Old Church.
Bird and Flower Border
Among the deeply meditative, melodious, and eloquent poems of Wordsworth there is one—-about the burial of Ossian—that glances at the question of fitness 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 Johnson 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 flowers 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 content 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 throughout the whole of life, had pursued them even in death, to haunt about their repose and to mar all the gentleness 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 Hildebrand Horden, cut off by a violent death in the springtime of his youth. Hildebrand Horden 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 remarkable 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 mentioned in Colley Cibber'sApology.Charles Coffey, the dramatist, author ofThe Devil upon Two Sticks,and other plays, lies in the vaults of St. Clement; as likewise does Thomas Rymer, historiographer for William III., successor to Shadwell, and author of Foedera, 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 sunshine of his wit and was wasted and degraded by his own brilliancy, rests, close by Bishop Sherlock, in Fulham 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 crumbling 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 universal and reverent sentiment—
"Take them, O Grave, and let them lieFolded upon thy narrow shelves,As garments by the soul laid byAnd precious only to ourselves."
One of the most impressive of the many literary pilgrimages that I have made was that which brought 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 London, crowned with the dome of St. Paul's on the southern 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 filled 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 was the Gate House inn, primitive, quaint, and cosy, which still is standing, to comfort the weary traveller with its wholesome hospitality.
† "Come in the first stage, so as either to walk, or to be driven in Mr. Gilman'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, June1817
The White Hart.
Highgate, with all its rural peace, must have been a bustling 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 summons 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 customs of a bygone age. Some years ago a new road was cut, so that travellers might wind around the hill, and avoid climbing 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 imagine, the London coach was welcome indeed, that brought to his door such well-loved friends as Charles Lamb, Joseph Henry Green, Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth, or Talfourd.
To this retreat the author ofThe Ancient Marinerwithdrew in 1815, to live with his friend James Gilman, 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 fiend 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 walking 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 imagination wave easily in the opal air of the highest heaven. The power and majesty of his thought are such as establish forever in the human mind the conviction of personal 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 sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languor, and manifold infirmities." 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 literary history,—the ravaged, agonising form of Swift, for instance, and the wonderful, desolate face of Byron; but there is no figure 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, accessible 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.
Ada Brooke Flower Border
In England, as elsewhere, every historic spot is occupied; and of course it sometimes 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 find the way strewn with roses nor the atmosphere of poetry ready-made for his enjoyment. That atmosphere, indeed, for the most part—especially in the cities—he must himself supply. Relics do not robe themselves for exhibition. The Past is utterly indifferent 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 inevitable physical weariness, the soporific influence of the climate, the tumult of the streets, the frequent and disheartening spectacle of poverty, squalor, and vice, the capricious and untimely rain, the inconvenience of long distances, the ill-timed arrival and consequent disappointment, the occasional nervous sense of loneliness and insecurity, the inappropriate boor, the ignorant, garrulous porter, the extortionate cabman, and the jeering bystander—all these must be regarded with resolute indifference by him who would ramble, pleasantly and profitably, in the footprints of English history. Everything 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 conferFind little to perceive."
To the philosophic stranger, however, even this prosaic occupancy of historic places is not without its pleasurable, because humorous, significance. 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 Gardens, 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 commemorates the defeat and death of the great Earl of Warwick, and, consequently, the final triumph of the Grown 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 thousand 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 English 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 find this spot adorned with a structure of more than common splendour. What you actually do find there is a plain monument, standing in the middle of a common, at the junction of several roads,—the chief of which are those leading to Hatfield and St. Albans, in Hertfordshire,—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 14th, anno 1471, in which the Earl was defeated and slain."†
† The words "stick no bills" have been intrusively added, just below this inscription.
Column on Barnet Battle-Field.
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 banners; and I heard the vengeful clash of arms, the horrible 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 mischance, 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 village 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.
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 roseLeaning, nodding at the wall."
Farm-house.
Cherubs Battling Boar Border
One of the most impressive spots on earth, and one that especially teaches—with silent, pathetic eloquence and solemn admonition—the great lesson of contrast, 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 measureless 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 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 character of wealth without ostentation and industry without tumult, must prove to you a deep and satisfying comfort. 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.
Falstaff Inn and West Gate, Canterbury.
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 humanity had begun to feel its profound and vital need of a sure and settled reliance on religious faith. The drifting 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 sacrifice that it would not make, in the accomplishment of its sacred task. It was grandly, nobly, terribly in earnest, and it achieved a work that is not only sublime in its poetic majesty but measureless in the scope and extent of its moral and spiritual influence. It has 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 building as Canterbury cathedral without feeling a greater love and reverence than he ever felt before, alike for God and man.
Butchery Lane, Canterbury.
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 hallowing 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 England," of whom fifty-three were buried in the cathedral, and here the tombs of fifteen of them are still visible. Here was buried the sagacious, crafty, inflexible, indomitable Henry the Fourth,—that Hereford whom Shakespeare has described and interpreted with matchless, immortal eloquence,—and here, cut off in the morning of his greatness, and lamented to this day in 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, human, 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 fine recumbent effigy of gilded brass, hang the gauntlets that he wore; and they tell you that his sword formerly hung there, but that Oliver Cromwell—who revealed his iconoclastic and unlovely character in making a stable of this cathedral—carried it away. Close at hand is the tomb of the wise, just, and gentle Cardinal 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 accomplished Hastings, and who "fled to Richmond," in good time, from the standard of the dangerous Protector. Standing there, I could almost hear the resolute, scornful voice of Richard, breathing out, in clear, implacable accents—
"Ely with Richmond troubles me more nearThan 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 such, at a great age, he passed away.
Flying Horse Inn, Canterbury.
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 fifty-five, 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 devout 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 his monument.
† 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 underneath 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.
Canterbury Cathedral.
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 banners, and the eternal, majestic silence with which it broods over the love, ambition, glory, defeat, and anguish 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 find some outlet of escape. Fit emblem, truly, of the human mind which strives to comprehend and to utter the meaning of this marvellous fabric!
Alladin's Lamp
Dark Wind Border
Night, in Stratford-upon-Avon—a summer night, with large, solemn stars, a cool and fragrant breeze, and the stillness 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 anywhere 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. Further 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 of everlasting renown. Long and weary the years have been since last I saw it; but to-night they are remembered 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 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.
Stratford-upon-Avon.
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 frequently 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 sunshine, where it streams through the little lattice windows of his prison. New Place, with its lovely lawn, its spacious 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,andA 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 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 eloquence and images of immortal beauty. The noble lesson of self-conquest—the lesson of the entire adequacy of the resolute, virtuous, patient human will—set forth so grandly that all the world must see its meaning and marvel at its splendour. And, last of all, death itself shorn of its terrors and made a trivial thing.
Stratford Church.
There is a new custodian at New Place, and he will show you the little museum that is kept there—including 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 foundation, 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 windows on which his gaze has often rested. The interior is cold and barren now, for the scriptural wall-paintings, discovered there in 1804, under a thick coating of whitewash, 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 forming a library; and there you may see at least one Shakespearean 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—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 wonderful 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 thinking of that kindly, pleasant voice, the hush of the beautiful 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 fields to Anne Hathaway's cottage at 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 five 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 between low fences and along the margin of gardens,—now in the sunshine, and now in the shadow of larch 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 tangled garden, everything remains the same. Mrs. Mary Taylor Baker, the last living descendant of the Hathaways, 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 fireside, 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 bedroom, I could hear, in the perfumed summer stillness, the low twittering of birds, whose nest is in the covering 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 cottage 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 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, however, 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 important 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.
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 brilliant career, the memorable achievement, the great character, once fulfilled, takes a permanent 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 Hampton 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 intervals her latent animal ferocity breaks loose—as it did under Henry the Eighth, under Mary, under Cromwell, 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 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, nevertheless, 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 nineteenth century takes its practical, substantial form, not alone in the honourable preservation of the ancient Shakespearean shrines, but in the Shakespeare Memorial. 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 Anderson acted—1885—in the Memorial Theatre, for its benefit, presenting for the first time in her life the character of Rosalind.) It is a noble monument. It stands upon the margin of the Avon, not distant from the 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 Memorial 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 conformity 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, dedicated 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 poetry and the history of the English stage.