakespeare himself, when it is read upon the slab
that covers him. There the musing traveller full well
conceives how dearly the poet must have loved the
beautiful scenes of his birthplace, and with what intense
longing he must have desired to sleep undisturbed in
the most sacred spot in their bosom. He doubtless
had some premonition of his approaching death. Three
months before it came he made his will. A little later
he saw the marriage of his younger daughter. Within
less than a month of his death he executed the will,
and thus set his affairs in order. His handwriting in
the three signatures to that paper conspicuously ex-

158 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
hibits the uncertainty and lassitude of shattered nerves.
He was probably quite worn out. Within the space, at
the utmost, of twenty-five years, he had written thirty-
seven plays, one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, and
two or more long poems ; had passed through much
and painful toil and through bitter sorrow ; had made
his fortune as author and actor ; and had superintended,
to excellent advantage, his property in London and his
large interests in Stratford and its neighbourhood. The
proclamation of health with which the will begins was
doubtless a formality of legal custom. The story that
he died of drinking too hard at a merry meeting with
Drayton and Ben Jonson is idle gossip. If in those
last days of fatigue and presentiment he wrote the
epitaph that has ever since marked his grave, it would
naturally have taken the plainest fashion of speech.
Such is its character; and no pilgrim to the poet's
shrine could wish to see it changed : —
" Good frend for lesvs sake forbeare.
To digg the dvst encloased heare ;
Blese be y^ man y' spares thes stones
And cvrst be he y' moves my bones."
It was once surmised that the poet's solicitude lest
his bones might be disturbed in death grew out of his
intention to take with him into the grave a confession
that the works which now follow him were written
by another hand. Persons have been found who actu
ally believe that a man who was great enough to write
Hamlet could be little enough to feel ashamed of it,
and, accordingly, that Shakespeare was only hired to
play at authorship, as a screen for the actual author. It

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 159
might not, perhaps, be strange that a desire for singu
larity, which is one of the worst literary crazes of this
capricious age, should prompt to the rejection of the
conclusive and overwhelming testimony to Shakespeare's
genius that has been left by Shakespeare's contempo
raries, and that shines forth in all that is known of his
life. It is strange that a doctrine should get itself
asserted which is subversive of common reason and
contradictory to every known law of the human mind.
This conjectural confession of poetic imposture has
never been exhumed. The grave is known to have
been disturbed, in 1796, when alterations were made
in the church, ^ and there came a time in the present
century when, as they were making repairs in the chan
cel pavement (the chancel was renovated in 1835), a
rift was accidently made in the Shakespeare vault.
Through this, though not without misgiving, the sexton
peeped in upon the poet's remains. He saw nothing
but dust.
The antique font from which the infant Shakespeare
may have received the water of Christian baptism is
still preserved in this church. It was thrown aside and
replaced by a new one about the middle of the seven-
1 It was the opinion — not conclusive but interesting — of the late J. O.
HaUiwell-Phillipps that at one or other of these " restorations " the original
tombstone of Shakespeare was removed and another one, from the yard
of a modern stone-mason, put in its place. Dr. Ingleby, in his book on
Shaliespeare's Bones, 1883, asserts that the original stone was removed.
I have compared Shakespeare's tombstone with that of his wife, and with
others in the chancel, but I have not found the discrepancy observed by
Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, and I think there is no reason to believe that the
original tombstone has ever been disturbed. The letters upon it were,
probably, cut deeper in 1835,

160

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

teenth century. Many years afterward it was found in
the charnel-house. When that was destroyed, in 1800,
it was cast into the churchyard. In later times the
parish clerk used it as a trough to his pump. It passed
then through the hands of several successive owners,

Remains of the old T'ont at which, probably, Shakespeare was christened,
now in the Nave of Stratford Church.
till at last, in days that had learned to value the past
and the associations connected with its illustrious names,
it found its way back again to the sanctuary from which
it had suffered such a rude expulsion. It is still a hand
some stone, though broken, soiled, and marred.
On the north wall of the chancel, above his grave

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 161
and near to "the American window," is placed Shake
speare's monument. It is known to have been erected
there within seven years after his death. It consists of
a half-length effigy, placed beneath a fretted arch, with
entablature and pedestal, between two Corinthian col
umns of black marble, gilded at base and top. Above
the entablature appear the armorial bearings of Shake
speare — a pointed spear on a bend sable and a silver
falcon on a tasselled helmet supporting a spear. Over
this heraldic emblem is a death's-head, and on each
side of it sits a carved cherub, one holding a spade, the
other an inverted torch. In front of the effigy is a
cushion, upon which both hands rest, holding a scroll
and a pen. Beneath is an inscription in Latin and
English, supposed to have been furnished by the poet's
son-in-law. Dr. Hall. The bust was cut by Gerard
Jonson, a native of Amsterdam and by occupation a
"tomb-maker," who lived in Southwark and possibly
had seen the poet. The material is a soft stone, and
the work, when first set up, was painted in the colours
of life. Its peculiarities indicate that it was copied
from a mask of the features taken after death. Some
persons believe (upon slender and dubious testimony)
that this mask has since been found, and busts of
Shakespeare have been based upon it, by W. R.
O'Donovan and by William Page. In September, 1764,
John Ward, grandfather of Mrs. Siddons, having come
to Stratford with a theatrical company, gave a perform
ance of Othello, in the Guildhall, and devoted its pro
ceeds to reparation of the Gerard Jonson effigy, then
somewhat damaged by time. The original colours were
then carefully restored and freshened. In 1793, under

Shakespeare^s Motinvient,

CHAP. XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 163
the direction of Malone, this bust, together with the
image of John-a-Combe — a recumbent statue upon a
tomb close to the east wall of the chancel — was coated
with white paint. From that plight it was extricated,
in 1 86 1, by the assiduous skill of Simon Collins, who
immersed it in a bath which took off the white paint
and restored the colours. The eyes are painted light
hazel, the hair and pointed beard auburn, the face and
hands flesh-tint. The dress consists of a scarlet doub
let, with a rolling collar, closely buttoned down the
front, worn under a loose black gown without sleeves.
The upper part of the cushion is green, the lower part
crimson, and this object is ornamented with gilt tassels.
The stone pen that used to be in the right hand of the
bust was taken from it, toward the end of the last cen
tury, by a young Oxford student, and, being dropped by
him upon the pavement, was broken. A quill pen has
been put in its place. This is the inscription beneath
the bust : —
Ivdicio Pylivm, genio Socratem, arte Maronem,
Terra tegit, popvlvs maeret, Olympvs habet.
Stay, passenger, why goest thov by so fast ?
Read, if thov canst, whom enviovs Death hath plast
Within this monvment : Shakspeare : with whome
Qvick Natvre dide ; whose name doth deck ys tombe
Far more than cost ; sieth all yt he hath writt
Leaves living art bvt page to serve his witt.
Obiit Ano. Doi. 1616. ^tatis 53. Die. 23. Ap.
The erection of the old castles, cathedrals, monas
teries, and churches of England was accomplished,
little by little, with laborious toil protracted through

164 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
many years. Stratford church, probably more than
seven centuries old, presents a mixture of architectural
styles, in which Saxon simplicity and Norman grace are
beautifully mingled. Different parts of the structure
were built at different times. It is fashioned in the
customary crucial form, with a square tower, an octa
gon stone spire, (erected in 1764, to replace a more
ancient one, made of oak and covered with lead), and a
fretted battlement all around its roof. Its windows are
diversifled, but mostly Gothic. The approach to it is
across a churchyard thickly sown with graves, through
a lovely green avenue of lime-trees, leading to a porch
on its north side. This avenue of foliage is said to be
the copy of one that existed there in Shakespeare's day,
through which he must often have walked, and through
which at last he was carried to his grave. Time itself
has fallen asleep in that ancient place. The low sob of
the organ only deepens the awful sense of its silence
and its dreamless repose. Yews and elms grow in the
churchyard, and many a low tomb and many a leaning
stone are there, in the shadow, gray with moss and
mouldering with age. Birds have built their nests in
many crevices in the timeworn tower, round which at
sunset you may see them circle, with chirp of greeting
or with call of anxious discontent. Near by flows the
peaceful river, reflecting the gray spire in its dark,
silent, shining waters. In the long and lonesome mead
ows beyond it the primroses stand in their golden ranks
among the clover, and the frilled and fluted bell of the
cowslip, hiding its single drop of blood in its bosom,
closes its petals as the night comes down.
Northward, at a little distance from the Church of

XII SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 165
the Holy Trinity, stands, on the west bank of the
Avon, the building that will always be famous as the
Shakespeare Memorial. The idea of the Memorial was
suggested in 1864, incidentally to the ceremonies which
then commemorated the three-hundredth anniversary
of the poet's birth. Ten years later the site for this
structure was presented to the town by Charles Edward
Flower, one of its most honoured inhabitants. Contri
butions of money were then asked, and were given.
Americans as well as Englishmen contributed. On
April 23, 1877, the flrst stone of the Memorial was laid.
On April 23, 1880, the building was dedicated. The
fabric comprises a theatre, a library, and a picture-
gaflery. In the theatre the plays of Shakespeare are
annually represented, in a manner as nearly perfect as
possible. In the library and picture-gallery are to be
assembled all the books upon Shakespeare that have
been published, and all the choice paintings that can
be obtained to illustrate his life and his works. As the
years pass this will naturally become a principal deposi
tory of Shakespearean objects. A dramatic college
may grow up, in association with the Shakespeare
theatre. The gardens that surround the Memorial will
augment their loveliness in added expanse of foliage
and in greater wealth of floral luxuriance. The mellow
tinge of age will soften the bright tints of the red brick
that mainly composes the building. On its cone-shaped
turrets ivy will clamber and moss will nestle. When a
few generations have passed, the old town of Stratford
will have adopted this now youthful stranger into the
race of her venerated antiquities. The same air of
poetic mystery that rests now upon his cottage and his

166

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

grave will diffuse itself around his Memorial ; and a
remote posterity, looking back to the men and the
ideas of to-day, will remember with grateful pride that
English-speaking people of the nineteenth century,
although they could confer no honour upon the great
name of Shakespeare, yet honoured themselves in
consecrating this votive temple to his memory.

CHAPTER XIII

UP TO LONDON

1882

BOUT the middle of the night the great
ship comes to a pause, off the coast of
Ireland, and, looking forth across the
black waves and through the rifts in the
rising mist, we see the low and lonesome
verge of that land of trouble and misery. A beautiful
white light flashes now and then from the shore, and at
intervals the mournful booming of a solemn bell floats
over the sea. Soon is heard the rolling click of oars, and
then two or three dusky boats glide past the ship, and
hoarse voices hail and answer. A few stars are visible
in the hazy sky, and the breeze from the land brings
off, in fltful puffs, the fragrant balm of grass and clover,.
mingled with the salt odours of sea-weed and slimy
rocks. There is a sense of mystery over the whole wild
scene ; but we realise now that human companionship
is near, and that the long and lonely ocean voyage is
ended. Travellers who make the run from Liverpool to Lon-
167

ml 3. c <^

chap. XIII UP TO LONDON 169
don by the Midland Railway pass through the vale of
Derby and skirt around the stately Peak that Scott has
commemorated in his novel of Peveril. It is a more
rugged country than is seen in the transit by the North
western road, but not more beautiful. You see the
storied mountain, - in its delicacy of outline and its airy
magnificence of poise, soaring into the sky — its summit
almost lost in the smoky haze — and you wind through
hillside pastures and meadow-lands that are curiously
intersected with low, zigzag stone walls; and constantly,
as the scene changes, you catch glimpses of green lane
and shining river ; of dense copses that cast their cool
shadow on the moist and gleaming emerald sod ; of
long white roads that stretch away like cathedral aisles
and are lost beneath the leafy arches of elm and oak ;
of little church towers embowered in ivy ; of thatched
cottages draped with roses ; of dark ravines, luxuriant
with a wild profusion of rocks and trees ; and of golden
grain that softly waves and whispers in the summer
wind; while, all around, the grassy banks and glimmer
ing meadows are radiant with yellow daisies, and with
that wonderful scarlet of the poppy that gives an almost
human glow of life and loveliness to the whole face of
England. After some hours of such a pageant — so
novel, so fascinating, so fleeting, so stimulative of eager
curiosity and poetic desire — it is a relief at last to
stand in the populous streets and among the grim
houses of London, with its surging tides of life, and its
turmoil of effort, conflict, exultation, and misery. How
strange it seems — yet, at the same time, how homelike
and familiar ! There soars aloft the great dome of
St. Paul's cathedral, with its golden cross that flashes

0,

chap. XIII UP TO LONDON 171
in the sunset ! There stands the Victoria tower — flt
emblem of the true royalty of the sovereign whose name
it bears. And there, more lowly but more august, rise
the sacred turrets of the Abbey. It is the same old
London — the great heart of the modern world — the
great city of our reverence and love. As the wanderer
writes these words he hears the plashing of the foun
tains in Trafalgar Square and the evening chimes that
peal out from the spire of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and
he knows himself once more at the shrine of his youth
ful dreams.
To the observant stranger in London few sights can
be more impressive than those that illustrate the singu
lar manner in which the life of the present encroaches
upon the memorials of the past. Old Temple Bar has
gone, — a sculptured griffin, at the junction of Fleet
Street and the Strand, denoting where once it stood.
(It has been removed to Theobald's Park, near Wal-
tham, and is now the lodge gate of the grounds of Sir
Henry Meux.) The Midland Railway trains dash over
what was once St. Pancras churchyard — the burial-
place of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and
of many other British worthies — and passengers look
ing from the carriages may see the children of the
neighbourhood sporting among the few tombs that yet
remain in that despoiled cemetery. Dolly's Chop-
House, intimately associated with the wits of the reign
of Queen Anne, has been destroyed. The ancient tav
ern of The Cock, immortalised by Tennyson, in his
poem of Will Waterproof's Monologue, is soon to
disappear, — with its singular wooden vestibule that
existed before the time of the Plague and that escaped

172 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, xiii
the great flre of 1666. On the site of Northumberland
House stands the Grand Hotel. The gravestones that
formerly paved the precinct of Westminster Abbey have
been removed, to make way for grassy lawns intersected
with pathways. In Southwark, across the Thames,
the engine-room of the brewery of Messrs. Barclay &
Perkins occupies the site of the Globe Theatre, in which
most of Shakespeare's plays were flrst produced. One
of the most venerable and beautiful churches in London,
that of St. Bartholomew the Great, — a gray, moulder
ing temple, of the twelfth century, hidden away in a
corner of Smithfleld, — is desecrated by the irruption
of an adjacent shop, the staircase hall of which breaks
cruelly into the sacred edifice and impends above the
altar. On July 12, 1882, the present writer, walk
ing in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden,
— the sepulchre of William Wycherley, Robert Wilks,
Charles Macklin, Joseph Haines, Thomas King, Samuel
Butler, Thomas Southerne, Edward Shuter, Dr. Arne,
Thomas Davies, Edward Kynaston, Richard Estcourt,
William Havard, and many other renowned votaries of
literature and the stage, — found workmen building a
new wall to sustain the enclosure, and almost every
stone in the cemetery uprooted and leaning against the
adjacent houses. Those monuments, it was said, would
be replaced ; but it was impossible not to consider the
chances of error in a new mortuary deal — and the
grim witticism of Rufus Choate, about dilating with
the wrong emotion, came then into remembrance, and
did not come amiss.
Facts such as these, however, bid us remember that
even the relics of the past are passing away, and

/ ,,i 'I'

The Charter-House.

174 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
that cities, unlike human creatures, may grow to be so
old that at last they will become new. It is not wonder
ful that London should change its aspect from one
decade to another, as the living surmount and obliterate
the dead. Thomas Sutton's Charter-House School,
founded in 1611, when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson
were still writing, was reared upon ground in which
several thousand corses were buried, during the time of
the Indian pestilence of 1348; and it still stands and
flourishes — though not as vigorously now as might be
wished. Nine thousand new houses, it is said, are built
in the great capital every year, and twenty-eight miles
of new street are thus added to it. On a Sunday I
drove for three hours through the eastern part of Lon
don without coming upon a single trace of the open
flelds. On the west, all the region from Kensington to
Richmond is settled for most part of the way ; while
northward the city is stretching its arms toward Hamp
stead, Highgate, and tranquil and blooming Finchley.
Truly the spirit of this age is in strong contrast with
that of the time of Henry the Eighth when (1530),
to prevent the increasing size of London, all new
buildings were forbidden to be erected "where no
former hath been known to have been." The march
of improvement nowadays carries everything before
it : even British conservatism is at some points giving
way : and, noting the changes that have occurred here
within only flve years, I am persuaded that those who
would see what remains of the London of which they
have read and dreamed — the London of Dryden and
Pope, of Addison, Sheridan, and Byron, of Betterton,
Garrick, and Edmund Kean — will, as time passes,

UP TO LONDON

175

find more and more difficulty both in tracing the foot
steps of fame, and in finding that sympathetic, rev
erent spirit which hallows the relics of genius and
renown.

CHAPTER XIV

OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON

IGHT-SEEING, merely for its own sake,
is not to be commended. Hundreds of
persons roam through the storied places
of England, carrying nothing away but the
bare sense of travel. It is not the spec
tacle that benefits, but the meaning of the spectacle. In
the great temples of religion, in those wonderful cathe
drals that are the glory of the old world, we ought to feel,
not merely the physical beauty but the perfect, illimita
ble faith, the passionate, incessant devotion, which alone
made them possible. The cold intellect of a sceptical
age, like the present, could never create such a majestic
cathedral as that of Canterbury. Not till the pilgrim
feels this truth has he really learned the lesson of such
places, — to keep alive in his heart the capacity of self-
sacrifice, of toil and of tears, for the grandeur and
beauty of the spiritual life. At the tombs of great men
we ought to feel something more than a consciousness
of the crumbling clay that moulders within, — some
thing more even than knowledge of their memorable
175

chap. XIV OLD CLIURCHES OF LONDON 177
words and deeds : we ought, as we ponder on the cer
tainty of death and the evanescence of earthly things,
to realise that art at least is permanent, and that no
creature can be better employed than in noble effort to
make the soul worthy of immortality. The relics of the
past, contemplated merely because they are relics, are
nothing. You tire, in this old land, of the endless array
of ruined castles and of wasting graves ; you sicken at
the thought of the mortality of a thousand years, decay
ing at your feet, and you long to look again on roses
and the face of childhood, the ocean and the stars.
But not if the meaning of the past is truly within your
sympathy ; not if you perceive its associations as feeling
equally with knowledge ; not if you truly know that its
lessons are not of death but of life ! To-day builds over
the ruins of yesterday, as well in the soul of man as on
the vanishing cities that mark his course. There need
be no regret that the present should, in this sense,
obliterate the past.
Much, however, as London has changed, and con
stantly as it continues to change, many objects still
remain, and long will continue to remain, that startle
and impress the sensitive mind. Through all its wide
compass, by night and day, flows and beats a turbulent,
resounding tide of activity, and hundreds of trivial and
vacuous persons, sordid, ignorant, and commonplace
tramp to and fro amid its storied antiquities, heedless of
their existence. Through such surroundings, but flnd
ing here and there a sympathetic guide or a friendly
suggestion, the explorer must make his way, — lonely
in the crowd, and walking like one who lives in a dream.
Yet he never will drift in vain through a city like this.

178 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
I went one night into the cloisters of Westminster
Abbey — that part, the South Walk, which is still acces
sible after the gates have been closed. - The stars
shone down upon the blackening walls and glimmering
windows of the great cathedral; the grim, mysterious
arches were dimly lighted ; the stony pathways, stretch
ing away beneath the venerable building, seemed to lose
themselves in caverns of darkness ; not a sound was
heard but the faint rustling of the grass upon the
cloister green. Every stone there is the mark of a
sepulchre ; every breath of the night wind seemed the
whisper of a gliding ghost. There, among the crowded
graves, rest Anne Oldfleld and Anne Bracegirdle, — in
Queen Anne's reign such brilliant luminaries of the
stage, — and there was buried the dust of Aaron Hill,
poet and dramatist, once manager of Drury Lane, who
wrote The Fair Inconstant for Barton Booth, and some
notably felicitous love-songs. There, too, are the relics
of Susanna Maria Arne (Mrs. Theo. Cibber), Mrs. Dan
cer, Thomas Betterton, and Spranger Barry. Sitting
upon the narrow ledge that was the monks' rest, I could
touch, close at hand, the tomb of a mitred abbot, while
at my feet was the great stone that covers twenty-six
monks of Westminster who jDerished by the Plague
nearly six hundred years ago. It would scarcely be
believed that the doors of dwellings open upon that
gloomy spot ; that ladies may sometimes be seen tend
ing flowers upon the ledges that roof those cloister
walks. Yet so it is ; and in such a place, at such a time,
you comprehend better than before the self-centred, se
rious, ruminant, romantic character of the English mind,
— which loves, more than anything else in the world.

XIV OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON 179
the privacy of august surroundings and a sombre and
stately solitude. It hardly need be said that you like
wise obtain here a striking sense of the power of con
trast. I was again aware of this, a little later, when,
seeing a dim light in St. Margaret's church near by, I
entered that old temple and found the men of the choir
at their rehearsal, and presently observed on the wall a
brass plate which announces that Sir Walter Raleigh
was buried here, in the chancel, — after being decapi
tated for high treason in the Palace Yard outside.
Such things are the surprises of this historic capital.
This inscription begs the reader to remember Raleigh's
virtues as well as his faults, — a plea, surely, that every
man might well wish should be made for himself at last.
I thought of the verses that the old warrior-poet is said
to have left in his Bible, when they led him out to
die — " Even such is time ; that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have.
And pays us nought but age and dust ;
Which, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days. —
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust."
This church contains a window commemorative of
Raleigh, presented by Americans, and inscribed with
these lines, by Lowell —
" The New World's sons, from England's breast we drew
Such milk as bids remember whence we came;
Proud of her past, wherefrom our future grew,
This window we inscribe with Raleigh's name."

ISO SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
It also contains a window commemorative of Caxton,
presented by the printers and publishers of London,
which is inscribed with these lines by Tennyson —
"Thy prayer was Light — more Light — while Time shall last,
Thou sawest a glory growing on the night,
But not the shadows which that li,ght would cast
Till shadows vanish in the Light of Light."
In St. Margaret's — a storied haunt, for shining
names alike of nobles and poets — was also buried John
Skelton, another of the old bards (obiit 1529), the enemy
and satirist of Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More,
one of whom he described as " madde Amaleke," and
the other as " dawcock doctor." Their renown has
managed to survive those terriflc shafts ; but at least
this was a falcon who flew at eagles. Here the poet
Campbell was married, — October 11, 1803. Such old
churches as this — guarding so well their treasures of
history — are, in a special sense, the traveller's bless
ings. At St. Giles's, Cripplegate, the janitor is a
woman ; and she will point out to you the lettered stone
that formerly marked the grave of Milton. It is in the
nave, but it has been moved to a place about twelve
feet from its original position, — the remains of the illus
trious poet being, in fact, beneath the floor of a pew, on
the left of the central aisle, about the middle of the
church: albeit there is a story, possibly true, that, on
an occasion when this church was repaired, in August,
1790, the coffin of Milton suffered profanation, and his
bones were dispersed. Among the monuments hard by
is a fine marble bust of Milton, placed against the wall,
and it is said, by way of enhancing its value, that

XIV OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON 181
George the Third came here to see it.^ Several of the
neighbouring inscriptions are of astonishing quaintness.
The adjacent churchyard — an eccentric, sequestered,
lonesome bit of grassy ground, teeming with monuments,
and hemmed in with houses, terminates, at one end, in
a piece of the old Roman wall of London (a.d. 306), —
an adamantine structure of cemented flints — which has
lasted from the days of Constantine, and which bids fair to
last forever. I shall always remember that strange nook
with the golden light of a summer morning shining upon
it, the birds twittering among its graves, and all around
it such an atmosphere of solitude and rest as made it
seem, though in the heart of the great city, a thousand
miles from any haunt of man. (It was formally opened
as a garden for public recreation on July 8, 1891.)
St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, an ancient and venerable
temple, the church of the priory of the nuns of St.
Helen, built in the thirteenth century, is full of relics
of the history of England. The priory, which adjoined
this church, has long since disappeared and portions of
the building have been restored ; but the noble Gothic
columns and the commemorative sculpture remain un
changed. Here are the tombs of Sir John Crosby, who
built Crosby Place (1466), Sir Thomas Gresham, who
founded both Gresham College and the Royal Exchange
in London, and Sir William Pickering, once Queen Eliz
abeth's Minister to Spain and one of the amorous aspir
ants for her royal hand ; and here, in a gloomy chapel,
^ This memorial befa the following inscription; "John Milton. Author
of 'Paradise Lost.' Born, December 1608. Died, November 1674. His
father, John Milton, died, March 1646. They were both interred in this
church."

182

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

Stands the veritable altar at which, it is said, the Duke
of Gloster received absolution, after the disappearance
of the princes in the Tower. Standing at that altar, in
the cool silence of the lonely church and the waning
light of afternoon, it was easy to conjure up his slender,
slightly misshapen form, decked in the rich apparel that
he loved, his handsome, aquiline, thoughtful face, the

Sir yohn Crosby's Momnnent.
drooping head, the glittering eyes, the nervous hand
that toyed with the dagger, and the stealthy stillness of
his person, from head to foot, as he knelt there before
the priest and perhaps mocked both himself and heaven
with the form of prayer. Every place that Richard
touched is haunted by his magnetic 'presence. In an
other part of the church you are shown the tomb of a
person whose will provided that the key of his sepulchre

OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON

183

should be placed beside his body, and that the door
should be opened once a year, for a hundred years. It
seems to have been his expectation to awake and arise ;
but the allotted century has passed and his bones are
still quiescent.
How calmly they sleep — those warriors who once
fllled the world with the tumult of their deeds ! If you
go into St. Mary's, in the Temple, you will stand above
the dust of the Crusaders and see the beautiful copper

Gresham's Momtment.

effigies of them, recumbent on the marble pavement, and
feel and know, as perhaps you never did before, the
calm that follows the tempest. St. Mary's was built in
1240 and restored in 1828. It would be difficult to flnd
a lovelier specimen of Norman architecture — at once
massive and airy, perfectly simple, yet rich with beauty,
in every line and scroll. There is only one other
church in Great Britain, it is said, which has, like this, a

V

M/

I /

-^ WM

_ ^^H^^^^^^^^^^^™ If III,

Goldsmith's House.

chap. XIV

OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON

185

circular vestibule. The stained glass windows, both
here and at St. Helen's, are very glorious. The organ at
St. Mary's was selected by Jeffreys, afterwards infamous
as the wicked judge. The pilgrim who pauses to muse
at the grave of Goldsmith may often hear its solemn,
mournful tones. I heard them thus, and was thinking
of Dr. Johnson's tender words, when he flrst learned
that Goldsmith was dead: "Poor Goldy was wild — very
wild — but he is so no more." The room in which he
died, a heart-broken man at only forty-six, was but a
little way from the spot where he sleeps.^ The noises of
Fleet Street are heard there only as a distant murmur.
But birds chirp over him, and leaves flutter down upon
his tomb, and every breeze that sighs around the gray
turrets of the ancient Temple breathes out his requiem.
1 No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple. — In 1757-58 Goldsmith was em
ployed by a chemist, near Fish .Street Hill. When he wrote his Inquiry
into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe he was living in Green
Arbour Court, " over Break-neck Steps." At a lodging in Wine Office Court,
Fleet Street, he wrote The I'icar of IValiefield. Afterwards he had lodgings
at Canonbury House, Islington, and in 1764, in the Library Staircase of the
Inner Temple. ^

l.flt<!_.S

CHAPTER XV
LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON
IHE mind that can reverence historic asso
ciations needs no explanation of the charm
that such associations possess. There are
streets and houses in London which, for
pilgrims of this class, are haunted with
memories and hallowed with an imperishable light —
that not even the dreary commonness of everyday life
can quench or dim. Almost every great author in Eng
lish literature has here left behind him some personal
trace, some relic that brings us at once into his living
presence. In the time of Shakespeare,- — of whom it
may be noted that wherever you find him at all you find
him in select and elegant neighbourhoods, — St. Helen's
parish was a secluded and peaceful quarter of the town ;
and there the poet had his residence, convenient to the
theatre in Blackfriars, in which he is known to have
owned a share. It is said that he dwelt at number
134 Aldersgate Street (the house has been demolished),
and in that region, — amid all the din of traffic and all
the strange adjuncts of a new age, — those who love

chap. XV LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON 187
him are in his company. Milton was born in a court
adjacent to Bread Street, Cheapside, and the explorer
comes upon him as a resident in St. Bride's churchyard,
— where the poet Lovelace was buried, — and at the
house which is now No. 19 York Street, Westminster
(in later times occupied by Bentham and by Hazlitt),
and in Jewin Street, Aldersgate. When secretary to
Cromwell he lived in Scotland Yard, where now is the
headquarters of the London police. His last home was
in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, but the visitor to that
spot finds it covered by the Artillery barracks. Walk
ing through King Street, Westminster, you will not
forget Edmund Spenser, who died there, in grief and
destitution, a victim to the same inhuman spirit of Irish
ruffianism that is still disgracing humanity and troubling
the peace of the world. Everybody remembers Ben
Jonson's terse record of that calamity : " The Irish hav
ing robbed Spenser's goods and burnt his house and a
little child new-born, he and his wife escaped, and after
he died, for lack of bread, in King Street." Jonson him
self is closely and charmingly associated with places
that may still be seen. He passed his boyhood near
Charing Cross — having been born in Hartshorn Lane,
now Northumberland Street — and went to the parish
school of St. Martin-in-the-Fields ; and those who roam
around Lincoln's Inn will call to mind that this great
poet helped to build it — a trowel in one hand and
Horace in the other. His residence, in his days of
fame, was just outside of Temple Bar — but all that
neighbourhood is new at the present time.
The Mermaid, which he frequented — ¦ with Shake
speare, Fletcher, Herrick, Chapman, and Donne — was

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

in Bread Street, but no trace of it remains ; and a bank
ing-house stands now on the site of the Devil Tavern, in
Fleet Street, where the Apollo Club, which he founded,
used to meet. The famous inscription, " O rare Ben
Jonson," is three times cut in the Abbey — once in
Poets' Corner and twice in the north aisle where he

A Bit from Clare Marliet.
was buried, the smaller of the two slabs marking the
place of his vertical grave. Dryden once dwelt in a
narrow, dingy, quaint house, in Fetter Lane, — the
street in which Dean Swift has placed the home of Gul
liver, and where now (1882) the famous Doomsday Book
is kept, — but later he removed to a finer dwelling, in
Gerrard Street, Soho, which was the scene of his death.

XV LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON 189
Both buildings are marked with mural tablets and
neither of them seems to have undergone much change.
(The house in Fetter Lane is gone — 1891.) Edmund
Burke's house, also in Gerrard Street, is a beer-shop ;
but his memory hallows the place, and an inscription
upon it proudly announces that here he lived. Dr.
Johnson's house in Gough Square bears likewise a
mural tablet, and, standing at its time-worn threshold,
the visitor needs no effort of fancy to picture that un
couth figure shambling through the crooked lanes that
lead into this queer, sombre, melancholy retreat. In
that house he wrote the first Dictionary of the English
language and the immortal letter to Lord Chesterfield.
In Gough Square lived and died Hugh Kelly, dramatist,
author of 772^ School of Wives and The Man of Reason,
and one of the friends of Goldsmith, at whose burial he
was present. The historical antiquarian society that
has marked many of the literary shrines of London has
rendered a great service. The houses associated with
Reynolds and Hogarth, in Leicester Square, Byron, in
Holies Street, Benjamin Franklin and Peter the Great,
in Craven Street, Campbell, in Duke Street, St. James's,
Garrick, in the Adelphi Terrace, Michael Farraday, in
Blandford Street, and Mrs. Siddons, in Baker Street, are
but a few of the historic spots which are thus commem
orated. Much, however, remains to be done. One
would like to know, for instance, in which room in " The
Albany " it was that Byron wrote Lara^ in which of the
1 Byron was born at No. 34 Holies Street, Cavendish Square. While
he was at school in Dulwich Grove his mother lived in a house in Sloane
Terrace. Other houses associated with him are No. 8 St. James Street; a
lodging in Bennet Street; No. 2 " The Albany " — a lodging that he

190 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND ch.ap. xv
houses of Buckingham Street Coleridge had his lodging
while he was translating Wallenstein, whereabouts in
Bloomsbury Square was the residence of Akenside, who
wrote The Pleasures of Imagination, and of Croly, who
wrote Salathiel ; or where it was that Gra}- lived, when
he established himself close by Russell Square, in order
to be one of the first — as he continued to be one of the
most constant — students at the then newly opened Brit
ish Museum (i 759). These, and such as these, may seem
trivial things ; but Nature has denied an unfailing source
of innocent happiness to the man who can find no pleas
ure in them. For my part, when rambling in Fleet
Street it is a special delight to remember even so slight
an incident as that recorded of the author of the Elegy
in a Country Churchyard, — that he once saw there his
satirist. Dr. Johnson, rolling and puffing along the side
walk, and cried out to a friend, " Here comes Ursa
Major." For the true lovers of literature "Ursa IMajor"
walks oftener in Fleet Street to-day than any living man.
A good thread of literary research might be profitably
followed by him who should trace the footsteps of all
the poets that have held, in England, the office of laure
ate. John Kay w^as laureate in the reign of Edward IV. ;
Andrew Bernard in that of Henry \'II. ; John Skelton
in that of Henry \'III.; and Edmund Spenser in that
rented of Lord .-Mthorpe, and entered on JIarch 28, 1814; and No.
139 Piccadilly, where his daughter, Ada, w-as born, and where Ladv Byron
left him. This, at present, is the home of the genial scholar Sir .-Xlgernon
Borthwick (1893). John Murray's house, where Byron's fragment of
.A.utobiography "as burned, is in Albemarle Street. Byron's body, when
brought home from Greece, lay in state at No. 25 Great George Street,
Westminster, before being taken north, to Hucknall-Torkard church, in
Nottinghamshire, for burial.

V V

\ -i«r^-

I-

192 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
of Elizabeth. Since then the succession has included
the names of Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Ben
Jonson, Sir William Davenant, John Dryden, Thomas
Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Nicholas Rowe, Lawrence
Eusden, Colley Cibber, William Whitehead, Thomas
Wharton, Henry James Pye, Robert Southey, William
Wordsworth, and Alfred Tennyson — who, until his
death, in 1892, wore, in spotless renown, that
" Laurel greener from the brows
Of him that utter'd nothing base.''
Most of those bards were intimately associated with
London, and several of them are buried in the Abbey.
It is, indeed, because so many storied names are writ
ten upon gravestones that the explorer of the old
churches of London finds so rich a harvest of impres
sive association and lofty thought. Few persons visit
them, and you are likely to find yourself comparatively
alone in rambles of this kind. I went one morning
into St. Martin — once "in the fields," now in one of
the busiest thoroughfares at the centre of the city —
and found there only a pew-opener preparing for the
service, and an organist playing an anthem. It is a
beautiful structure, with its graceful spire and its columns
of weather-beaten stone, curiously stained in gray and
sooty black, and it is almost as famous for theatrical
names as St. Paul's, Covent Garden, or St. George's,
Bloomsbury, or St. Clement Danes. Here, in a vault
beneath the church, was buried the bewitching and
affectionate Nell Gwyn ; here is the grave of James
Smith, joint author with his brother Horace — who was
buried at Tunbridge Wells — of The Rejected Addresses ;

LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON

193

here rests Yates, the original Sir Oliver Surface ; and
here were laid the ashes of the romantic and sprightly
Mrs. Centlivre, and of George Farquhar, whom
neither youth, genius, patient
labour, nor sterling achievement
could save from a life of mis
fortune and an untimely and
piteous death. A cheerier asso
ciation of this church is with
Thomas Moore, the poet of Ire-

Gray's In7i Square.

land, who was here married. At St. Giles-in-the-Fields,
again, are the graves of George Chapman, who trans
lated Homer, Andrew Marvel, who wrote such lovely

194 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, xv
lyrics of love. Rich, the manager, who brought out
Gay's Beggar s Opera, and James Shirley, the fine old
dramatist and poet, whose immortal couplet has been so
often murmured in such solemn haunts as these —
" Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."
Shirley lived in Gray's Inn when he was writing his
plays, and he was fortunate in the favour of queen Hen
rietta Maria, wife to Charles the First; but when the
Puritan times arrived he fell into misfortune and poverty
and became a school-teacher in Whitefriars. In 1666
he was living in or near Fleet Street, and his home was
one of the many dwellings that were destroyed in the
great fire. Then he fled, with his wife, into the parish
of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, where, overcome with grief
and terror, they both died, within twenty-four hours of
each other, and were buried in the same grave.

CHAPTER XVI

A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN

|0 muse over the dust of those about whom
we have read so much — the great actors,
thinkers, and writers, the warriors and
statesmen for whom the play is ended and
the lights are put out — is to come very
near to them, and to realise more deeply than ever
before their close relationship with our own humanity ;
and we ought to be wiser and better for this experience.
It is good, also, to seek out the favourite haunts of our
heroes, and call them up as they were in their lives.
One of the happiest accidents of a London stroll was
the flnding of the Harp Tavern,^ in Russell Street,
Covent Garden, near the stage door of Drury Lane
theatre, which was the accustomed resort of Edmund
1 An account of the Harp, in the Victuallers ' Gazette, says that this
tavern has had within its doors every actor of note since the days of Gar
rick, and many actresses, also, of the latter part of the eighteenth century;
and it mentions, as visitants there, Dora Jordan, Nance Oldfield, Anne
Bracegirdle, Kitty Clive, Harriet Mellon, Barton Booth, Quin, Cibber,
Macklin, Grimaldi, EHza Vestris, and Miss Stephens — who became
Countess of Essex. 195

196 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
Kean. Carpenters and masons were at work upon it
when I entered, and it was necessary almost to creep
amid heaps of broken mortar and rubbish beneath their
scaffolds, in order to reach the interior rooms. Here, at
the end of a narrow passage, was a little apartment, per
haps flfteen feet square, with a low ceiling and a bare
floor, in which Kean habitually took his pleasure, in the
society of fellow-actors and boon companions, long ago.
A narrow, cushioned bench against the walls, a few
small tables, a chair or two, a number of churchwarden
pipes on the mantlepiece, and portraits of Disraeli and
Gladstone, constituted the furniture. A panelled wain
scot and dingy red paper covered the walls, and a few
cobwebs hung from the grimy ceiling. By this time
the old room has been made neat and comely; but then
it bore the marks of hard usage and long neglect, and
it seemed all the more interesting for that reason.
Kean's seat is at the right, as you enter, and just
above it a mural tablet designates the spot, — which is
stin further commemorated by a death-mask of the
actor, placed on a little shelf of dark wood and covered
with glass. No better portrait could be desired ; cer
tainly no truer one exists. In life this must have been
a glorious face. The eyes are large and prominent, the
brow is broad and flne, the mouth wide and obviously
sensitive, the chin delicate, and the nose long, well set,
and indicative of immense force of character. The
whole expression of the face is that of refinement and
of great and desolate sadness. Kean, as is known from
the testimony of one who acted with him,i was always
1 The mother of Jefferson, the comedian, described Edmund Kean in
this way. She was a member of the company at the Walnut Street

XVI A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN 197
at his best in passages of pathos. To hear him speak
Othello's farewell was to hear the perfect music of
heart-broken despair. To see him when, as The Stran
ger, he listened to the song, was to see the genuine,
absolute reality of hopeless sorrow. He could, of course,
thrill his hearers in the ferocious outbursts of Richard
and Sir Giles, but it was in tenderness and grief that he
was supremely great ; and no one will wonder at that
who looks upon his noble face — so eloquent of self-
conflict and suffering — even in this cold and colourless
mask of death. It is easy to judge and condemn the
sins of a weak, passionate humanity ; but when we
think of such creatures of genius as Edmund Kean and
Robert Burns, we ought to consider what demons in
their own souls those wretched men were forced to
fight, and by what agonies they expiated their vices and
errors. This little tavern-room tells the whole mournful
story, with death to point the moral, and pity to breathe
its sigh of unavailing regret.
Many of the present frequenters of the Harp are
elderly men, whose conversation is enriched with
memories of the stage and with ample knowledge and
judicious taste in literature and art. They naturally
speak with pride of Kean's association with their
favourite resort. Often in that room the eccentric
genius has put himself in pawn, to exact from the
manager of Drury Lane theatre the money needed to
Theatre, Philadelphia, when he acted there, and it was she who sang for
him, when he acted The Stranger, the well-known lines, by Sheridan, —
" 1 have a silent sorrow here,
A grief I'll ne'er impart ;
It breathes no sigh, it sheds no tear,
But it consumes my heart."

198 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
relieve the wants of some brother actor. Often his
voice has been heard there, in the songs that he sang
with so much feeling and sweetness and such homely
yet beautiful skill. In the circles of the learned and
courtly he never was really at home ; but here he filled
the throne and ruled the kingdom of the revel, and
here no doubt every mood of his mind, from high
thought and generous emotion to misanthropical bit
terness and vacant levity, found its unfettered expres
sion. They show you a broken panel in the high
wainscot, which was struck and smashed by a pewter pot
that he hurled at the head of a person who had given
him offence ; and they tell you at the same time, — as,
indeed, is historically true, — that he was the idol of
his comrades, the first in love, pity, sympathy, and kind
ness, and would turn his back, any day, for the least of
them, on the nobles who sought his companionship.
There is no better place than this in which to study
the life of Edmund Kean. Old men have been met
with here who saw him on the stage, and even acted
with him. The room is the weekly meeting-place and
habitual nightly tryst of an ancient club, called the City
of Lushington, which has existed since the days of the
Regency, and of which these persons are members.
The City has its Mayor, Sheriff, insignia, record-book,
and system of ceremonials ; and much of wit, wisdom,
and song may be enjoyed at its civic feasts. The names
of its four wards — Lunacy, Suicide, Poverty, and Juni
per — are written up in the four corners of the room,
and whoever joins must select his ward. Sheridan was
a member of it, and so was the Regent ; and the present
landlord of the Harp (Mr. M'Pherson) preserves among

XVI A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN 199
his relics the chairs in which those gay companions sat,
when the author presided over the initiation of the
prince. It is thought that this club grew out of the
society of The Wolves, which was formed by Kean's
adherents, when the elder Booth arose to disturb his
supremacy upon the stage. But there is no malice in
it now. Its purposes are simply convivial and literary,
and its tone is that of thorough good-will.^
One of the gentlest and most winning traits in the
English character is its instinct of companionship as to
literature and art. Since the days of the Mermaid the
authors and actors of London have dearly loved and
deeply enjoyed such odd little fraternities of wit as are
typified, not inaptly, by the City of Lushington. There
are no rosier hours in my memory than those that were
passed, between midnight and morning, in the cosy
clubs in London. And when dark days come, and foes
harass, and the troubles of life annoy, it will be sweet
to think that in still another sacred retreat of friendship,
across the sea, the old armour is gleaming in the festal
lights, where one of the gentlest spirits that ever wore
the laurel of England's love smiles kindly on his com
rades and seems to murmur the charm of English
hospitality —
" Let no one take beyond this threshold hence
Words uttered here in friendship's confidence."
1 A coloured print of this room may be found in that eccentric book
The Life of an Actor, by Pierce Egan: 1825.

CHAPTER XVII

STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY

T is a cool afternoon in July, and the
shadows are falling eastward on fields of
waving grain and lawns of emerald velvet
Overhead a few light clouds are drifting,
and the green boughs of the great elms
are gently stirred by a breeze from the west. Across
one of the more distant fields a flock of sable rooks —
some of them fluttering and cawing — wings its slow
and melancholy flight. There is the sound of the
whetting of a scythe, and, near by, the twittering of
many birds upon a cottage roof. On either side of the
country road, which runs like a white rivulet through
banks of green, the hawthorn hedges are shining and
the bright sod is spangled with all the wild -flowers
of an English summer. An odour of lime-trees and
of new -mown hay sweetens the air for many miles
around. Far off, on the horizon's verge, just glimmer
ing through the haze, rises the imperial citadel of Wind
sor. And close at hand a little child points to a gray

CHAP. XVII STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 201
spire ¦"¦ peering out of a nest of ivy, and tells me that
this is Stoke-Pogis church.
If peace dwells anywhere upon the earth its dwell
ing-place is here. You come into this little church
yard by a pathway across the park and through a
wooden turnstile ; and in one moment the whole world
is left behind and forgotten. Here are the nodding
elms ; here is the yew-tree's shade ; here " heaves the
turf in many a mouldering heap." All these graves
seem very old. The long grass waves over them,
and some of the low stones that mark them are entirely
shrouded with ivy. Many of the "frail memorials"
are made of wood. None of them is neglected or for
lorn, but all of them seem to have been scattered here,
in that sweet disorder which is the perfection of rural
loveliness. There never, of course, could have been
any thought of creating this effect; yet here it re
mains, to win your heart forever. And here, amid this
mournful beauty, the little church itself nestles close to
the ground, while every tree that waves its branches
around it, and every vine that clambers on its surface,
seems to clasp it in the arms of love. Nothing breaks
the silence but the sighing of the wind in the great yew-
tree at the church door, — beneath which was the poet's
favourite seat, and where the brown needles, falling,
through many an autumn, have made a dense carpet on
the turf. Now and then there is a faint rustle in the
ivy ; a fltful bird-note serves but to deepen the stillness ;
and from a rose-tree near at hand a few leaves flutter
down, in soundless benediction on the dust beneath.
'' In Gray's time there was no spire on the church — nor is the spire an
improvemept to the tower.

\

.^il^a:^^^^

CHAP. XVII STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 203
Gray was laid in the same grave with his mother,
"the careful, tender mother of many children, one
alone of whom," as he wrote upon her gravestone,
" had the misfortune to survive her." Their tomb — a
low, oblong, brick structure, covered with a large slab
— stands a few feet away from the church wall, upon
which is a small tablet to denote its place. The poet's
name has not been inscribed above him. There was
no need here of "storied urn or animated bust." The
place is his monument, and the majestic Elegy — giving
to the soul of the place a form of seraphic beauty and
a voice of celestial music — is his immortal epitaph.
" There scatter'd oft, the earliest of ye Year,
By hands unseen are showers of vi'Iets found ;
The Redbreast loves to build & warble there,
And little Footsteps lightly print the ground."
There is a monument to Gray in Stoke Park, about
two hundred yards from the church ; but it seems com
memorative of the builder rather than the poet. They
intend to set a memorial window in the church, to
honour him, and the visitor finds there a money-box for
the reception of contributions in aid of this pious design.
Nothing will be done amiss that serves to direct closer
attention to his life. It was one of the best lives ever
recorded in the history of literature. It was a life sin
gularly pure, noble, and beautiful. In two qualities,
sincerity and reticence, it was exemplary almost beyond
a parallel ; and those are qualities that literary character
in the present day has great need to acquire. Gray
was averse to publicity. He did not sway by the
censure of other men ; neither did he need their admira-

204 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
tion as his breath of life. Poetry, to him, was a great
art, and he added nothing to literature until he had first
made it as nearly perfect as it could be made by the
thoughtful, laborious exertion of his best powers, super
added to the spontaneous impulse and flow of his genius.
More voluminous writers, Charles Dickens among the
rest, have sneered at him because he wrote so little.
The most colossal form of human complacency is that
of the individual who thinks all other creatures inferior
who happen to be unlike himself. This reticence on
the part of Gray was, in fact, the emblem of his sin
cerity and the compelling cause of his imperishable
renown. There is a better thing than the great man
who is always speaking ; and that is the great man
who only speaks when he has a great word to say.
Gray has left only a few poems ; but of his principal
works each is perfect in its kind, supreme and unap
proachable. He did not test merit by reference to ill-
formed and capricious public opinion, but he wrought
according to the highest standards of art that learning
and taste could furnish. His letters form an English
classic. There is no purer prose in existence ; there is
not much that is so pure. But the crowning glory of
Gray's nature, the element that makes it so impressive,
the charm that brings the pilgrim to Stoke-Pogis church
to muse upon it, was the self-poised, sincere, and lovely
exaltation of its contemplative spirit. He was a man
whose conduct of life would, first of all, purify, expand,
and adorn the temple of his own soul, out of which
should afterward flow, in their own free way, those
choral harmonies that soothe, guide, and exalt the
human race, He lived before he wrote. The soul of

XVII STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY 205
the Elegy is the soul of the man. It was his thought
— which he has somewhere expressed in better words
than these — that human beings are only at their best
while such feelings endure as are engendered when
death has just taken from us the objects of our love.
That was the point of view from which he habitually
looked upon the world ; and no man who has learned
the lessons of experience can doubt that he was right.
Gray was twenty-six years old when he wrote the
first draft of the Elegy. He began that poem in 1742,
at Stoke-Pogis, and he finished and published it in
1751- No visitor to this churchyard can miss either
its inspiration or its imagery. The poet has been dead
more than a hundred years, but the scene of his ram
bles and reveries has suffered no material change.
One of his yew-trees, indeed, much weakened with age,
was some time since blown down, in a storm, and its
fragments have been carried away. The picturesque
manor house not far distant was once the home of
Admiral Penn, father of William Penn the famous
Quaker.! j^H ^j^g ^^ees of the region have, of course,
waxed and expanded, — not forgetting the neighbouring
' WiUiam Penn and his children are buried in the little Jordans grave
yard, not many miles away. The visitor to Stoke-Pogis should not omit a
visit to Upton church, Burnham village, and Binfield. Pope lived at Bin-
field when he wrote his poem on Windsor Forest. Upton claims to have
had a share in the inspiration of the Elegy, but Stoke-Pogis was unques
tionably his place of residence when he wrote it. Langley Marish ought to
be visited also, and Horton — where Milton wrote " L'.-\llegro," "II Pen-
seroso,'' and " Comus.'' Chalfont St. Peter is accessible, where still is
standing the house in which Milton finished Paradise Lost and began
Paradise Regained : and from there a short drive will take you to Beacons-
field, where you may see Edmund Burke's tablet, in the church, and the
monument to Waller, in the churchyard.

206 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
beeches of Burnham, among which he loved to wander,
and where he might often have been found, sitting with
his book, at some gnarled wreath of " old fantastic
roots." But in its general characteristics, its rustic
homeliness and peaceful beauty, this " glimmering land
scape," immortalised in his verse, is the same on which
his living eyes have looked. There was no need to
seek for him in any special spot. The house in which
he once lived might, no doubt, be discovered; but every
nook and vista, every green lane and upland lawn and
ivy-mantled tower of this delicious solitude is haunted
with his presence.
The night is coming on and the picture will soon be
dark ; but never while memory lasts can it fade out of the
heart. What a blessing would be ours, if only we could
hold forever that exaltation of the spirit, that sweet, re
signed serenity, that pure freedom from all the passions
of nature and all the cares of life, which comes upon
us in such a place as this ! Alas, and again alas ! Even
with the thought this golden mood begins to melt away ;
even with the thought comes our dismissal from its
influence. Nor will it avail us anything now to linger
at the shrine. Fortunate is he, though in bereavement
and regret, who parts from beauty while yet her kiss is
warm upon his lips, — waiting not for the last farewell
word, hearing not the last notes of the music, seeing
not the last gleams of sunset as the light dies from the
sky. It was a sad parting, but the memory of the place
can never now be despoiled of its loveliness. As I write
these words I stand again in the cool and dusky silence
of the poet's church, with its air of stately age and its
fragrance of cleanliness, while the light of the western

STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY

207

sun, broken into rays of gold and ruby, streams through
the painted windows and softly falls upon the quaint
little galleries and decorous pews ; and, looking forth
through the low, arched door, I see the dark and melan
choly boughs of the dreaming yew-tree, and, nearer, a
shadow of rippling leaves in the clear sunshine of the
churchway path. And all the time a gentle voice is
whispering, in the chambers of thought —
'¦ No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode :
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God."

Old Church.

CHAPTER XVIII

AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE

MONG the deeply meditative, melodious,
and eloquent poems of Wordsworth there
is one — about the burial of Ossian —
that glances at the question of fltness in
a place of sepulchre. Not always, for
the illustrious dead, has the final couch of rest
been rightly chosen. We think with resignation,
and with a kind of pride, of Keats and Shelley in
the little Protestant burial-ground at Rome. Every
heart is touched at the spectacle of Garrick and John
son sleeping side by side in Westminster Abbey. It
was right that the dust of Dean Stanley should mingle
with the dust of poets and of kings ; and to see — as
the present writer did, only a little while ago — fresh
fiowers on the stone that covers him, in the chapel of
Henry the Seventh, was to feel a tender gladness and
solemn content Shakespeare's grave, in the chancel of
Stratford church, awakens the same ennobling awe and
melancholy pleasure ; and it is with kindred feeling that
you linger at the tomb of Gray. But who can be con-
208

chap. XVIII AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE 209
tent that poor Letitia Landon should sleep beneath the
pavement of a barrack, with soldiers trampling over
her dust .'' One might almost think, sometimes, that the
spirit of calamity, which follows certain persons through
out the whole of life, had pursued them even in death,
to haunt about their repose and to mar all the gentle
ness of association that ought to hallow it. Chatterton,
a pauper and a suicide, was huddled into a workhouse
graveyard, the very place of which — in Shoe Lane,
covered now by Farringdon Market — has disappeared.
Otway, miserable in his love for Elizabeth Barry, the
actress, and said to have starved to death in the Minories,
near the Tower of London, was laid in a vault of St.
Clement Danes, in the middle of the Strand, where
never the green leaves rustle, but where the roar of the
mighty city pours on in continual tumult. That church
holds also the remains of William Mountfort, the actor,
slain in a brawl by Lord Mohun ; of Nat Lee, "the
mad poet " ; of George Powell, the tragedian, of brilliant
and deplorable memory ; and of the handsome Hilde-
brand Horden, cut off by a violent death in the spring
time of his youth. Hildebrand Plorden was the son of
a clergyman of Twickenham and lived in the reign of
William and Mary. Dramatic chronicles say that he was
possessed of great talent as an actor, and of remark
able personal beauty. He was stabbed, in a quarrel, at
the Rose Tavern ; and after he had been laid out for
the grave, such was the lively feminine interest in his
handsome person, many ladies came, some masked and
others openly, to view him in his shroud. This is men
tioned in Colley Gibber's Apology. Charles Coffey, the
dramatist, author of The Devil upon Tit'o Sticks, and

210 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
Other plays, lies in the vaults of St. Clement ; as like
wise does Thomas Rymer, historiographer for William
III., successor to Shadwell, and author of Fadera, in
seventeen volumes. In the church of St. Clement you
may see the pew in which Dr. Johnson habitually sat
when he attended divine service there. It was his
favourite church. The pew is in the gallery ; and to
those who honour the passionate integrity and fervent,
devout zeal of the stalwart old champion of letters, it
is indeed a sacred shrine. Henry Mossop, one of the
stateliest of stately actors, perishing, by slow degrees,
of penury and grief, — ¦ which he bore in proud silence,
— found a refuge, at last, in the barren gloom of Chelsea
churchyard. Theodore Hook, the cheeriest spirit of his
time, the man who filled every hour of life with the sun
shine of his wit and was wasted and degraded by his
own brilliancy, rests, close by Bishop Sherlock, in Ful-
ham churchyard, — ¦ one of the dreariest spots in the
suburbs of London. Perhaps it does not much signify,
when once the play is over, in what oblivion our crum
bling relics are hidden away. Yet to most human
creatures these are sacred things, and many a loving
heart, for all time to come, will choose a consecrated spot
for the repose of the dead, and will echo the tender
words of Longfellow, — so truly expressive of a univer
sal and reverent sentiment —
" Take them, O Grave, and let them lie
Folded upon thy narrow shelves.
As garments by the soul laid by
And precious only to ourselves."
One of the most impressive of the many literary
pilgrimages that I have made was that which brought

XVIII AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE 211
me to the house in which Coleridge died, and the place
where he was buried. The student needs not to be
told that this poet, born in 1772, the year after Gray's
death, bore the white lilies of pure literature till 1834,
when he too entered into his rest. The last nineteen
years of the life of Coleridge were spent in a house at
Highgate ; and there, within a few steps of each other,
the visitor may behold his dwelling and his tomb. The
house is one in a block of dwellings, situated in what is
called the Grove — a broad, embowered street, a little
way from the centre of the village. There are gardens
attached to these houses, both in the front and the rear,
and the smooth and peaceful roadside walks in the
Grove itself are pleasantly shaded by elms of noble size
and abundant foliage. These were young trees when
Coleridge saw them, and all this neighbourhood, in his
day, was but thinly settled. Looking from his chamber
window he could see the dusky outlines of sombre Lon
don, crowned with the dome of St. Paul's on the south
ern horizon, while, more near, across a fertile and
smiling valley, the gray spire of Hampstead church
would bound his prospect, rising above the verdant
woodland of Caen.^ In front were beds of flowers, and
all around he might hear the songs of birds that fllled
the fragrant air with their happy, careless music. Not
far away stood the old church of Highgate, long since
destroyed, in which he used to worship, and close by
^ "Come in the first stage, so as either to walk, or to be driven in Mr.
Oilman's gig, to Caen wood and its delicious groves and alleys, the finest
in England, a grand cathedral aisle of giant lime-trees, Pope's favourite
composition walk, when with the old Earl." — Coleridge to Crabb Robinson.
Highgate, June 181 7

212

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

was the Gate House inn, primitive, quaint, and cosy,
which still is standing, to comfort the weary traveller
with its wholesome hospitality. Highgate, with all its
• rural peace, must
have been a bus
tling place in the
old times, for all
the travel went
through it that passed
either into or out of
London by the great
north road, — that road
in which Whittington
heard the prophetic sum
mons of the bells, and where
may still be seen, suitably
and rightly marked, the site of the
stone on which he sat to rest.
Here, indeed, the coaches used to
halt, either to feed or to change
horses, and here the many neglected
little taverns still remaining, with
their odd names and their swinging
signs, testify to the discarded cus
toms of a bygone age. Some years
ago a new road was cut, so that
travellers might wind around the hill, and avoid climb
ing the steep ascent to the village ; and since then the
grass has begun to grow in the streets. But such bustle
as once enlivened the solitude of Highgate could never
have been otherwise than agreeable diversion to its
inhabitants ; while for Coleridge himself, as we can well

t '. s
The White Hart.

XVHI AT THE GR.WE OF COLERIDGE 213
imagine, the London coach was welcome indeed, that
brought to his door such well-loved friends as Charles
Lamb, Joseph Henry Green, Crabb Robinson, Words
worth, or Talfourd.
To this retreat tjie author of The Ancient Mariner
withdrew in 1815, to live with his friend James Oilman,
a surgeon, who had undertaken to rescue him from the
demon of opium, but who, as De Quincey intimates,
was lured by the poet into the service of the very flend
whom both had striven to subdue. It was his last
refuge, and he never left it till he was released from
life. As you ramble in that quiet neighbourhood your
fancy will not fail to conjure up his placid figure, — the
silver hair, the pale face, the great, luminous, changeful
blue eyes, the somewhat portly form clothed in black
raiment, the slow, feeble walk, the sweet, benignant
manner, the voice that was perfect melody, and the
inexhaustible talk that was the flow of a golden sea of
eloquence and wisdom. Coleridge was often seen walk
ing there, with a book in his hand ; and the children of
the village knew him and loved him. His presence is
impressed forever upon the place, to haunt and to hallow
it. He was a very great man. The wings of his imagi
nation wave easily in the opal air of the highest heaven.
The power and majesty of his thought are such as estab
lish forever in the human mind the conviction of per
sonal immortality. Yet how forlorn the ending that
this stately soul was enforced to make ! For more than
thirty years he was the slave of opium. It blighted his
home ; it alienated his wife ; it ruined his health ; it
made him utterly wretched. " I have been, through a
large portion of my later life," he wrote, in 1834, "a

214 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, xviii
sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languor, and
manifold inflrmities." But behind all this, — more
dreadful still and harder to bear, — was he not the slave
of some ingrained perversity of the mind itself, some
helpless and hopeless irresolution of character, some
enervating spell of that sublime yet pitiable dejection
of Hamlet, which kept him forever at war with himself,
and, last of all, cast him out upon the homeless ocean
of despair, to drift away into ruin and death ? There
are shapes more awful than his, in the records of liter
ary history, — the ravaged, agonising form of Swift, for
instance, and the wonderful, desolate face of Byron ;
but there is no flgure more forlorn and pathetic.
This way the memory of Coleridge came upon me,
standing at his grave. He should have been laid in
some wild, free place, where the grass could grow above
him and the trees could wave their branches over his
head. They placed him in a ponderous tomb, of gray
stone, in Highgate churchyard, and in later times they
have reared a new building above it, — the grammar-
school of the village, — so that now the tomb, fenced
round with iron, is in a cold, barren, gloomy crypt, ac
cessible indeed from the churchyard, through several
arches, but grim and doleful in all its surroundings ; as
if the evil and cruel fate that marred his life were still
triumphant over his ashes.

CHAPTER XIX

ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD

N England, as elsewhere, every historic
spot is occupied ; and of course it some
times happens, at such a spot, that its
association is marred and its sentiment
almost destroyed by the presence of the
persons and the interests of to-day. The visitor to
such places must carry with him not only knowledge
and sensibility but imagination and patience. He will
not flnd the way strewn with roses nor the atmosphere
of poetry ready-made for his enjoyment. That atmos
phere, indeed, for the most part — especially in the
cities — he must himself supply. Relics do not robe
themselves for exhibition. The Past is utterly indiffer
ent to its worshippers. All manner of little obstacles,
too, will arise before the pilgrim, to thwart him in his
search. The mental strain and bewilderment, the inev
itable physical weariness, the soporific influence of the
climate, the tumult of the streets, the frequent and dis
heartening spectacle of poverty, squalor, and vice, the
capricious and untimely rain, the inconvenience of long
215

216 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
distances, the ill-timed arrival and consequent disap
pointment, the occasional nervous sense of loneliness and
insecurity, the inappropriate boor, the ignorant, garru
lous porter, the extortionate cabman, and the jeering
bystander — all these must be regarded with resolute
indifference by him who would ramble, pleasantly and
profltably, in the footprints of English history. Every
thing depends, in other words, upon the eyes with
which you observe and the spirit which you impart.
Never was a keener truth uttered than in the couplet
of Wordsworth —
" Minds that have nothing to confer
Find little to perceive."
To the philosophic stranger, however, even this
prosaic occupancy of historic places is not without
its pleasurable, because humorous, signiflcance. Such
an observer in England will sometimes be amused as
well as impressed by a sudden sense of the singular
incidental position into which — partly through the
lapse of years, and partly through a peculiarity of
national character — the scenes of famous events, not
to say the events themselves, have gradually drifted.
I thought of this one night, when, in Whitehall Gar
dens, I was looking at the statue of James the Second,
and a courteous policeman came up and silently turned
the light of his bull's-eye upon the inscription. A
scene of more incongruous elements, or one suggestive
of a more serio-comic contrast, could not be imagined.
I thought of it again when standing on the village
green near Barnet, and viewing, amid surroundings
both pastoral and ludicrous, the column which there

XIX ON B.\RNET BATTLE-FIELD 217
commemorates the defeat and death of the great
Earl of Warwick, and, consequently, the final tri
umph of the Crown over the last of the Barons of
England. It was toward the close of a cool summer day, and of
a long drive through the beautiful hedgerows of sweet
and verdurous Middlesex, that I came to the villages of
Barnet and Hadley, and went over the field of King
Edward's victory, — that fatal glorious field, on which
Gloster showed such resolute valour, and where Neville,
supreme and magnificent in disaster, fought on foot, to
make sure that himself might go down in the stormy death
of all his hopes. More than four hundred years have
drifted by since that misty April morning when the
star of Warwick was quenched in blood, and ten thou
sand men were slaughtered to end the strife between the
Barons and the Crown ; yet the results of that conflict
are living facts in the government of England now, and
in the fortunes of her inhabitants. If you were unaware
of the solid simplicity and proud reticence of the Eng
lish character, — leading it to merge all its shining
deeds in one continuous fabric of achievement, like
jewels set in a cloth of gold, — you might expect to flnd
this spot adorned with a structure of more than common
splendour. What you actually do flnd there is a plain
monolith, standing in the middle of a common, at the
junction of several roads, — the chief of which are
those leading to Hatfleld and St. Albans, in Hertford
shire, — and on one side of this column you may read,
in letters of faded black, the comprehensive statement
that " Here was fought the famous battle between
Edward the Fourth and the Earl of Warwick, April

' til ^-AffJtS-'* ,
-fa*! \ ll,

*>.:,. ^¦¦^^i^..-¦-

Column on Barnet Battle-Field,

chap. XIX ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD 219
14th, anno 1471, in which the Earl was defeated and
slain."! In my reverie, standing at the foot of this humble,
weather-stained monument, I saw the long range of
Barnet hills, mantled with grass and flowers and with
the golden haze of a morning in spring, swarming with
gorgeous horsemen and glittering with spears and ban
ners ; and I heard the vengeful clash of arms, the hor
rible neighing of maddened steeds, the furious shouts
of onset, and all the nameless cries and groans of battle,
commingled in a thrilling yet hideous din. Here rode
King Edward, intrepid, handsome, and stalwart, with
his proud, cruel smile and his long, yellow hair. There
Warwick swung his great two-handed sword, and mowed
his foes like grain. And there the fiery form of Richard,
splendid in burnished steel, darted like the scorpion,
dealing death at every blow ; till at last, in fatal mis
chance, the sad star of Oxford, assailed by its own
friends, was swept out of the field, and the fight drove,
raging, into the valleys of Hadley. How strangely,
though, did this fancied picture contrast with the actual
scene before me ! At a little distance, all around the
viUage green, the peaceful, embowered cottages kept
their sentinel watch. Over the careless, straggling
grass went the shadow of the passing cloud. Not a
sound was heard, save the rustle of leaves and the low
laughter of some little children, playing near the
monument. Close by and at rest was a flock of geese,
couched upon the cool earth, and, as their custom is,
supremely contented with themselves and all the world.
1 The words "stick no bills" have been intrusively added, just below
this inscription.

220

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND

chap. XIX

And at the foot of the column, stretched out at his full
length, in tattered garments that scarcely covered his
nakedness, reposed the British labourer, fast asleep
upon the sod. No more Wars of the Roses now ; but
calm retirement, smiling plenty, cool western winds, and
sleep and peace —
" With a red rose and a white rose
Leaning, nodding at the wall."

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CHAPTER XX
A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY
NE of the most impressive spots on earth,
and one that especially teaches — with
silent, pathetic eloquence and solemn
admonition — the great lesson of con
trast, the incessant flow of the ages and
the inevitable decay and oblivion of the past, is the
ancient city of Canterbury. Years and not merely days
of residence there are essential to the adequate and
right comprehension of that wonderful place. Yet
even an hour passed among its shrines will teach
you, as no printed word has ever taught, the meas
ureless power and the sublime beauty of a perfect
religious faith ; while, as you stand and meditate in the
shadow of the gray cathedral walls, the pageant of a
thousand years of history will pass before you like a
dream. The city itself, with its bright, swift river (the
Stour), its opulence of trees and flowers, its narrow
winding streets, its numerous antique buildings, its
many towers, its fragments of ancient wall and gate,
its formal decorations, its air of perfect cleanliness and
I

chap. XX A GLIMPSE OF C.-VNTERBURY 223
thoughtful gravity, its beautiful, umbrageous suburbs,
— where the scarlet of the poppies and the russet red
of the clover make one vast rolling sea of colour and of
fragrant delight, — and, to crown all, its stately char
acter of wealth without ostentation and industry without
tumult, must prove to you a deep and satisfying com
fort. But, through all this, pervading and surmounting
it all, the spirit of the place pours in upon your heart,
and floods your whole being with the incense and organ
music of passionate, jubilant devotion.
It was not superstition that reared those gorgeous
fanes of worship which still adorn, even while they no
longer consecrate, the ecclesiastic cities of the old world.
In the age of Augustine, Dunstan, and Ethelnoth human
ity had begun to feel its profound and vital need of a
sure and settled reliance on religious faith. The drift
ing spirit, worn with sorrow, doubt, and self-conflict,
longed to be at peace — longed for a refuge equally
from the evils and tortures of its own condition and the
storms and perils of the world. In that longing it
recognised its immortality and heard the voice of its
Divine Parent; and out of the ecstatic joy and utter
abandonment of its new-born, passionate, responsive
faith, it built and consecrated those stupendous temples,
— rearing them with all its love no less than all its
riches and all its power. There was no wealth that it
would not give, no toil that it would not perform, and
no sacriflce that it would not make, in the accomplish
ment of its sacred task. It was grandly, nobly, terribly
in earnest, and it achieved a work that is not only sub
lime in its poetic majesty but measureless in the scope
and extent of its moral and spiritual influence. It has

Butchery Lajie^ Canterbury.

chap. XX A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY 225
left to succeeding ages not only a legacy of permanent
beauty, not only a sublime symbol of religious faith, but
an everlasting monument to the loveliness and greatness
that are inherent in human nature. No creature with
a human heart in his bosom can stand in such a build
ing as Canterbury cathedral without feeling a greater
love and reverence than he ever felt before, alike for
God and man.
On a day (July 27, 1882) when a class of the boys of
the King's School of Canterbury was graduated the
present writer chanced to be a listener to the impressive
and touching sermon that was preached before them, in
the cathedral ; wherein they were tenderly admonished
to keep unbroken their associations with their school
days and to remember the lessons of the place itself.
That counsel must have sunk deep into every mind. It
is difficult to understand how any person reared amid
such scenes and relics could ever cast away their hal
lowing influence. Even to the casual visitor the bare
thought of the historic treasures that are garnered in
this temple is, by itself, sufficient to implant in the
bosom a memorable and lasting awe. For more than
twelve hundred years the succession of the Archbishops
of Canterbury has remained substantially unbroken.
There have been ninety-three " primates of all Eng
land," of whom fifty-three were buried in the cathedral,
and here the tombs of fifteen of them are still visi
ble. Here was buried the sagacious, crafty, inflexible,
indomitable Henry the Fourth, — that Hereford whom
Shakespeare has described and interpreted with match
less, immortal eloquence, — and here, cut off in the
morning of his greatness, and lamented to this day in

226 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, xx
the hearts of the English people, was laid the body of
Edward the Black Prince, who to a dauntless valour
and terrible prowess in war added a high-souled, hu
man, and tender magnanimity in conquest, and whom
personal virtues and shining public deeds united to
make the ideal hero of chivalry. In no other way than
by personal observance of such memorials can historic
reading be invested with a perfect and permanent
reality. Over the tomb of the Black Prince, with its
flne recumbent effigy of gilded brass, hang the gaunt
lets that he wore ; and they tell you that his sword for
merly hung there, but that Oliver Cromwell — who
revealed his iconoclastic and unlovely character in mak
ing a stable of this cathedral — carried it away. Close
at hand is the tomb of the wise, just, and gentle Car
dinal Pole, simply inscribed " Blessed are the dead
which die in the Lord " ; and you may touch a little,
low mausoleum of gray stone, in which are the ashes of
John Morton, that Bishop of Ely from whose garden in
Holborn the strawberries were brought for the Duke of
Gloster, on the day when he condemned the accom
plished Hastings, and who "fled to Richmond," in good
time, from the standard of the dangerous Protector.
Standing there, I could almost hear the resolute, scorn
ful voice of Richard, breathing out, in clear, implacable
accents —
" Ely with Richmond troubles me more near
Than Buckingham and his rash-levied strength."
The astute Morton, when Bosworth was over and
Richmond had assumed the crown and Bourchier had
died, was made Archbishop of Canterbury ; and as

Flying Horse Inn, Canterbury.

228 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
such, at a great age, he passed away. A few hundred
yards from his place of rest, in a vault beneath the
Church of St. Dunstan, is the head of Sir Thomas
More (the body being in St. Peter's, at the Tower of
London), who in his youth had been a member of
Morton's ecclesiastical household, and whose greatness
that prelate had foreseen and prophesied. Did no
shadow of the scaffold ever fall across the statesman's
thoughts, as he looked upon that handsome, manly boy,
and thought of the troublous times that were raging
about them .? Morton, aged ninety, died in 1500; More,
aged flfty-flve, in 1535. Strange fate, indeed, was that,
and as inscrutable as mournful, which gave to those
who in life had been like father and son such a
ghastly association in death ! ^ They show you the
place where Becket was murdered, and the stone steps,
worn hollow by the thousands upon thousands of de
vout pilgrims who, in the days before the Reformation,
crept up to weep and pray at the costly, resplendent
shrine of St. Thomas. The bones of Becket, as all the
world knows, were, by command of Henry the Eighth,
burnt, and scattered to the winds, while his shrine was
pillaged and destroyed. Neither tomb nor scutcheon
commemorates him here, — but the cathedral itself is
^ St. Dunstan's church was connected with the Convent of St. Gregory.
The Roper family, in the time of Henry the Fourth, founded a chapel in
it, in which are two marble tombs, commemorative of them, and under
neath which is their burial vault. Margaret Roper, Sir Thomas More's
daughter, obtained her father's head, after his execution, and buried it
here. The vault was opened in 1835, — when a new pavement was laid
in the chancel of this church, — and persons descending into it saw the
head, in a leaden box shaped like a beehive, open in front, set in a niche
in the wall, behind an iron grill.

XX A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY 229
his monument. There it stands, with its grand columns
and glorious arches, its towers of enormous size and
its long vistas of distance, so mysterious and awful, its
gloomy crypt where once the silver lamps sparkled and
the smoking censers were swung, its tombs of mighty
warriors and statesmen, its frayed and crumbling ban
ners, and the eternal, majestic silence with which it
broods over the love, ambition, glory, defeat, and an
guish of a thousand years, dissolved now and ended in
a little dust ! As the organ music died away I looked
upward and saw where a bird was wildly flying to and
fro, through the vast spaces beneath its lofty roof, in
the vain effort to flnd some outlet of escape. Fit em
blem, truly, of the human mind which strives to com
prehend and to utter the meaning of this marvellous
fabric !

CHAPTER XXI
THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE
1882
|IGHT, in Stratford-upon-Avon — a sum
mer night, with large, solemn stars, a cool
and fragrant breeze, and the stiflness of
perfect rest. From this high and grassy
bank I look forth across the darkened
meadows and the smooth and shining river, and see the
little town where it lies asleep. Hardly a light is any
where visible. A few great elms, near by, are nodding
and rustling in the wind, and once or twice a drowsy
bird-note floats up from the neighbouring thicket that
skirts the vacant, lonely road. There, at some distance,
are the dim arches of Clopton's Bridge. In front — a
graceful, shapely mass, indistinct in the starlight — rises
the fair Memorial, Stratford's honour and pride. Fur
ther off, glimmering through the tree-tops, is the dusky
spire of Trinity, keeping its sacred vigil over the dust
of Shakespeare. Nothing here is changed. The same
tranquil beauty, as of old, hallows this place ; the same
sense of awe and mystery broods over its silent shrines
230

chap. XXI THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE

231

of everlasting renown. Long and weary the years have
been since last I saw it ; but to-night they are remem
bered only as a fleeting and troubled dream. Here,
once more, is the highest and noblest companionship
this world can give. Here, once more, is the almost
visible presence of the one magician who can lift the

Straiford-upon-A von.

soul out of the infinite weariness of common things and
give it strength and peace. The old time has come
back, and the bloom of the heart that I thought had all
faded and gone. I stroll again to the river's brink,
and take my place in the boat, and, trailing my hand
in the dark waters of the Avon, forget every trouble
that ever I have known.

232 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
It is often said, with reference to memorable places,
that the best view always is the first view. No doubt
the accustomed eye sees blemishes. No doubt the
supreme moments of human life are few and come but
once ; and neither of them is ever repeated. Yet fre
quently it will be found that the change is in ourselves
and not in the objects we behold. Scott has glanced at
this truth, in a few mournful lines, written toward the
close of his heroic and beautiful life. Here at Stratford,
however, I am not conscious that the wonderful charm
of the place is in any degree impaired. The town still
preserves its old-fashioned air, its quaintness, its perfect
cleanliness and order. At the Shakespeare cottage, in
the stillness of the room where he was born, the spirits
of mystery and reverence still keep their imperial state.
At the ancient grammar-school, with its pent-house roof
and its dark, sagging rafters, you still may see, in fancy,
the unwilling schoolboy gazing upward absently at the
great, rugged timbers, or looking wistfully at the sun
shine, where it streams through the little lattice windows
of his prison. New Place, with its lovely lawn, its spa
cious garden, the ancestral mulberry and the ivy-covered
well, will bring the poet before you, as he lived and
moved, in the meridian of his greatness. Cymbeline,
The Tempest, and A Winter s Tale, the last of his works,
undoubtedly were written here ; and this alone should
make it a hallowed spot. Here he blessed his young
daughter on her wedding day ; here his eyes closed in
the long last sleep ; and from this place he was carried
to his grave in the chancel of Stratford church. I pass
once again through the fragrant avenue of limes, the
silent churchyard with its crumbling monuments, the

STRATFORD CHURCH.

XXI THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE 233
dim porch, the twilight of the venerable temple, and
kneel at last above the ashes of Shakespeare. What
majesty in this triumphant rest ! All the great labour
accomplished. The universal human heart interpreted
with a living voice. The memory and the imagination
of mankind stored forever with words of sublime elo
quence and images of immortal beauty. The noble
lesson of self-conquest — the lesson of the entire ade
quacy of the resolute, virtuous, patient human will —
set forth so grandly that all the world must see its mean
ing and marvel at its splendour. And, last of all, death
itself shorn of its terrors and made a trivial thing.
There is a new custodian at New Place, and he will
show you the little museum that is kept there — includ
ing the shovel-board from the old Falcon tavern across
the way, on which the poet himself might have played
— and he will lead you through the gardens, and descant
on the mulberry and on the ancient and still unforgiven
vandalism of the Rev. Francis Gastrell, by whom the
Shakespeare mansion was destroyed (1759), and will
pause at the well, and at the fragments of the founda
tion, covered now with stout screens of wire. There is
a fresh and fragrant beauty all about these grounds, an
atmosphere of sunshine, life, comfort and elegance of
state, that no observer can miss. This same keeper
also has the keys of the guild chapel, opposite, on which
Shakespeare looked from his windows and his garden,
and in which he was the holder of two sittings. You
will enter it by the same porch through which he walked,
and see the arch and columns and tall, mullioned win
dows on which his gaze has often rested. The interior is
cold and barren now, for the scriptural wall-paintings,

234 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
discovered there in 1804, under a thick coating of white
wash, have been obliterated and the wooden pews,
which are modern, have not yet been embrowned by
age. Yet this church, known beyond question as one
of Shakespeare's personal haunts, will hold you with
the strongest tie of reverence and sympathy. At his
birthplace everything remains unchanged. The gentle
ladies who have so long guarded and shown it still have
it in their affectionate care. The ceiling of the room in
which the poet was born — the room that contains " the
Actor's Pillar " and the thousands of signatures on walls
and windows — is slowly crumbling to pieces. Every
morning little particles of the plaster are found upon
the floor. The area of tiny, delicate iron laths, to sustain
this ceiling, has more than doubled (1882) since I first
saw it, in 1877. It was on the ceiling that Lord Byron
wrote his name, but this has flaked off and disappeared.
In the museum hall, once the Swan inn, they are form
ing a library ; and there you may see at least one Shake
spearean relic of extraordinary interest. This is the
MS. letter of Richard Quiney — whose son Thomas
became, in 1616, the husband of Shakespeare's youngest
daughter, Judith — ^ asking the poet for the loan of thirty
pounds. It is enclosed between plates of glass in a
frame, and usually kept covered with a cloth, so that
the sunlight may not fade the ink. The date of this
letter is October 25, 1598, and thirty English pounds
then was a sum equivalent to about six hundred dollars
of American money now. This is the only letter known
to be in existence that Shakespeare received. Miss
Caroline Chataway, the younger of the ladies who keep
this house, will recite to you its text, from memory —

XXI THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE 235
giving a delicious old-fashioned flavour to its quaint
phraseology and fervent spirit, as rich and strange as
the odour of the wild thyme and rosemary that grow
in her garden beds. This antique touch adds a wonder
ful charm to the relics of the past. I found it once
more when sitting in the chimney-corner of Anne
Hathaway's kitchen ; and again in the lovely little
church at Charlecote, where a simple, kindly woman,
not ashamed to reverence the place and the dead, stood
with me at the tomb of the Lucys, and repeated from
memory the tender, sincere, and eloquent epitaph with
which Sir Thomas Lucy thereon commemorates his wife.
The lettering is small and indistinct on the tomb, but
having often read it I well knew how correctly it was
then spoken. Nor shall I ever read it again without think
ing of that kindly, pleasant voice, the hush of the beauti
ful church, the afternoon sunlight streaming through the
oriel window, and — visible through the doorway arch —
the roses waving among the churchyard graves.
In the days of Shakespeare's courtship, when he
strolled across the flelds to Anne Hathaway's cottage af
Shottery, his path, we may be sure, ran through wild
pasture-land and tangled thicket. A fourth part of
England at that time was a wilderness, and the entire
population of that country did not exceed flve millions
of persons. The Stratford-upon-Avon of to-day is still
possessed of some of its ancient features ; but the
region round about it then must have been rude and
wild in comparison with what it is at present. If you
walk in the foot-path to Shottery now you will pass be
tween low fences and along the margin of gardens, —
now in the sunshine, and now in the shadow of larch

236 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
and chestnut and elm, while the sweet air blows upon
your face and the expeditious rook makes rapid wing to
the woodland, cawing as he flies. In the old cottage,
with its roof of thatch, its crooked rafters, its odorous
hedges and climbing vines, its leafy well and its tan
gled garden, everything remains the same. Mrs. Mary
Taylor Baker, the last living descendant of the Hatha
ways, born in this house, always a resident here, and
now an elderly woman, still has it in her keeping, and
still displays to you the ancient carved bedstead in the
garret, the wooden settle by the kitchen flreside, the
hearth at which Shakespeare sat, the great blackened
chimney with its adroit iron "fish-back" for the better
regulation of the tea-kettle, and the brown and tattered
Bible, with the Hathaway family record. Sitting in an
old arm-chair, in the corner of Anne Hathaway's bed
room, I could hear, in the perfumed summer stillness,
the low twittering of birds, whose nest is in the cover
ing thatch and whose songs would awaken the sleeper
at the earliest light of dawn. A better idea can be
^obtained in this cottage than in either the birthplace or
any other Shakespearean haunt of what the real life
actually was of the common people of England in
Shakespeare's day. The stone floor and oak timbers of
the Hathaway kitchen, stained and darkened in the
slow decay of three hundred years, have lost no particle
of their pristine character. The occupant of the cot
tage has not been absent from it more than a week
during upward of half a century. In such a nook the
inherited habits of living do not alter. "The thing that
has been is the thing that shall be," and the customs of
long ago are the customs of to-day.

THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE

237

The Red Horse inn is now in the hands of William
Gardner Colbourne, who has succeeded his uncle Mr.
Gardner, and it is brighter than of old — without, how
ever, having parted with either its antique furniture or
its delightful antique ways. The old mahogany and
wax-candle period has not ended yet in this happy
place, and you sink to sleep on a snow-white pillow, soft
as down and fragrant as lavender. One important
change is especially to be remarked.
They have made a niche in a corner
of Washington Irving's parlour, and
in it have placed his arm-chair, re-
cushioned and polished, and sequested
from touch by a large sheet of plate-
glass. The relic may still be seen,
but the pilgrim can sit upon it no
more. Perhaps it might be well to
enshrine "Geoffrey Crayon's Sceptre"
in a somewhat similar way. It could
be fastened to a shield, displaying the
American colours, and placed in this
storied room. At present it is the tenant of a starred
and striped bag, and keeps its state in the seclusion of
a bureau ; nor is it shown except upon request — like
the beautiful marble statue of Donne, in his shroud,
niched in the chancel wall of St. Paul's cathedral.^
' A few effigies are all that remain of old St. Paul's. The most impor
tant and interesting of them is that shrouded statue of the poet John
Donne, who was Dean of St. Paul's from 1621 to 1631, dying in the latter
year, aged 58. This is in the south aisle of the chancel, in a niche in the
wall. You will not see it unless you ask the privilege. The other relics
are in the crypt and in the churchyard. There is nothing to indicate
the place of the grave of John of Gaunt or that of Sir Philip Sidney. Old
St. Paul's was burned September 2, 1666.

Washington Irving's
Chair.

238 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
One of the strongest instincts of the English character
is the instinct of permanence. It acts involuntarily, it
pervades the national life, and, as Pope said of the
universal soul, it operates unspent. Institutions seem
to have grown out of human nature in this country,
and are as much its expression as blossoms, leaves,
and flowers are the expression of inevitable law. A
custom, in England, once established, is seldom or never
changed. The brflliant career, the memorable achieve
ment, the great character, once fulfllled, takes a per
manent shape in some kind of outward and visible
memorial, some absolute and palpable fact, which
thenceforth is an accepted part of the history of the
land and the experience of its people. England means
stability — the fireside and the altar, home here and
heaven hereafter ; and this is the secret of the power
that she wields in the affairs of the world, and the charm
that she diffuses over the domain of thought. Such a
temple as St. Paul's cathedral, such a palace as Hamp
ton Court, such a castle as that of Windsor or that of
Warwick, is the natural, spontaneous expression of the
English instinct of permanence ; and it is in memorials
like these that England has written her history, with
symbols that can perish only with time itself. At in
tervals her latent animal ferocity breaks loose — as it
did under Henry the Eighth, under Mary, under Crom
well, and under James the Second, — and for a brief
time ramps and bellows, striving to deface and deform
the surrounding structure of beauty that has been slowly
and painfully reared out of her deep heart and her sane
civilisation. But the tears of human pity soon quench
the fire of Smithfield, and it is only for a little while

XXI THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE 239
that the Puritan soldiers play at nine-pins in the nave
of St. Paul's. This fever of animal impulse, this wild
revolt of petulant impatience, is soon cooled ; and then
the great work goes on again, as calmly and surely as
before — that great work of educating mankind to the
level of constitutional liberty, in which England has
been engaged for well-nigh a thousand years, and in
which the American Republic, though sometimes at
variance with her methods and her spirit, is, neverthe
less, her follower and the consequence of her example.
Our Declaration was made in 1776: the Declaration to
the Prince of Orange is dated 1689, and the Bill of
Rights 1628, while Magna Charta was secured in 1215.
Throughout every part of this sumptuous and splendid
domain of Warwickshire the symbols of English stability
and the relics of historic times are numerous and deeply
impressive. At Stratford the reverence of the nine
teenth century takes its practical, substantial form, not
alone in the honourable preservation of the ancient
Shakespearean shrines, but in the Shakespeare Memo
rial. That fabric, though mainly due to the fealty of
England, is also, to some extent, representative of the
practical sympathy of America. Several Americans —
Edwin Booth, Herman Vezin, M. D. Conway, and W. H.
Reynolds among them — were contributors to the fund
that built it, and an American gentlewoman. Miss Kate
Field, has worked for its cause with excellent zeal,
untiring fidelity, and good results. (Miss Mary Ander
son acted — 1885 — in the Memorial Theatre, for its
benefit, presenting for the first time in her life the char
acter of Rosalind.) It is a noble monument. It stands
upon the margin of the Avon, not distant from the

240 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
church of the Holy Trinity, which is Shakespeare's
grave ; so that these two buildings are the conspicuous
points of the landscape, and seem to confront each
other with sympathetic greeting, as if conscious of their
sacred trust. The vacant land adjacent, extending
between the road and the river, is a part of the Memo
rial estate, and is to be converted into a garden, with
pathways, shade-trees, and flowers, — by means of which
the prospect will be made still fairer than now it is, and
will be kept forever unbroken between the Memorial
and the Church. Under this ample roof are already
united a theatre, a library, and a hall of pictures. The
drop-curtain, illustrating the processional progress of
Queen Elizabeth when "going to the Globe Theatre,"
is gay but incorrect. The divisions of seats are in con
formity with the inconvenient arrangements of the
London theatre of to-day. Queen Elizabeth heard
plays in the hall of the Middle Temple, the hall of
Hampton Palace, and at Greenwich and at Richmond ;
but she never went to the Globe Theatre. In historic
temples there should be no trifling with historic themes ;
and surely, in a theatre of the nineteenth century, dedi
cated to Shakespeare, while no fantastic regard should
be paid to the usages of the past, it would be tasteful
and proper to blend the best of ancient ways with all
the luxury and elegance of these times. It is much,
however, to have built what can readily be made a
lovely theatre ; and meanwhile, through the affectionate
generosity of friends in all parts of the world, the library
shelves are continually gathering treasures, and the hall
of paintings is growing more and more the imposing
expository that it was intended to be, of Shakespearean

! •»«^- ?,-«,,

THE STRATFORD MEMORIAL.

X3il THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE 241
poetry and the history of the English stage. Many
faces of actors appear upon those walls — from Garrick
to Edmund Kean, from Macready to Henry Irving,
from Kemble to Edwin Booth, from Mrs. Siddons to
Ellen Terry, Ada Rehan, and Mary Anderson. Prom
inent among the pictures is a spirited portrait of Garrick
and his wife, playing at cards, wherein the lovely, laugh
ing lady archly discloses that her hands are full of
hearts. Not otherwise, truly, is it with sweet and gentle
Stratford herself, where peace and beauty and the most
hallowed and hallowing of poetic associations garner
up, forever and forever, the hearts of all mankind.
In previous papers upon this subject I have tried to
express the feelings that are excited by personal con
tact with the relics of Shakespeare — the objects that
he saw and the flelds through which he wandered.
Fancy would never tire of lingering in this delicious
region of flowers and of dreams. From the hideous
vileness of the social condition of London in the time
of James the First, Shakespeare must indeed have re
joiced to depart into this blooming garden of rustic
tranquillity. Here also he could flnd the surroundings
that were needful to sustain him amid the vast and
overwhelming labours of his final period. No man,
however great his powers, can ever, in this world, escape
from the trammels under which nature enjoins and per
mits the exercise of the brain. Ease, in the intellectual
life, is always visionary. The higher a man's faculties
the higher are his ideals, — toward which, under the
operation of a divine law, he must perpetually strive,
but to the height of which he will never absolutely
attain. So, inevitably, it was with Shakespeare. But,

sMi^*;iir.

chap. XXI THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE 243
although genius cannot escape from itself and is no
more free than the humblest toiler in the vast scheme
of creation, it may — and it must — sometimes escape
from the world : and this wise poet, of all men else,
would surely recognise and strongly grasp the great
privilege of solitude amid the sweetest and most sooth
ing adjuncts of natural beauty. That privilege he
found in the sparkling and fragrant gardens of War
wick, the woods, fields and waters of the Avon, where
he had played as a boy, and where love had laid its first
kiss upon his lips and poetry first opened upon his
inspired vision the eternal glories of her celestial world.
It still abides there, for every gentle soul that can feel
its influence — to deepen the glow of noble passion, to
soften the sting of grief, and to touch the lips of worship
with a fresh sacrament of patience and beauty.

THE ANNE HATHAWAY COTTAGE.
April, 1892. — A record that all lovers of the Shake
speare shrines have long wished to make can at last be
made. The Anne Hathaway Cottage has been bought
for the British Nation, and that building will henceforth
be one of the Amalgamated Trusts that are guarded by
the corporate authorities of Stratford. The other Trusts
are the Birthplace, the Museum, and New Place. The
Mary Arden Cottage, the home of Shakespeare's mother,
is yet to be acquired.

CHAPTER XXII
A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT
" / imist become a borrower of the night.
For a dark Iiour or twain." — MACBETH.

illDNIGHT has just sounded from the
tower of St. Martin. It is a peaceful
night, faintly lit with stars, and in the
region round about Trafalgar Square a
dream-like stillness broods over the dark
ened city, now slowly hushing itself to its brief and
troubled rest. This is the centre of the heart of modern
civilisation, the middle of the greatest city in the world
— the vast, seething alembic of a grand future, the
stately monument of a deathless past. Here, alone, in
my quiet room of this old English inn, let me meditate
a while on some of the scenes that are near me — the
strange, romantic, sad, grand objects that I have seen,
the memorable flgures of beauty, genius, and renown that
haunt this classic land.
How solemn and awful now must be the gloom within
the walls of the Abbey ! A walk of only a few minutes
244

Church of St. Martin.

246 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
•
would bring me to its gates — the gates of the most
renowned mausoleum on earth. No human foot to-night
invades its sacred precincts. The dead alone possess it.
I see, upon its gray walls, the marble figures, white and
spectral, staring through the darkness. I hear the night-
wind moaning around its lofty towers and faintly sob
bing in the dim, mysterious spaces beneath its fretted
roof. Here and there a ray of starlight, streaming
through the sumptuous rose window, falls and lingers,
in ruby or emerald gleam, on tomb, or pillar, or dusky
pavement. Rustling noises, vague and fearful, float
from those dim chapels where the great kings lie in
state, with marble effigies recumbent above their bones.
At such an hour as this, in such a place, do the dead
come out of their graves .'' The resolute, implacable
Queen Elizabeth, the beautiful, ill-fated Queen of Scots,
the royal boys that perished in the Tower, Charles the
Merry and William the Silent — are these, and such
as these, among the phantoms that fill the haunted
aisles ? What a wonderful company it would be, for
human eyes to behold ! And with what passionate
love or hatred, what amazement, or what haughty scorn,
its members would look upon each other's faces, in this
miraculous meeting .-" Here, through the glimmering,
icy waste, would pass before the watcher the august
shades of the poets of five hundred years. Now would
glide the ghosts of Chaucer, Spenser, Jonson, Beau
mont, Dryden, Cowley, Congreve, Addison, Prior, Camp
bell, Garrick, Burke, Sheridan, Newton, and Macaulay
— children of divine genius, that here mingled with the
earth. The grim Edward, who so long ravaged Scot
land ; the blunt, chivalrous Henry, who conquered

XXII A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT 247
France ; the lovely, lamentable victim at Pomfret, and
the harsh, haughty, astute victor at Bosworth ; James
with his babbling tongue, and William with his impas
sive, predominant visage — they would all mingle with
the spectral multitude and vanish into the gloom.
Gentler faces, too, might here once more reveal their
loveliness and their grief — Eleanor de Bohun, broken
hearted for her murdered lord ; Elizabeth Claypole, the
meek, merciful, beloved daughter of Cromwell ; Matilda,
Queen to Henry the First, and model of every grace
and virtue ; and sweet Anne Neville, destroyed — if his
enemies told the truth — by the politic craft of Gloster.
Strange sights, truly, in the lonesome Abbey to-night !
In the sombre crypt beneath St. Paul's cathedral how
thrilling now must be the heavy stillness ! No sound
can enter there. No breeze from the upper world can
stir the dust upon those massive sepulchres. Even in
day-time that shadowy vista, with its groined arches
and the black tombs of Wellington and Nelson and the
ponderous funeral-car of the Iron Duke, is seen with a
shudder. How strangely, how fearfully the mind would
be impressed, of him who should wander there to-night !
What sublime reflections would be his, standing beside
the ashes of the great admiral, and thinking of that
fiery, dauntless spirit — so simple, resolute, and true —
who made the earth and the sea alike resound with the
splendid tumult of his deeds. Somewhere beneath this
pavement is the dust of Sir Philip Sidney — buried
here before the destruction of the old cathedral, in the
great fire of 1666 — and here, too, is the nameless grave
of the mighty Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt.
Shakespeare was only twenty-two years old when Sidney

24S SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, xxti
fell, at the battle of Zutphen, and, being then resident
in London, he might readily have seen, and doubtless
did see, the splendid funeral procession with which the
body of that heroic gentleman — radiant and immortal
example of perfect chivalry — was borne to the tomb.
Hither came Henry of Hereford — returning from exile
and deposing the handsome, visionary, useless Richard
— to mourn over the relics of his father, dead of sorrow
for his son's absence and his country's shame. Here,
at the venerable age of ninety-one, the glorious brain of
Wren found rest at last, beneath the stupendous temple
that himself had reared. The watcher in the crypt to
night would see, perchance, or fancy that he saw, those
figures from the storied past. Beneath this roof —the
soul and the perfect symbol of sublimity ! — are ranged
more than fourscore monuments to heroic martial per
sons who have died for England, by land or sea. Here,
too, are gathered in everlasting repose the honoured
relics of men who were famous in the arts of peace.
Reynolds and Opie, Lawrence and West, Landseer,
Turner, Cruikshank, and many more, sleep under the
sculptured pavement where now the pilgrim walks. For
fifteen centuries a Christian church has stood upon this
spot, and through it has poured, with organ strains and
glancing lights, an endless procession of prelates and
statesmen, of poets and vvarriors and kings. Surely
this is hallowed and haunted ground ! Surely to him
the spirits of the mighty dead would be very near, who
— alone, in the darkness — should stand to-night within
those sacred walls, and hear, beneath that awful dome,
the mellow thunder of the bells of God.
How looks, to-night, the interior of the chapel of the

250 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
Foundling hospital .? Dark and lonesome, no doubt,
with its heavy galleries and sombre pews, and the great
organ — Handel's gift — standing there, mute and grim,
between the ascending tiers of empty seats. But never,
in my remembrance, will it cease to present a picture
more impressive and touching than words can say.
Scores of white-robed children, rescued from shame and
penury by this noble benevolence, were ranged around
that organ when I saw it, and, with artless, frail little
voices, singing a hymn of praise and worship. Well-
nigh one hundred and fifty years have passed since this
grand institution of charity — the sacred work and
blessed legacy of Captain Thomas Coram — was estab
lished in this place. What a divine good it has accom
plished, and continues to accomplish, and what a pure
glory hallows its founder's name ! Here the poor
mother, betrayed and deserted, may take her child and
find for it a safe and happy home and a chance in life
— nor will she herself be turned adrift without sym
pathy and help. The poet and novelist George Croly
was once chaplain of the Foundling hospital, and he
preached some noble sermons there ; but these were
thought to be above the comprehension of his usual
audience, and he presently resigned the place. Sidney
Smith often spoke in this pulpit, when a young man.
It was an aged clergyman who preached there within
my hearing, and I remember he consumed the most
part of an hour in saying that a good way in which
to keep the tongue from speaking evil is to keep the
heart kind and pure. Better than any sermon, though,
was the spectacle of those poor children, rescued out
of their helplessness and reared in comfort and affec-

A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT

251

tion. Several fine works of art are owned by this hos
pital and shown to visitors — paintings by Gainsborough
and Reynolds, and a portrait of Captain Coram, by Ho
garth. May the
turf lie lightly
on him, and dai
sies and violets
deck his hal
lowed grave !
No man ever did
a better deed
than he, and the
darkest night
that ever was
cannot darken
his fame.
How dim and
silent now are
all those narrow
and dingy little
streets and lanes
around Paul's
churchyard and
the Temple,
where Johnson
and Goldsmith
loved to ramble !
More than once
have I wandered there, in the late hours of the night,
meeting scarce a human creature, but conscious of a
royal company indeed, of the wits and poets and play
ers of a far-off time. Darkness now, on busy Smith-

Middle Temple Lane.

252 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap.
fleld, where once the frequent, cruel flames of bigotry
shed forth a glare that sickened the light of day.
Murky and grim enough to-night is that grand pro
cessional walk in St. Bartholomew's church, where
the great gray pillars and splendid Norman arches of
the twelfth century are mouldering in neglect and
decay. Sweet to fancy and dear in recollection, the
old church comes back to me now, with the sound
of children's voices and the wail of the organ strangely
breaking on its pensive rest. Stillness and peace
over arid Bunhill Fields — the last haven of many a
Puritan worthy, and hallowed to many a pilgrim as
the resting-place of Bunyan and of Watts. In many a
park and gloomy square the watcher now would hear
only a rustling of leaves or the fretful twitter of half-
awakened birds. Around Primrose Hill and out toward
Hampstead many a night-walk have I taken, that
seemed like rambling in a desert — so dark and still are
the walled houses, so perfect is the solitude. In Drury
Lane, even at this late hour, there would be some move
ment ; but cold and dense as ever the shadows are rest
ing on that little graveyard behind it, where Lady
Dedlock went to die. To walk in Bow Street now, —
might it not be to meet the shades of Waller and
Wycherley and Betterton, who lived and died there ; to
have a greeting from the silver-tongued Barry ; or to
see, in draggled lace and ruffles, the stalwart flgure and
flushed and roystering countenance of Henry Fielding ?
Very quiet now are those grim stone chambers in the
terrible Tower of London, where so many tears have
fallen and so many noble hearts been split with sorrow.
Does Brackenbury still kneel in the cold, lonely, vacant

A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT

253

chapel of St. John ; or the sad ghost of Monmouth
hover in the chancel of St. Peter's ? How sweet to--
night would be the rustle of the ivy on the dark walk
of Hadley church, where late I breathed the rose-scented
air and heard the warbling thrush, and blessed, with
a grateful heart, the loving kindness that makes such
beauty in the world !
Out there on the hill
side of Highgate, pop
ulous with death, the
starlight gleams on
many a ponderous
tomb and the white
marble of many a
sculptured statue,
where dear and fa
mous names will lure
the traveller's foot
steps for years to
come. There Lynd-
hurst rests, in honour
and peace, and there
is hushed the tuneful
voice of Dempster — ¦
never to be heard any more, either when snows are
flying or "when green leaves come again." Not many
days have passed since I stood there, by the humble
gravestone of poor Charles Harcourt, that fine actor,
and remembered all the gentle enthusiasm with which
(1877) he spoke to me of the character of Jaques —
which he loved — and how well he repeated the im
mortal lines upon the drama of human life. For him

The Castle Inn.

254 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND chap, xxu
the "strange, eventful history" came early and sud
denly to an end. In that ground, too, I saw the sculp
tured medallion of the well-beloved George Honey —
" all his frolics o'er " and nothing left but this. Many
a golden moment did we have, old friend, and by me
thou art not forgotten ! The lapse of a few years
changes the whole face of life ; but nothing can ever
take from us our memories of the past. Here, around
me, in the still watches of the night, are the faces that
will never smile again, and the voices that will speak
no more — Sothern, with his silver hair and bright and
kindly smile, from the spacious cemetery of Southamp
ton ; and droll Harry Beckett and poor Adelaide Neil
son from dismal Brompton. And if I look from yonder
window I shall not see either the lions of Landseer or
the homeless and vagrant wretches who sleep around
them ; but high in her silver chariot, surrounded with
all the pomp and splendour that royal England knows,
and marching to her coronation in Westminster Abbey,
the beautiful figure of Anne Boleyn, with her dark eyes
full of triumph and her torrent of golden hair flashing
in the sun. On this spot is written the whole history
of a mighty empire. Here are garnered up such loves
and hopes, such memories and sorrows, as can never be
spoken. Pass, ye shadows ! Let the night wane and
the morning break.

THE END

THE WORKS OF MR. WILLIAM WINTER.

Just Published.
Shadows of the Stage.
Second Series. iSmo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cen'ts.
*,(* Also a limited edition, printed on laid paper, with ample
margins, $2. 00.
Shakespeare's England.
i8mo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents.
Gray Days and Cold.
iSmo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents.
Old Shrines and Ivy.
i8mo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents.
Shadows of the Stage.
First Series. i8mo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents.
The above four volumes, uniformly bound in half calf or half morocco,
in a box, gS.oo.
*^* Also a limited edition, printed on laid paper, with ample
margins, four volumes, in a box, $8.00.
Wanderers.
Being a Collection of the Poems of WILLIAM WINTER. New Edition,
Revised and Enlarged. With a Portrait of the .\uthor. iSmo, cloth,
gilt top, 75 cents.
**"' Also a limited large-paper edition, printed on English hand
made paper. Price S2.50.
George William Curtis.
With Portrait. iSmo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents.

SHAKESPEARE 5 ENGLAND.
New Edition. i8mo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents.
" To him England is the 'old home'; historical and romantic asso
ciations cluster around his path wherever he goes ; and he sets down
his impressions with a felicity of language that is in itself a source of con
tinuous enjoyment. \Vhether rambling about London in pursuit of mem
ories of a great and noble past, visiting Shakespeare's country, studying
the grandeur of Warwick and Kenilworth, or tarrying at the shrines of
\\'arwickshire, j\Ir. Winter is always a gracious, sympathetic, and edify
ing guide.'' — Boston Beacon.
"Mr. Winter's sympathy with English antiquity is profound; he
writes reverently, meditatively, and eloquentlj'. As an interpreter of the
thoughts and feelings of Americans wlio approach historic and literary
England with intelligent appreciation of what it all stands for to them, he
is dehghtful, wise, and impressive." — Nezi' York Times.
"In the graceful English of which Mr. Winter is a master, he dis
courses as only a poet could, and surely as Shakespeare himself would
have desired, on Stratford-on-Avon and its environs — the most satisfactory
account of the place we recall — and on the kindred topic, ' The Shrines of
Warwickshire.' Other chapters describe with the same enthusiasm and
delicate appreciation the old churches and literary shrines of London,
\\''estmin3ter Abbey, Canterbury, Stoke-Pogis, Windsor, and other his
toric places. Every lover of Shakespeare should own, or at least read, the
book."- — A]-t Amateur.
" He offers something more than guidance to the American traveller.
He is a convincing and eloquent interpreter of the august memories and
venerable sanctities of the old country.'' — Saturday Revieiu.
" Enthusiastic and yet keenly critical notes and comments on English
Ufe and scenery.'' — Scotsman.
" The book is delightful reading. It is a delicious view of England
wich this poet takes. It is indeed the noble, hospitable, merry, romance-
haunted England of our fathers — the England which we know of in song
and story.'' — Scribaer's Moitthly.

GRAY DAYS AND GOLD.
New Edition. i8mo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents.
" This book, which is intended as a companion to ' Shakespeare's Eng
land,' relates to the gray days of an American wanderer in the British
Islands, and to the gold of thought and fancy that can be found there.
Mr. Winter's graceful and meditative style in his English sketches has
recommended his earlier volume upon [Shakespeare's] England to many
readers, who will not need urging to make the acquaintance of this com
panion-book, in which the traveller guides us through the quiet and roman
tic scenery of the mother-country with a mingled affection and sentiment
of which we have had no example since Irving's day," — The Nation.
"No more delightful guide to the homes and haunts of genius could
any reader desire." — Kilmarnock Journal.
" For those who are unable to visit the scenes, and have to be content
with seeing through the eyes of others, a better description would be diffi
cult to find ; and to those who propose to visit the districts no more useful,
informing, and pleasant companion could be recommended." — Glasgow
Herald. " Mr. Winter, whether he writes in simple prose or tuneful verse, is
always poetical, and it is one of his chief characteristics, as it is his great
est charm as a writer, that he not only perceives the poetic beauty of the
scenes he visits, but that he makes his readers perceive it. There are more
golden than gray days in this book, for Mr. Winter's thought is like to an
Eldorado in its natural opulence of wealth ; it is always bright, warm,
glowing with color, rich in feeling. , . , They who have never visited the
scenes which Mr, Winter so charmingly describes will be eager to do so in
order to realize his fine descriptions of them, and they who have already
visited them will be incited by his eloquent recital of their attractions to
repeat their former pleasant experiences," — Public Ledger, Philadelphia.
" They show at their best their author's quick sympathy and clear in
sight into the essential in the works and the lives of those who have made
recent Enghsh literature what it is— Burns, Scott, Byron, Matthew Arnold,
Clough, and many others. He has followed where they walked, has sat
beside their graves, has entered into their spirit." — Evangelist.
" Much that is bright and best in our literature is brought once more to
our dulled memories. Indeed, we know of but few volumes containing so
much of observation, kindly comment, philosophy, and artistic weight as
this unpretentious little book." — Chicago Herald.
" Is as friendly and good-humoured a book on English scenes as any
American has written since Washington Irving," — Daily News, London.

OLD SHRINE5 AND IVY.
iSmo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents.
"This volume, in harmony with the edition of Mr. Winter's selected
essays and poems published by Macmillan during this past year, contains
some of his most charming work. The essays he lays as offerings upon
the shrines of history and of literature. Mr. Winter may have gone in
search of history, but his offerings — praise be to history that they lie upon
her shrine — are bits from his wanderings in England, Scotland, and
France, and of his 'lingering in lovely Warwickshire.' Here he medi
tated — and the thread runs through all the book — upon the divine poet with
whose story and spirit the region is 'ha.Wowed.''''— Journal 0/ Education.
" It is a thoughtful book, full of tender and reminiscent ideas strung
together on the thread of history." — Appeal Avalanche.
" We are glad to have these gatherings and meditations of a pure and
classic dramatic scholar saved from the fate of what are aptly called
' fugitive ' productions." — New York Observer.
" The sketches are written with the grace and sentiment that charac
terized so happily 'Gray Days and Gold,' and the shining thread of the
author's Shakespearianism runs through them." — Nation.
" A decidedly choice specimen of good literature is ' Old Shrines and
Ivy,' by William Winter, devoted at the outset to English Cathedrals, the
pleasing views along the road to them, the historical associations of the
great buildings and their relations to Shakespeare's plays, and adding
instructive critical notes on some of the plays and on Sheridan's ' School
for Scandal,' and closing with a very hearty personal tribute to Mr, Long
fellow,'' — Christian Lntelligencer.
" It is pleasant to visit Arden in such sympathetic company as that of
William Winter." — St. Paul Pioneer Press.
"Those loving Shakespeare and his lovers should certainly see to it
that this dainty little book is not only on their shelves, but thoroughly
read and re-read." — American Hebi'ew.
" No one else could have written these letters and essays. They
are instinct with poetry, and they breathe that reverence for the great
names of history and literature which seems almost to have been crushed
out by the present idolatry of material achievement." — San Francisco
Chronicle.

SHADOWS OF THE STAGE.
FIRST SERIES.
i8mo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents.
*^* Also a limited large-paper edition, $2.00.
"His stage memories are models of the best dramatic criticism, not
only in sympathetic understanding of the subject, but in perfect courtesy
and appreciation. "—yoarKa/ of Education.
" Mr. WiUiam Winter's impressionable genius has seized upon the
' shadows ' of the stage, transforming them into enduring pictures of
reality in this charming little book, in which we find chapters on Jefferson,
Edwin Booth, McCuUough, Adelaide Neilson, Irving, Ellen Terry, Mary
Anderson, the Florences, Ada Rehan, and others ; and the volume is one
of present interest and future value." — Boston Budget.
"Taken one by one, and regarded in the light of their original inten
tion, Mr. Winter's essays present features of very high merit. He pos
sesses a full vocabulary, and uses it with freedom and vigour. His
impulsive eloquence gives powerful and picturesque expression to catholic
sympathies and cultured taste." — Saturday Revieiu.
" i\Ir. Winter has long been known as the foremost of American
dramatic critics, as a writer of very charming verse, and as a master in the
lighter veins of English prose." — Chicago Herald.
" He has the poise and sure judgment of long experience, the fine per
ception and cultured mind of a litterateur and man of the world, and a
command of vivid and flexible language quite his own. One must look
far for anything approaching it in the way of dramatic criticism ; only
Lamb could write more delightfully of actors and acting. . . . Mr. Winter
is possessed of that quality invaluable to a play-goer, a temperament finely
receptive, sensitive to excellence ; and this it is largely which gives his
dramatic writings their value. Criticism so luminous, kindly, genial,
sympathetic, and delicately expressed fulfils its function to the utmost." —
Milwaukee Sentinel.
"This little book is in every way delightful. It gives us charming
glimpses of personal character, exquisite bits of criticism, and the indefina
ble charm of stage life. . . . No transcript of American life of to-day would
be complete without these pictures, and Mr. Winter has in a sense done a
service to history in this exquisite little book." — Appeal Avalanche.

SHADOWS OF THE STAGE.
SECOND SERIES.
i8mo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents.
*^* Also a limited large-paper edition, $2.00.
'' The reader is thrilled almost into the belief that he himself has seen
and heard these great ones, so illuminating is the touch of this biographer.
How fine are his discriminations ; how kindly is his severest censure 1" —
Philadelphia Record.
"Mr. Winter's exquisite style lends a charm to every page of the
'Shadows,' and there are many passages of analytical criticism that make
it a valuable contribution to stage literature." — Dramatic AIir7'or.
" It contains sketches of the elder Booth, who was probably the most
original actor ever seen in America ; ot Forrest ; of James H. Hackett,
celebrated for his personation of Falstaff ; of John E. Owens ; of John
Brougham ; of Modjeska, and of twenty others, either in some special or
general aspect. An appreciative chapter is on Ada Rehan's acting." —
Chicago Herald.
" The essays . are significant not only as containing on the whole
the best literary criticism of the drama in our language to-day, but as
forming with the first series under its title, already published, a tolerably
complete history of the American stage.
"Mr. Winter's rare gifts of insight, and his faculty of felicitous ex
pression are nowhere more conspicuous than in these papers, which em
brace a wide range of subject in their treatment of dramatic themes, and
in their comment, commemorative and historical, upon actors, most of
them contemporary, but not a few of whom have already joined the
'shadows' on the other shore." — New York Home fournal.
" An exceedingly entertaining contribution to the history of the Amer
ican drama." — Boston Beacon.
" As long as men and women will want to hear and read about the
kings and queens of tragedy and comedy, these memorials of the American
stage with which Mr, Winter has been contemporaneous will be read with
delight. . It is a rare intellectual pleasure to read, couched in this pure
and crystalline English, the calm judgments of a man who is so unmistak
ably /«c?'/(!/rz'«c^/.r in his art." — Newark Daily Advertiser.

WANDERERS.
Being a Collection of the Poems of William Winter.
New Edition, Revised and Enlarged. With a Portrait of the
Author. i8mo, cloth, gilt top, 75 cents.
%* Also a limited large-paper edition, printed on English
hand-made paper. Price, $2.50.
"Free from cant and rant — clear-cut as a cameo, pellucid as a moun
tain brook. It may be derided as trite, borni^ unimpassioned ; but in
its own modest sphere it is, to our thinking, extraordinarily successful,
and satisfies us far more than the pretentious mouthing which receives the
seal of over-hasty approbation." — Athencsum.
" They evince the true poetic spirit, and for daintiness, combined with
elegance, depth, and power, rank with many of the best poems of the cen
tury. To any one unfamiliar with Mr. Winter's peculiar gift this appears
to be strong praise, but in his little volume will be found many gems of
rare purity and sentiment." — Minneapolis Tribujie.
"A most graceful and felicitous poet of occasions, Mr. Winter is yet
more. He has the poet's temperament, with all its delicacy of intuitive
insight, its susceptibility to beauty, and its ardent emotion. His music is
all in minor chords, and if it is not the heroic call to life, the triumphant
faith in the life to come, it is so sympathetic and so sweet in its sadness
that it charms the imagination like a plaintive melody heard in the
shadowy twilight." — Bostojt Budget.
"Mr. Winter has gone back for his inspiration to the English lyrical
poets of the Elizabethan period and their successors, who, in spite of
many changes in taste, still retain a secure place in our affections ; and
their sweetness, simplicity, and spontaneity are easily traceable in his
Umpid verse." — Home Joui-nal {New York).
"Whatever the theme of his song, he gives it that exquisite finish and
imparts to it that true poetic touch that cannot fail to charm the reader
who is blessed with a keen appreciation of the high, beautiful, and true
elements of poetry. He is graceful, harmonious, spontaneous, apprecia
tive, and strong." — Boston Home Journal.
"... A collection of some poems as true as any that have been
penned in the language for a century. The commendation is a strong
one, but it is only just. Mr. Winter in every verse gives full testimony of
the possession of the real poetic spirit." — Chicago Ti?nes.

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.
With Portrait. ISmo, clotli, 75 cents.
" Mr. Winter easily ranks among the most justly appreciative of
critics and the most graceful of writers, and also was intimately ac
quainted with Mr. Curtis. From any point of view this eulogy com
mands a high degree of admiration, and will be read with wide atten
tion and interest. It is a literary treasure in itself apart from its theme."
— Congregationalist.
" It is the affectionate tribute of one who was a firm and intimate
friend of the dead scholar and who knew the good qualities which were
his. It is eloquent and pathetic in many instances, and full of reminis
cence.'' — Chicago Times.
•• A splendid tribute to one of the foremost men of letter America
has produced." ¦ — CJiicago Herald.
" William Winter's tender, appreciative, eloquent, and just eulogy on
George William Curtis is rightly published in book form and will be
read and cherished by thousands of earnest Americans. . Mr.
Winter has drawn a portrait full of color and feeling." — Boston
Beacon. " A fragrant tribute that now, embalmed between the covers of a
book, will shed lasting sweetness." — Pliiladelphia Record.
" Mr. Winter's tribute to the memory of his lifelong friend is not a
task done perfunctorily. Manifestly his heart inspired the words that
he spoke. The verdict of the future respecting Curtis's rank as an
author, as a man of letters, as an orator, and as a citizen, can hardly be
made up without a reference to this tiny volume; for it embodies from
the experience and observation of a clear-sighted contemporary a sum
mary of the moral and intellectual forces that environed Curtis from his
youth up. It shows that a thorough-going biography of the man would
mean a history of the literature and politics of the nation during a most
important period." — New York Tribune.

MACMILLAN & CO.,
66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEA?V YORK.

3 9002 08561 9667

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