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WE had “Queen’s weather” for most of our excursions in England, and no fairer day than that on which we went to Stratford-on-Avon.

The denizens of the region give the first sound of a to the name of the quiet river—as in fate. I do not undertake to decide whether they, or we are correct. Their derelictions upon the H question are so flagrant as to breed distrust of all their inventions and practice in pronunciation. (Although we did learn to say “Tems”—very short—for “T’ames.”)

I wish, for the benefit of future tourists who may read these pages, that I had retained the address of the driver—and I believe the owner—of the waggonette we secured for our drives in Warwickshire. It held our party of six comfortably, leaving abundant space in the bottom and under the seats for hamper and wraps, and was a stylish, easy-running vehicle. The coachman was a fine young fellow of, perhaps, six-and-twenty, civil, obliging, and, in our experience, an exceptionally intelligent member of his class. In this conveyance, and with such pilotage, we set out on July 27th, upon one of our red-letter pilgrimages—fore-ordained within our, for once, prophetic souls ever since, as ten-year old children, we used to read Shakspeare secretly in the garret on rainy Saturdays.

It was an old copy relegated to the lumber-chest as too shabby for the family library. One side of the calf-skin cover was gone, and luckily for the morals of the juvenile student, “Venus and Adonis” and most of the sonnets had followed suite. But an engraved head of William Shakspeare was protected by the remaining cover and had left a shadow-picture, in white-and-yellow, upon the tissue-paper next it. After the title-page followed a dozen or so of biography, which we devoured as eagerly as we did “The Tempest,” “Julius Cæsar,” and “Macbeth.” We had read Mrs. Whitney’s always-and-everywhere charming “Sights and Insights,” before and since leaving America, and worn Emory Ann’s “realizing our geography” to shreds by much quoting. To-day, we were realizing our Shakspeare and “Merry” England.

The drive was surpassingly lovely. The smoothness of the road was, in itself, a luxury. It is as evenly-graded and free from stones and ruts as a bowling-alley. One prolific topic of conversation is denied the morning-callers and bashful swains of Warwickshire. They cannot discuss the “state of the roads,” their uniform condition being above criticism. The grass grew quite up to the edge of the highway, but was shaven and weedless as a lawn. There were hedge-rows instead of fences, and at intervals, we had enchanting glimpses up intersecting ways of what we had heard and read of all our lives, yet in which we scarcely believed until we saw, in their beauty and picturesqueness, real lanes. The banks, sloping downward from the hedges into these, were clothed with vines, ferns and field-flowers. One appreciates the exquisite fidelity of such sketches from Nature as—

“I know a bank on which the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows

Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine—”

after seeing the lanes between Leamington and Stratford-on-Avon. Double rows of noble trees screened us from the sun for a mile at a time, and the hedges, so skillfully clipped that the sides and rounded tops were never marred by redundant growth, yet bearing no sign of the shears in stubby or naked stems, were walls of richest verdure throughout the route. The freshness and trimness of the English landscape is a joy and wonder forever to those unused to the perfection of agriculture which is the growth of centuries. There is the finish and luxuriance of a pleasure-garden in every prospect in these midland counties, and, forgetting that the soil has acknowledged a master in the husbandman for more than a thousand years, and that, for more than half that time, the highest civilization known to man has held reign in this tiny island, we are tempted to think discontentedly of the contrast offered by our own magnificent, and, by contrast, crude spaces. It was not because of affectation or lack of patriotism that, upon our return home, the straggling fences, clogged with alder and brambles, the ragged pastures and gullied hillsides were a positive pain to sight and heart.

Any one who has seen a good photograph of Shakspeare’s house knows exactly how it looks. The black timbers of the frame-work are visible from the outside. The spaces between the beams are filled with cement or plaster. There are three gables in front, the third, at the upper corner, broader and higher than the others. The chimney is in the end-gable, joining this last at right angles, and is covered with ivy. A pent-house protects the main entrance. Wide latticed windows light the ground-floor; a latticed oriel projects from the second story of the taller division of the building. Smaller casements in line with this are set in each of the principal upper rooms. The house is flush with the street, and is probably smarter in its “restoration,” than when Master John Shakspeare, wool-dealer, lived here. We entered, without intervening vestibule or passage, a square room, the ceiling of which was not eight feet high. A peasant’s kitchen, that was also best-room, with a broken stone floor and plastered walls checquered by hewn beams.

Two sisters, who dressed, looked, moved and spoke absurdly alike, are the custodians of the cottage. One met us with a professional droop of a not-elastic figure, a mechanical smile and an immediate plunge into business:

“After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble tenement, it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration, and one that accounts for the dilapidation of the floor, it having been shattered by chopping meat upon it.”

No reasonable visitor could desire to linger in the apartment longer than sufficed for the delivery of the comprehensive formula, and she tiptoed into the adjoining room:

“In this the family were accustomed to sit when they were not dressed in their best clothes”—mincingly jocular.

Caput and I, regardless of routine, strayed back into the outer kitchen to get a more satisfactory look, and after our fashion, and that of Mr. Swiveller’s Marchioness, “to make-believe very hard.” We wanted to shut our eyes—and ears—and in a blessed interval of silence, to see the honest dealer in wool—member of the corporation; for two years chamberlain; high bailiff in 1569; and in 1571—his son William being then seven years of age—chief alderman of Stratford, standing in the street-door chatting with a respectful fellow-townsman; Mary his wife, passing from dresser to hearth, and, upon a stool in the chimney corner, the Boy, chin propped upon his hand, thinking—“idling,” his industrious seniors would have said.

We had hardly passed the door of communication when sister No. 1 having transferred the rest of the visitors to No. 2, and sent them up-stairs, reappeared. The same professional dip of the starched figure; the manufactured smile, and, mistaking us for fresh arrivals, she began, without variation of syllable or inflection:

“After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble tenement, it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration—”

We fled to the upper story. The stairs give upon an ante-chamber corresponding with the back-kitchen. Against the rear-wall, in a gaudy frame, and, itself looking unpicturesquely new and distinct, is the celebrated “Stratford Portrait”—another restoration. It is not spurious, having been the property of a respectable county-family for upwards of a century, and there is abundant documentary testimony of its authenticity. It shows us a handsomer man than do the other pictures of the Great Play-Wright. In fact, it is too good-looking. One could believe it the representment of the jolly, prosperous wool-factor, complacent under the shower of municipal honors. It is difficult to reconcile the smooth, florid face, the scarlet lips, dainty moustache and imperial, with thoughts of Lear, Hamlet, and Coriolanus.

“The room in which Shakspeare was born” was quite full of pilgrims—quiet, well-bred and non-enthusiastic, exclaiming softly over such signatures as Walter Scott’s upon the casement-panes, and Edmund Kean’s upon the side of the chimney devoted to actors’ autographs. They indulged in no conversational raptures—for which we were grateful. But the hum of talk, the rustle and stir were a death-blow to fond and poetic phantasies. We gazed coldly upon the scrawlings that disfigure the walls and blur the windows; incredulously upon the deal table and chairs; critically at the dirty bust which offered still another and a different image of the man we refused to believe came by this shabby portal into the world that was to worship him as the greatest of created intellects. Such disillusions are more common with those who visit old shrines in the rôle of “passionate pilgrims” than they are willing to admit.

I wanted to think of Shakspeare’s cradle and the mother-face above it; how he had been carried by her to the casement—thrown wide on soft summer days like this—and clapped his hands at sight of birds and trees, and boys and girls playing in the street, as my babies, and all other babies, have done from the days of Cain. How he had rolled and crept upon the floor, and caught many a tumble in his trial-steps, and fallen asleep at twilight in the warm covert of mother-arms. I had thought of it a thousand times before; I have been all over it a thousand times since. While on the hallowed spot, I saw the low room, common and homely, with bulging rafters and rough-cast sides, the uneven boards of the floor, brown and blotched—the vulgarity of everything, the consecration of nothing.

The museum in an adjoining room caused a perceptible rise in the spirits, dampened by our inability to “realize,” as conscience decreed, in the birth-chamber. The desk used by Shakspeare at school looked plausible. There were realistic touches in the lid bespattered with ink and hacked by jack-knife. The hinges are of leather. We believed that he kept gingerbread, sausage-roll, toffey, green apples, and cock-chafers with strings tied to their hind legs, in it. We did not quibble over Shakspeare’s signet-ring, engraved with “W. S.” and a lover’s knot. He might have sat in the chair reputed to have been used in the merry club-meetings at the Falcon Inn, the sign of which is to be seen here. His coat-of-arms, a falcon and spear, was proof that his father bore, by right, the grand old name of “gentleman.” One of the very tame dragons in charge of the premises bore down upon us while we were looking at this.

“It is a singular coincidence, too remarkable to be only a coincidence”—her tones a ripple of treacle—“that the falcon should be the bird that shakes its wings most constantly while in flight. Combine this circumstance with the spear, and he is a very dull student of heraldry who cannot trace the derivation of the name of the Immortal Bard.”

Caput set his jaw dumbly. It was Dux, younger and less discreet, who said, “By Jove!”

The crayon head exhibited here is a copy of the “Chandos Portrait,” taken at the age of forty-three. It also is reputed to be an excellent likeness, and resembles neither the bust in the church nor the famous “Death Mask,” of which there is here preserved an admirable photograph. After studying all other pictures extant of him, one reverts to the last-mentioned as the truest embodiment of the ideal Shakspeare we know by his works. The face, sunken and rigid in death, yet bears the impress of a loftier intellectuality and more dignified manhood than do any of the painted and sculptured presentments. The only letter written to Shakspeare, known to be in existence, is preserved in this museum. It is signed by one Richard Quyney, who would like to borrow thirty pounds of the poet. One speculates, in deciphering the yellow-brown leaf that would crumble at a touch, upon the probabilities of the writer having had a favorable reply, and why this particular epistle should have been kept so carefully. It was probably pure accident. It could hardly have been a unique in the owner’s collection if the stories of his rapid prosperity and the character of the boon-companions of his early days be true.

As we paused in the lower front room to strengthen our recollection of the tout ensemble, leaning upon the sill of the window by which the child and boy must often have stood at evening, gazing into the quiet street, or seen the moon rise hundreds of times over the dark line of roofs, custodian No. 1 drooped us a professional adieu, and dividing the wire-and-pulley smile impartially between us and a fresh bevy of pilgrims upon the threshold, commenced with the automatic precision of a cuckoo-clock:

“After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble tenement it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration—”

“Eight day or daily?” queried Lex, as we walked down the street.

We lingered for a moment at the building to which went Shakspeare as a

“Whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping, like snail,

Unwillingly to school.”

It is “the thing” to quote the line before the gray walls capped by mossy slates, of the Grammar-School founded by Henry IV. The quadrangle about which the lecture-rooms and offices are ranged is not large, and is entered by a low gateway. Over the stones of this court-yard Shakspeare’s feet,

“Creeping in to school,

Went storming out to playing.”

Boy-nature, in 1574, was the same, in these respects, as in 1874, Shakspeare and Whittier being judges.

Stratford-on-Avon is a clean, quiet country town, that would have dwindled into a village long ago had not John Shakspeare’s son been born in her High Street. Antique houses, with peaked gables and obtrusive beams, deep-stained by years—(Time’s record is made with inky dyes, and in broad English down-strokes, in this climate)—are to be seen on every street. Every second shop along our route had in its one window a show of what we would call “Shakspeare Notions;” stamped handkerchiefs, mugs, platters, paper-cutters and paper-weights, and a host of photographs, all commemorative of the town and the Man.

“New Place” was purchased by Shakspeare in 1597, and enlarged and adorned as befitted his amended fortunes. We like to hear that, while he lived in London, not a year elapsed without his paying a visit to Stratford, and that in 1613, upon his withdrawal from public life, he made New Place his constant residence, spending his time “in ease, retirement and the society of friends.” In the garden grew, and, long after his death flourished, the mulberry-tree planted by his own hands. In the museum we had seen a goblet carved out of the wood of this tree, and, in a sealed bottle, the purple juice of its berries. New Place did not pass from the poet’s family until the death of his granddaughter, Lady Barnard. It is recorded that, in 1643, this lady and her husband were the hosts of Henrietta Maria, Queen of Charles I. She was thankful in the turmoil and distrust of civil war, to find an asylum for three weeks under the roof that had covered a greater than the lordliest Stuart who ever paltered with a nation’s trust. At Lady Barnard’s decease, New Place was sold, first to one, then another proprietor, until Sir Hugh Clopton remodelled and almost rebuilt the house. After him came the Rev. Francis Gastrell who, in a fit of passion at what he conceived to be the exorbitant tax levied upon the mansion, pulled it down to the foundation-stones. In the same Christian frame of mind, he hewed down the mulberry-tree, then in a vigorous old age, a giant of its tribe, “because so many people stopped in the street to stare at it, thereby inconveniencing himself and family.” Peevish fatuousness that has a parallel in the discontent of the present incumbent of Haworth that, “because he chances to inhabit the parsonage in which the Brontë sisters lived and died, he must be persecuted by throngs of visitors to it and the church.” It is not his fault, he pathetically reminds the public, that people of genius once dwelt there, and he proposes to demonstrate the dissimilarity of those who now occupy it by renovating Haworth Rectory and erecting a new church upon the site of that in which the Brontës are buried.

Of New Place nothing remains but the foundations, swathed in the kindly coverlet of turf, that in England, so soon cloaks deformity with graceful sweeps and swells of verdure. The grounds are tended with pious care, and nobody carps that visitors always loiter here on their way from Shakspeare’s birth-place to his tomb.

We passed to the fane of Holy Trinity between two rows of limes in fullest leaf. The avenue is broad, but the noon beams were severed into finest particles in filtering through the thick green arch; the door closing up the farther end was an arch of grayer glooms. The church-yard is paved with blackened tombstones. The short, rich grass over-spreads mounds and hollows, defines the outlines of the oblong, flat slabs, sprouts in crack and cranny. The peace of the summer heavens rested upon the dear old town—the river slipping silently beneath the bridge in the background—the venerable church, in the vestibule of which we stayed our steps to hearken to music from within. The organist was practising a dreamy voluntary, rising, now, into full chords that left echoes vibrating among the groined arches after he resumed his pensive strain. Walking softly and slowly, lest our tread upon the paved floor might awake dissonant echoes, we gained the chancel. An iron rail hinders the nearer approach to the Grave. This barrier is a recent erection and a work of supererogation, since that sight-seer has not been found so rude as to trample over the sacred dust.

Upon the stone—even with the rest of the flags—concealing the vault, lay a strip of white cloth, stamped with a fac-simile of the epitaph composed by Shakspeare for his tomb. Volumes have been written to explain its meaning, and treatises to prove that there is nothing recondite in its menace. Since the rail prevented us from getting to that side of the slab next the inner wall of the chancel, we must have read the inscription upside-down but for the convenient copy:

“Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be y^e man y^t spares thes stones,

And cvrst be he y^t moves my bones.”

Our eyes returned again and again to the weird lines and the plain stone, as thoughts of what lay beneath it were chased away by the wretched pomp of the monument raised by the nearest relatives of the dead. It is set in the chancel wall about the height of a tall man’s head above the floor and almost directly over the burial-vault. The light from a gorgeous painted window streams upon it. Just beyond, nearer the floor, the effigy of a knight in armor lies upon a recessed sarcophagus. The half-length figure intended for Shakspeare is in an arched niche, the family escutcheon above it. On each side is a naked boy of forbidding countenance. One holds an inverted torch, the other a skull and spade. A second and larger skull surmounts the monument. The marble man—we could not call it Shakspeare—writes, without looking at pen or paper, within an open book, laid upon a cushion. The whole affair, niche, desk, cushion and attitude, reminds one ludicrously of the old-time pulpits likened by Mr. Beecher to a “toddy tumbler with a spoon in it.” The “spoon” in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, wears the dress of a gentleman of his day, a full, loose surcoat, with falling collar and cuffs. The forehead is high and bald, the face smooth as a pippin, the eyes have a bold, hard stare; upon the mouth, and, indeed, upon all the visage, dwells a smirk, aggressive and ineffable. It is the face of a conceited, pompous, heavy fool, which the fine phrenological development of the cranium cannot redeem. We cannot make it to be to us the man whom, according to the stilted lines below—

“Envious death has plast

Within this monument.”

“Yet it must have been a likeness,” ventured Caput. “It was seen and approved by his daughters.”

We persisted in our infidelity, and refused to look again at the smirking horror. When it was set up in the mortuary pillory overhead, it was colored from nature. The hair, Vandyke beard, and moustache were auburn, the tight, protuberant eyes hazel, the dress red and black. Seventy years afterward, it was painted white and was probably a shade less odious for the whitewashing. Lately the colors have been restored to their pristine brightness and varnish.

Another flat slab bears the inscription:—

“Heere lyeth interred the body of Anne, Wife

of William Shakespeare who dep’ted this life the

6^th day of Avgt · 1623 · being of the age of · 67 · yeares.”

She was a woman of twenty-five, he a lad of eighteen when they were married—a circumstance that dampens the romantic imaginings we would fain foster to their full growth, in visiting the vine-draped cottage of Anne Hathaway. We put from us, while standing by the graves of husband and wife, the truth that when he, a hale, handsome gentleman of fifty-three, sat at eventide in the shadow of the mulberry-tree, or, as tradition paints him, leaned upon the half-door of a mercer’s shop and made impromptu epigrams upon passing neighbors—Anne was a woman of sixty, who had best abide in-doors after the dew began to fall.

We went to the Red Horse Inn by merest accident. We must lunch somewhere, having grown ravenously hungry even in Stratford-on-Avon, and left the choice of a place to the driver of our waggonette. Five minutes’ rattling drive over the primitive pavements between the rows of quaint old houses, and we were in a covered passage laid with round stones. A waiter had his hand upon the door by the time we stopped; whisked us out before we knew where we were, and into a low-ceiled parlor on the ground-floor, looking upon the street. A lumbering mahogany table was in the middle of the floor. Clumsy chairs were marshalled against the wainscot. Old prints hung around the walls. The carpet was very substantial and very ugly. A subtle intuition, a something in the air of the room—maybe, an unseen Presence, arrested me just within the door. I had certainly never been here before, yet I stood still, a bewilderment of reminiscence and association enveloping my senses, like fragrant mist.

“Can this be”—I said slowly, feeling for words—“Geoffrey Crayon’s Parlor?”

I tell the incident just as it occurred. Not one of us knew the name of the inn. Our guide-books did not give it, nor had one of the party bethought him or herself that Washington Irving had ever visited Stratford or left a record of his visit. None of the many tourists who had described the town to us had mentioned the antique hostelry. What followed our entrance came to me—a “happening” I do not attempt to explain.

The waiter did not smile. English servants consider the play of facial muscles impertinent when addressing superiors. But he answered briskly, as he had opened the carriage-door.

“Yes, mem! Washington Irving’s parlor! Yes, mem!”

“And this is the Red Horse Inn?”

“The Red Horse Inn! Yes, mem!”

“Where, then, is Geoffrey Crayon’s Sceptre?” looking at the grate.

He vanished, and was back in a moment, holding something wrapped in red plush. A steel poker, clean, bright and slender, and, engraved upon one flat side in neat characters—“Geoffrey Crayon’s Sceptre.”

I took it in speechless reverence. The others gathered about me and it.

“Now”—said Caput, in excruciating and patient politeness, wheeling up the biggest arm-chair—“if you will have the goodness to sit down, and tell us what it all means!”

I had read the story thirty years before in a bound volume of the “New York Mirror,” itself then, at least ten years old. But it came back to me almost word for word, (what we read in those days, we digested!) as I sat there, the sceptre upon my knee, and rehearsed the tale to the circle of listeners.

Since our return to America I have hunted up the old “Mirror,” and take pleasure in transcribing a portion of Mr. Willis’ pleasant story of the interview between himself and the landlady who remembered Mr. Irving’s visit.

“Mrs. Gardiner proceeded: ‘I was in and out of the coffee-room the night he arrived, mem, and I sees directly, by his modest ways and his timid look, that he was a gentleman, and not fit company for the other travellers. They were all young men, sir, and business travellers, and you know, mem, ignorance takes the advantage of modest merit, and after their dinner they were very noisy and rude. So I says to Sarah, the chambermaid, says I, ‘that nice gentleman can’t get near the fire, and you go and light a fire in number three, and he shall sit alone, and it shan’t cost him nothing, for I like the looks on him.’ Well, mem, he seemed pleased to be alone, and after his tea he puts his legs up over the grate, and there he sits with the poker in his hand till ten o’clock. The other travellers went to bed, and at last the house was as still as midnight, all but a poke in the grate, now and then, in number three, and every time I heard it I jumped up and lit a bed-candle, for I was getting very sleepy, and I hoped he was getting up to ring for a light. Well, mem, I nodded and nodded, and still no ring at the bell. At last I says to Sarah, says I, ‘Go into number three and upset something, for I am sure that gentleman has fallen asleep.’ ‘La, ma’am!’ says Sarah, ‘I don’t dare.’ ‘Well, then,’ says I, ‘I’ll go!’ So I opens the door and I says—‘If you please, sir, did you ring?’ little thinking that question would ever be written down in such a beautiful book, mem.”

(She had already showed to her listeners “a much-worn copy of the Sketch-Book,” in which Mr. Irving records his pilgrimage to Stratford.)

“He sat with his feet on the fender, poking the fire, and a smile on his face, as if some pleasant thought was in his mind. ‘No, ma’am,’ says he, ‘I did not.’ I shuts the door and sits down again, for I hadn’t the heart to tell him it was late, for he was a gentleman not to speak rudely to, mem. Well, it was past twelve o’clock when the bell did ring. ‘There!’ says I to Sarah, ‘thank heaven he has done thinking, and we can go to bed!’ So he walked up stairs with his light, and the next morning he was up early and off to the Shakspeare house. …

“There’s a Mr. Vincent that comes here sometimes, and he says to me one day—‘So, Mrs. Gardiner, you’re finely immortalized! Read that!’ So the minnit I read it I remembered who it was and all about it, and I runs and gets the number three poker, and locks it up safe and sound, and by and by I sends it to Brummagem and has his name engraved on it; and here you see it, sir, and I wouldn’t take no money for it.”

Mr. Willis was in Stratford-on-Avon in 1836. In 1877 the “sceptre” was displayed to us, as I have narrated, as one of the valuable properties of the Red Horse Inn, although good Mrs. Gardiner long ago laid down her housekeeping keys forever.

We sat late over the luncheon served in the parlor, which could not have been refurnished since Irving “had his tea” there, too happy in the chance that had brought us to the classic chamber to be otherwise than merry over the stout bill, one-third of which should have been set down to Geoffrey Crayon’s account. The Britons are thorough utilitarians. Nowhere do you get “sentiment gratis.”

We drove home in the summer twilight, that lasts in the British Isles until dawn, and enables one to read with ease until ten o’clock P.M. Our road skirted the confines of Charlecote, the country-seat of the Lucys. The family was at home, and visitors were therefore excluded. It is a fine old place, but the park, which is extensive, looked like a neglected common after the perfectly appointed grounds of Stoneleigh Abbey, through which we passed. The fence enclosing the Charlecote domain was a sort of double hurdle, in miserable repair, and intertwisted with wild vines and brambles. The deer were gathered in groups and herds under oaks that may have sheltered their forefathers in Shakspeare’s youth. Scared by our wheels, rabbits scampered from hedge to coverts of bracken. If the fences were in no better state “in those ruder ages, when”—to quote Shakspeare’s biographer—“the spirit of Robin Hood was yet abroad, and deer and coney-stealing classed, with robbing orchards, among the more adventurous, but ordinary levities of youth,” the trespass for which the Stratford poacher was arraigned was a natural surrender to irresistible temptation, and the deed easily done.