But

his excessive vitality. The transformation was complete as that of his own mad prince, when the brightening radiance of his divine genius gave himself and the world assurance of his immortality. When he had made his hits not only as playwright and poet, but as the successful manager of a London theatre, the scapegrace of Stratford became an acute man of business. Although once doubly a vagabond as deer-stealer and play-actor, his name had long been familiar to the courtiers and citizens of London; and Scott makes even the prosaic Earl of Sussex say to the queen in 'Kenilworth,' "Some of his poetry has rung in mine ears, as if they sounded to boot and saddle." he came to be so well considered in the eyes of the respectable, that even at Stratford his early indiscretions were forgiven, if not forgotten. He had laid by money; he had invested in land and house property; he was actually advanced to the intimacy of such merchants of substance as John à Comb and his brother; and he died decently and discreetly as a gentleman of means and master of the snug mansion of New Place. By the way, that aspect of the poet's career, and the credit in which he had come to be regarded by the country gentry and his fellow - townsmen, was most humorously and pathetically brought out in "Shakespeare's Funeral," by Sir Edward Hamley, reprinted from Maga in the second series of the 'Tales from Blackwood.'

Shakespeare's marriage with the placid and apparently commonplace Ann Hathaway- and she was several years older than himself to boot-seems at first sight as unsuitable as that of Burns with his "bonny Jean." Ann was "sonsy," as we should say in Scotland, and good-natured; and the

union was far from an unhappy one for the poet, as it was probably a very fortunate match for posterity. Had he been caught by some rustic siren who could have made cages as well as nets, he might never have come to trouble with his Justice Shallow, and might have realised a decent competency in the Stratford wool trade. As it was, he had broken bounds for a time, before his genius rose soaring into the infinite. But few men have apparently been more indifferent to fame, although it is conceivable that the seeming indifference may have been born of serene self-assurance. Certain it is, that he scarcely gave a second thought to the offspring of his brain, when they had rapidly taken shape under his flying fingers: he left the capital, when in the full flush of his fame, to come back contentedly to comparative obscurity in Stratford. And if his wife had something to forgive, she forgave it very freely, and we have no doubt made him exceedingly comfortable in his maturity. William Howitt has read in the Sonnets a very pretty and poetical story of Shakespeare's vie intime and conjugal relations. How far it may be fanciful we cannot say; but we are inclined to think there must have been much more in Ann Hathaway than most of her husband's biographers have believed. It is unlikely, on the face of it, that Shakespeare should have married a woman whose soul did not ring responsively to some of the finer chords in his own. We suspect that in her fresh bloom and simple modesty, as in the sweetness of the homely fragrance she diffused, she resembled some of those old-fashioned garden - flowers the dreamer of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" loved so dearly. And if it were so, the happiest evenings of his life may have been

those he passed with Ann at Shottery. It needs little brightness of imagination to picture him there. Though some hideous brick cottages have been run up of late years, the topography can be very slightly changed. As you approach it from Stratford, the hamlet nestles -Artemus Ward used to sneer at villages "nestling," but the word is a good and suggestive one all the same under swelling heights of verdant pasturage, dotted over with clumps of oaks and elms. And close by the cottage the road runs, as it must always have run, between the crofts or the orchards on the left hand, and the babbling little brook on the right. The bridge must have been precisely at the same gentle bend, and we may be sure that the poet often leant over the parapet, losing himself in his fancies, as he gazed upon the stream, when, after breaking in a sharp fall under the greenwood, it stole silently and swiftly towards the shadows of the arch. There or anywhere else in the neighbourhood, whether beneath the appletrees of the Shottery orchard or the oaks in Charlecote Park, where the public footpath strikes across the sacred precincts, we may imagine him lying in rapt abstraction till the springs of verse involuntarily welled up in such a madrigal

as

"Who loves to lie with me,

Under the greenwood tree."

It is just as well for the romantic shrine-hunter to take Shottery first, for first appearances at Stratford are decidedly disenchanting. It seems so prosperous and pushing, that its American visitors might almost imagine themselves in a rising Western town-though they say that the wool-combing is a thing of the past, and that even the reputation of the Stratford ales

has been declining. The railway has been carried very wide of the High Street; and the approach is through a long and straggling suburb, lined at intervals and on either side with bold-faced brick cottages and smart semi-detached villas. Yet though the demolisher has been abroad and the restorer has run riot, there is still an air of most respectable antiquity in the heart and centre of the ancient borough. Shakespeare's house in Henley Street has been brushed up "out of knowledge;" and though the very miscellaneous contents of the museum therein may be gratifying to the curious, we should rather have seen the rough old room we remember over the primitive butcher's shop. But elsewhere there are alms-houses and a chapel of the Holy Cross, and queer dwelling-houses, which, in spite of modern alterations to their complexions, show the respectability of extreme old age through their false airs of coquetry. In such a place as Stratford, we are always specially interested in the inns. Like Canterbury, Stratford has for long been the resort of generations of pilgrims, so any wellconsidered hostelry should be of old standing. The goodwill may have changed hands, but it must always have been well worth selling. There in the broad street leading to the bridge over the Avon-a bridge, by the way, that was built by Sir Thomas Clopton of Clopton, one of the magnificent mayors of London of the Dick Whittington school-is the famous "Red Horse," immortalised by Washington Irving. We confess that we did not enter it, though there is a portal that gapes wide enough in all conscience-evidently made for the passage of heavily laden wains, and leading into a vast courtyard surrounded by stab

ling and waggon-sheds, where troops of carriers like those on Gadshill might once have littered their horses. Now there seemed a certain air of desolation about it; and we confess that we carried our custom to the "Shakespeare" in the High Street. Simple bread and cheese with beer being our customary mid-day fare, we can say nothing as to the culinary resources of that establishment. We only know that we felt a sense of quiet comfort which might have induced us to prolong our stay had we been travelling with our portmanteau in company. But what did strike us was the interpretation of scenes from the plays in a series of prints adorning the walls of the parlour. We enjoyed them, because they chanced to awaken sleeping memories of a similar set hung in a certain old-fashioned Hertfordshire bedroom, where we had awakened as a boy to bright mornings. "Where ignorance is bliss," &c.; and in those innocent days we knew no better, and we took Kit Sly, like Titania and the rest of the characters, as elegant embodiments of gospel realism. Calm reconsideration while waiting for the luncheon - tray at Stratford made us modify those early impressions. And we chiefly stood amazed before the presentment of Macbeth and the murderers of Duncan, when we saw what had satisfied the artistic sympathies of our ancestors. The usurper of Scotland was such a sprightly youth as may be seen any day at amateur theatricals on the boards of a suburban theatre, in a kilt and tights and a flowing plume. If he cut his clothing according to his cloth, we may presume that the budgets of the usurpation balanced indifferently. Nor could we doubt that nothing but extreme necessity could have induced the

elder assassin to listen to criminal overtures; for though he had apparently gone to bed in his clothes, and forgotten to comb his hair, he was evidently a decent and wellmeaning man who had succumbed to a struggle with his fortune. The Falcon Tavern over the way, with its projecting front and bulging bow-window, is more quaint of aspect than its more pretentious rival.

It is in the bar of the Falcon that Sir Edward Hamley makes the company assemble after Shakespeare's funeral; it is there that he makes young Raleigh and Master Drayton descend; it is thither that he makes Sir Thomas Lucy send to fetch their luggage; it is there that he makes Drayton imagine Shakespeare sitting, where from his chair the poet can command the revels of the common room and watch the humours of the simple village worthies.

From the inns, which are the types of the stages in our fleshly pilgrimage; from the inns, which, if they had only kept fitting registers, might produce muster-rolls of the potentates and the celebrities of recent centuries in most countries; from the inns, which were filled to overflowing at the Garrick centenary, when Johnson's biographer peacocked it along the pavements, with "Corsica Boswell" paraded on his hat,-it is an easy and natural passage down the street to the church and the churchyard, where the soil has been raised by the dust of generations. We need hardly linger on the way at the site of New Place, since there is little to be seen there but the site of Shakespeare's house. The house had been built in the reign of the seventh Henry, and Shakespeare bought it in 1597, when he was only in his thirty-fourth year. There he spent the last eighteen years of his life, and com

posed many of his plays; there he died, and thence he was borne to his tomb on the shoulders of some of the poor folk he had befriended. It passed subsequently into the hands of the Cloptons, and a descendant of the builder of Stratford Bridge demolished the old Tudor mansion, and replaced it with a Newer "Place." But that deed of vandalism was out-vandalled by Parson Gastrell, who has been damned to infamy by the unanimous consent of posterity. In 1753 it pleased the reverend gentleman to cut down the mulberry-tree Shakespeare had planted in his garden, and under the spreading branches of which Garrick and his friends had been entertained in 1749 by Sir Hugh Clopton. But as we know, it is an ill wind that blows good to no one; and the sacrilege gave an immense impulse to a "genuine" local industry. Shakespeake's mulberry-tree multiplied itself miraculously, and souvenirs of the poet were sold at handsome prices, to be circulated through all the quarters of the globe. Nor did the profits end there. An advertisement better calculated "to draw" could hardly have been devised. So we are sadly reminded of the ingratitude of human nature when we read that the Rev. Mr Gastrell, after some years of "boycotting," made a hurried hegira from Stratford in the night, "amidst the rage and curses of its inhabitants."

As for the noble collegiate church, it seems the very spot for the burial of the English poet. The architecture is at once airy and solemn; the shadows of thick green trees fall softly on the graves; and the Avon, sleeping so tranquilly that it scarcely murmurs even in the silence of the night, when the noisy nightingales have it all their own way, washes one of the sides of

the churchyard. The old building has been kept in excellent repair, yet the touch of the restorer is nowhere offensively conspicuous. The bats come streaming after sunset out of holes under the tiles, to go skimming among belated swallows over the surface of the river; the jackdaws, nesting in the crevices of the masonry, are in chorus with the rooks among the boughs of the limes; and the yellow wallflower has struck its roots everywhere among the lichens, lightening the walls in gay patches of colour, and brightening the grey buttresses and gargoyles. No admirer of Shakespeare can believe for one moment that he ever wrote the malediction inscribed on his tomb. If the credulous may credit him with the scurrilous satire on Sir Thomas Lucy, which might possibly have been penned after a night of inebriation, yet we cannot conceive him drivelling in doggerel when he lay dying in the ripe maturity of his powers. But whoever may have written the "Cursed be he who moves my bones," he clearly knew Shakespeare's townsfolk well. The churchyard is pretty, and fairly well kept; but one of the most original features in it is the rows of gravestones set on edge, and sunk in the ground, by way of bordering to the walks. The idea, so far as our recollections go, is unique, and it would have struck us indeed as characteristic and effective, had it not been so painfully suggestive of the wreckage of associations and memories. We have no intention of asking our readers to walk into the church. If Washington Irving and Howitt had not been there before us, is not all that concerns the interior written at length in the guidebooks? The only thing to be said is, that the grave is genuine; that the malediction, whoever may have

penned it, has served its purpose, and that the dust of Shakespeare may possibly lie undisturbed to the last day, by that of the daughter "good Mrs Hall"-whom he loved so dearly.

Some four miles from the town, and in the opposite direction from Shottery, is Charlecote. It is on one of the roads that lead to Warwick and Leamington, so the active tourist may probably be inclined to return on foot. There are pretty peeps up and down the Avon from over the lofty parapets of the bridge. A picturesquely wooded height bounds the view to the left, but for some way the scenery is tame, though pleasing. It is possible that the woodcutter as well as the roadmaker may have been busy there since Shakespeare's time. But as you go forward, the hedge timber becomes finer and more frequent; the rich green meadows are often enclosed by untrimmed hedgerows; the wildflowers, that threaten later in the year to choke the ditches, thrive in gay luxuriance in that kindly soil; there are bright cottages and snug farm - steadings; cattle are taking it lazily in the lush herbage; lambs are bleating and breaking away from their gambols to make playful rushes in quest of their dams; the blackbirds and thrushes are singing merrily, though many of the smaller songsters sit silent through the afternoon; the plaintive cooing of the ringdoves comes from the copses; and the rooks are cawing in many a rookery. Altogether, of a fine spring afternoon, it is as pleasant a walk as can well be conceived, and thoroughly English. Appropriately enough, the prettiest sight is the first distant view of Charlecote. The old hall, rebuilt somewhere in the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, has been greatly enlarged

and adorned by subsequent proprietors; but it must always have been a striking picture in the landscape to any one riding from Stratford. We may imagine the worthy Justice Shallow swelling with pardonable self-complacency as he pulled his pacing nag into a gentle amble, to survey the smoke curling up from his hospitable chimneys. For even his satirist allows that he kept open house; and to this day the supper he offered Falstaff and his followers on their northward march has a singularly appetising sound. The 'short-legged hens are a flash of descriptive genius from the mind that found no detail too trivial for its touch. We like the look of those old red-brick mansions, when the first fieriness of the red has been mellowed by time. The patch of toned-down warmth, with its suppressed but genial glow, at once relieves and sets off the varied tints of the cool, enveloping masses of green.

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And on a nearer approach you remark that the plastic material lends itself wonderfully to the schemes or caprices of the architect. Bay-windows are thrown out; receding nooks and angles are thrown in; archways and gables, flying buttresses and mullions have been dexterously moulded in graceful designs; while the whole is suitably covered by the many-lined and many-sloped roof of tiles, as it is crowned by the quaint stacks of chimneys. it is the charm of rural England that its most beautiful private parks are almost invariably open to the public. Not unfrequently the parish church stands within a stone-throw of the great entrance of the mansion. At any rate there are footpaths secured by immemorial rights of usage; and the worst penalty a lady may have to pay for the use of them is perhaps an

And