[Illustration: Parish Church of Stratford-on-Avon.]
Within the walls of the fine old Church of Stratford-on-Avon,
represented in the above wood-cut, lie the ashes of SHAKSPEARE. In a
small house still standing in the same town, was the great poet born. We
may best convey to our readers some impression of the interest which we
have felt in visiting this spot, by reprinting some passages from ‘The
Sketch Book’ of Washington Irving, one of the most pleasing and
accomplished writers that the United States has produced.
“I had come to Stratford on a poetical pilgrimage. My first visit was to
the house where Shakspeare was born, and where, according to tradition,
he was brought up to his father’s craft of wool-combing. It is a small
mean-looking edifice of wood and plaster, a true nestling-place of
genius, which seems to delight in hatching its offspring in bye-corners.
The walls of its squalid chambers are covered with names and
inscriptions, in every language, by pilgrims of all nations, ranks, and
conditions, from the prince to the peasant; and present a simple, but
striking instance of the spontaneous and universal homage of mankind to
the great poet of nature.
“The house is shown by a garrulous old lady in a frosty red face,
lighted up by a cold blue anxious eye, and garnished with artificial
locks of flaxen hair, curling from under an exceedingly dirty cap. She
was peculiarly assiduous in exhibiting the relics with which this, like
all other celebrated shrines, abounds. There was the shattered stock of
the very matchlock with which Shakspeare shot the deer, on his poaching
exploit. There, too, was his tobacco-box; which proves that he was a
rival smoker of Sir Walter Raleigh; the sword also with which he played
Hamlet: and the identical lanthorn with which Friar Laurence discovered
Romeo and Juliet at the tomb! There was an ample supply also of
Shakspeare’s mulberry tree, which seems to have as extraordinary powers
of self-multiplication as the wood of the true cross; of which there is
enough extant to build a ship of the line.”
Since the visit of Mr. Irving to Stratford, the inscriptions on the
walls of Shakspeare’s house have been obliterated. We can no longer hunt
out the hand-writing of Garrick or Byron amidst the crowd of Smiths and
Whites whom curiosity had brought hither. The ancient tenant of the
house, the keeper of the Shaksperian relics described above, being
ejected from the premises which she had so long occupied with profit, in
a fit of wrath had the sacred walls smeared over with whitewash the
night before she quitted them. The old lady had moved with her heap of
relics to a house on the opposite side of the way when we visited
Stratford about seven years ago. But the knowledge of her malicious
outrage prevented us looking upon her trumpery with any patience. We had
ceased to have any faith in these matters. We refused to sit in her
Shakspeare’s chair, affirming, to her great mortification, that the real
chair had been sold to the Empress of Russia; and, worst of all, we
refused to purchase her own play of the Battle of Waterloo. Poor woman!
she claimed to be a lineal descendant from the poet, and to prove her
claim to the inheritance of his genius, wrote the most execrable verses
that folly ever produced. We could have forgiven her bad verses, had
some of Shakspeare’s good humour and kindness of heart descended to her.
But she whitewashed out all the names, noble and ignoble, of the sacred
chamber to spite her successor! Her play and her plaster doubly
destroyed all belief in her pedigree! We should add, that the exterior
of Shakspeare’s house has been much altered within the last forty years.
The following cut exhibits it as it appeared in 1788.
[Illustration: Shakspeare’s House as it appeared in 1788.]