are within the area of the property on the western side, belonging to Mrs. Izod, four tenements, three of which were apparently erected or converted into habitations, at the beginning of the last century; for before that period they seem to be unnoticed; and the fourth, which, from the continuation of the framed timber front, and from the old doorways communicating internally, evidently forms part of the birth-place; but which, in 1771, was separated from it. The Committee have much satisfaction in stating, that they have within the last few days purchased of Mrs. Izod the four tenements above-mentioned, for the sum of £820; which, as it puts them in actual possession of a part of the house in which Shakspere was born, cannot but be regarded as a most important acquisition at the present moment." The property, whose future destination is to be decided by the auctioneer's hammer, comprises the remainder of the original two messuages. How far the one messuage extended, in which John Shakspere lived, which William Shakspere, his heir, gave to his sister for life, and which did not pass out of the hands of Shakspere's descendants till 1807, cannot, we think, be exactly determined without a professional inspection of the internal walls. It is evident, from the plan, that in some parts doors have been stopped up, and in others doors have been cut through; and we are inclined to think that the second messuage, which became the public-house in 1642, occupied less of the frontage than it now claims. At any rate the Shaksperian Club have done wisely in purchasing one isolated portion of the property. If the public obtain the remainder, there can be no difficulty in restoring the whole to its condition at the end of the sixteenth century. The Shaksperian Club assume, without hesitation, that in these premises William Shakspere was born. Mr. Wheler says, "In this lowly abode it has been the invariable and uncontradicted tradition of the town, that our inimitable Bard drew his first breath." Disturb not the belief. To look upon this ancient house,-perhaps one of the oldest in Stratford, votaries have gathered from every region where the name of Shakspere is known. Washington Irving says, "I had come to Stratford on a poetical pilgrimage. My first visit was to the house where Shakspere was born; and where, according to tradition, he was brought up to his father's craft of wool-combing. It is a small nean-looking edifice of wood and plaster,—a true nestling-place of genius, which seems to delight in hatching its offspring in by-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, with 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 particularly assiduous in exhibit

shrines, abounds." The engravings at page 233 exhibit the room, whose walls "are covered with names and inscriptions in every language," as it existed with some of its "relics," about the period when Washington Irving made his visit to Stratford. He had a true poet's faith even in the relics :-"What is it to us whether these stories be true or false, so long as we can persuade ourselves into the belief of them, and enjoy all the charm of the reality?" The American pilgrim found a representative of the matter-of-fact portion of the world in the old sexton of Stratford, and a superannuated crony named John Ange: "I was grieved to hear these two worthy wights speak very dubiously of the eloquent dame who shows the Shakspere House. John Ange shook his head when I mentioned her valuable and inexhaustible collection of relics, particularly her remains of the mulberry-tree; and the old sexton even expressed a doubt as to Skakspere having been born in her house. I soon discovered that he looked upon her mansion with an evil eye, as a rival to the poet's tomb; the latter having comparatively but few visitors. Thus it is that historians differ at the very outset; and mere pebbles make the stream of truth diverge into different channels, even at the fountain-head." For ourselves, we frankly confess that the want of absolute certainty that Shakspere was born in the house in Henley-street produces a state of mind that is something higher and pleasanter than the conviction that depends upon positive evidence. We are content to follow the popular faith, undoubtingly. The traditionary belief is sanctified by long usage and universal acceptation. The merely curious look in reverent silence upon that mean room, with its massive joists and plastered walis, firm with ribs of oak, where they are told the poet of the human race was born. Eyes now closed on the world, but who have left that behind which the world "will not willingly let die," have glistened under this humble roof, and there have been thoughts unutterable

solemn, confiding, grateful, humble-clustering round their hearts in that hour. The autographs of Byron and Scott are amongst hundreds of perishable inscriptions. Disturb not the belief that William Shakspere first saw the light in this venerated room.

Pursuing the associations connected with Shakspere, we naturally turn from the home of his childhood to his school, and his school-boy days.

In the seventh year of the reign of Edward VI., a royal Charter was granted to Stratford for the incorporation of the inhabitants. That charter recites, "That the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon was an ancient borough, in which a certain Guild was theretofore founded, and endowed with divers lands, tenements, and possessions, out of the rents, revenues, and profits, whereof a certain Free Grammar-school for the education of boys there was made and supported." The charter further recites the other public objects to which the property of the Guild had been applied;—that it

was dissolved; and that its possessions had come into the hands of the King. The charter of incorporation then grants to the bailiff and burgesses certain properties which were parcel of the possessions of the guild, for the general charges of the borough, for the maintenance of an ancient almshouse, " and that the Free Grammar-school, for the instruction and education of boys and youth, should be thereafter kept up and maintained as theretofore it used to be." The only qualifications necessary for the admission of a boy into the Free Grammar-school of Stratford were, that he should be a resident in the town, of seven years of age, and able to read. The Grammar-school was essentially connected with the corporation of Stratford; and it is impossible to imagine that, when the son of John Shakspere become qualified by age for admission to a school, where the best education of the time was given, literally for nothing, his father, in that year, being chief alderman, should not have sent him to the school. We assume, without any hesitation, that William Shakspere did receive, in every just sense of the word, the education of a scholar; and as such education was to be had at his own door, we also assume that he was brought up at the Free Grammar-school of his own

town.

The Grammar-school is now an ancient room, over the old Town-hall of Stratford-both, no doubt, offices of the ancient Guild. We enter from the street into a court, of which one side is formed by the Chapel of the Holy Cross. Opposite the chapel is a staircase; ascending which we are in a plain room, with a ceiling. But it is evident that this work of plaster is modern, and that above it we have the oak roof of the sixteenth century. In this room are a few forms, and a rude antique desk. But it appears that the Chapel of the Guild was also used as a school-room. This chapel is in great part a very perfect specimen of the plainer ecclesiastical architecture of the reign of Henry VII.; —a building of just proportions and some ornament, but not running into elaborate decoration. The interior now presents nothing very remarkable. But upon a general repair of the chapel in 1804, beneath the whitewash of successive generations, was discovered a series of most remarkable paintings - -some in a portion of the building erected by Sir Hugh Clopton, and others in the far more ancient chancel. If this was the school-room of William Shakspere, those rude paintings must have produced a powerful effect upon his imagination. Many of them in the ancient chancel constituted a pictorial romance-the History of the Holy Cross, from its origin as a tree at the creation of the world to its rescue from the pagan Cosdroy, king of Persia, by the Christian king, Heraclius; and its final exaltation at Jerusalem,-the anniversary of which event was celebrated at Stratford at its annual fair, held on the 14th of September.

There is a passage in one of Shakspere's sonnets, the 89th, which has induced a belief that he had the misfortune of a physical defect, which would render him peculiarly the object of maternal solicitude:

"Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault,
And I will comment upon that offence:
Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt;
Against thy reasons making no defence."

These and other lines have been interpreted to mean that William Shakspere was literally lame, and that his lameness was such as to limit him, when he became an actor, to the representation of the parts of old men. Of one thing, however, we may be quite sure-that, if Shakspere were lame, his infirmity was not such as to disqualify him for active bodily exertion. The same series of verses that have suggested this belief that he was lame, also show that he was a horseman. His entire works exhibit that familiarity with external nature, with rural occupations, with athletic sports, which is incompatible with an inactive boyhood. It is not impossible that some natural defect, or some accidental injury, may have modified the energy of such a child; and have cherished in him that love of books, and traditionary lore, and silent contemplation, without which his intellect could not have been nourished into its wondrous strength. But we cannot imagine William Shakspere a petted child, chained to home, not breathing the free air upon his native hills, denied the boy's privilege to explore every nook of his own river. We would imagine him communing from the first with Nature, as Gray has painted him,—

"The dauntless child

Stretch'd forth his little arms, and smiled."

Much of the education of William Shakspere was unquestionably in the fields. A thousand incidental allusions manifest his familiarity with all the external aspects of nature. He is very rarely a descriptive poet, distinctively so called; but images of mead and grove, of dale and upland, of forest depths, of quiet walks by gentle rivers,-reflections of his own native scenery,—— spread themselves without an effort over all his writings. All the occupations of a rural life are glanced at or embodied in his characters. The sports, the festivals, of the lone farm or the secluded hamlet, are presented by him with all the charms of an Arcadian age, but with a truthfulness that is not found in Arcadia. The nicest peculiarities in the habits of the lower creation are given at a touch; we see the rook wing his evening flight to the wood; we hear the drowsy hum of the sharded beetle. He wreathes all the flowers of the field in his delicate chaplets; and even the nicest mysteries of the gardener's art can be expounded by him. All this he appears to do as if from an instinctive power. His poetry in this, as in all other great essentials, is like the operations of nature itself; we see not its workings. But we may be assured, from the very circumstance of its appearing so accidental, so spontaneous in its relations to all external nature and to the country life, that it had its foundation in very early and very accurate observation. Stratford was especially fitted to have been the " 'green lap" in which the boy-poet was "laid." The whole face of creation here wore an aspect of quiet loveliness. Looking on its placid stream, its gently swelling hills, its rich pastures, its sleeping woodlands, the external

world would to him be full of images of repose: it was in the heart of man that he was to seek for the sublime. Nature has thus ever with him something genial and exhilarating. There are storms in his great dramas, but they are the accompaniments of the more terrible storms of human passions: they are raised by the poet's art to make the agony of Lear more intense, and the murder of Duncan more awful. But his love of a smiling creation seems ever present. We must image Stratford as it was, to see how the young Shakspere walked "in glory and in joy" amongst his native fields. Upon the bank of the Avon, having a very slight rise, is placed a scattered town; a town whose dwellings have orchards and gardens, with lofty trees growing in its pathways. Its splendid collegiate church, in the time of Henry VIII., was described to lie half a mile from the town. Its eastern window is reflected in the river which flows beneath, as it is at present reflected (Cut, No. 2); its grey tower is embowered amidst lofty elm-rows. At the opposite end of the town is a fine old bridge, with a causeway whose "wearisome but needful length" tells of inundations in the low pastures that lie all around it. We look upon Dugdale's Map of Barichway Hundred, in which Stratford is situated, published in 1656, and we see four roads issuing from the town; as these are amongst the principal roads at the present day. (See Map.) The one to Henley-in-Arden, which lies through the street in which Shakspere may be supposed to have passed his boyhood, continues over a vallev of some

breadth and extent, unenclosed fields undoubtedly in the sixteenth century, with the hamlets of Shottery and Bishopton amidst them. The road leads into the then woody district of Arden. At a short distance from it is the hamlet of Wilmecote, where Mary Arden dwelt; and some two miles aside, more in the heart of the woodland district, and hard by the river Alne, is the village of Aston Cantlow. Another road indicated on this old map is that to Warwick. The wooded hills of Welcombe overhang it, and a little aside, some mile and a half from Stratford, is the meadow of Ingon, which John Shakspere rented in 1570. Very beautiful, even now, is this part of the neighbourhood, with its rapid undulations, little dells which shut in the scattered sheep, and sudden hills opening upon a wide landscape. Ancient crab-trees and hawthorns tell of uncultivated downs which have rung to the call of the falconer or the horn of the huntsman; and then, having crossed the ridge, we are amongst rich corn-lands, with farm-houses of no modern date scattered about; and deep in the hollow, so as to be hidden till we are upon it, the old village of Snitterfield, with its ancient church and its yw-tree as ancient. Here the poet's maternal grandmother had her jointure; and here, it has been conjectured, his father also had possessions. On the opposite side of Stratford the third road runs in the direction of the Avon to the village of Bidford, with a nearer pathway along the river-bank. We cross the ancient bridge by the fourth road (which also diverges to Shipston), and we are on our way to the celebrated

house and estate of Charlcote, the ancient seat of the Lucys, the Shaksperian locality with which most persons are familiar through traditions of deer-stealing. A pleasant ramble, indeed, is this to Charlcote and Hampton Lucy, even with glimpses of the Avon from a turnpike-road. But let the road run through meadows without hedge-rows, with pathways following the river's bank, now diverging when the mill is close upon the stream, now crossing a leafy elevation, and then suddenly dropping under a precipitous wooded rock, and we have a walk such as poet might covet, and such as Shakspere did enjoy in his boy rambles.

On the road to Henley-in-Arden, about two or three hundred yards from the house in Henley-street, where John Shakspere once dwelt, there stands even now a very ancient boundary-tree-an elm which is recorded in a Presentment of the Perambulation of the boun

with its hamlets of Bishopton, Little Wilmecote, Shottery, and Drayton. As the marvellous boy of the Stratford Grammar-school looked upon that plain, how little could he have foreseen the course of his future life! For twenty years of his manhood he was to have no constant dwelling-place in that his native town; but it was to be the home of his affections. He would be gathering fame and opulence in an almost untrodden path, of which his young ambition could shape no definite image; but in the prime of his life he was to bring his wealth to his own Stratford, and become the proprietor and the contented cultivator of some of the loved fields that he now saw mapped out at his feet. Then, a little while, and an early tomb under that grey tower-a tomb so to be honoured in all ages to come, "That kings for such a tomb would wish to die."

For some six miles the boundary runs from north barren, and still known as Drayton Bushes and Drayton Wild Moor. Here,

Evesham highway." Such are the boundaries of the borough at this day. At a period, then, when it was usual for the boys of grammar-schools to attend the annual perambulations in Rogation Week of the clergy, the magistrates, and public officers, and the inhabitants, of parishes and towns, might William Shakspere be found, in gleeful companionship, under this old boundary elm. A wide parish is this of Stratford, including eleven villages and hamlets. A district of beautiful and varied scenery is this parish-hill and valley, wood and water. Following the Avon upon the north bank, against the stream, for some two miles, the processionists would walk through low and fertile meadows-unenclosed pastures then, in all likelihood. A little brook falls into the river, coming down from the marshy uplands of Ingon, where, in spite of modern improvement, the frequent bog attests the accuracy of Dugdale's description. The brook is traced upwards into the hills of Welcombe; and then, for nearly three miles from Welcombe Greenhill, the boundary lies along a wooded ridge, opening prospects of surpassing beauty. There may the distant spires of Coventry be seen peeping above the intermediate hills, and the nearer towers of Warwick lying cradled in their surrounding woods. In another direction a cloud-like spot, in the extreme distance, is the far-famed Wrekin; and turning to the north-west are the noble hills of Malvern, with their well-defined outlines. The Cotswolds lock, in the landscape on another side; while in the middle distance the bold Bredon-hill looks down upon the vale of Evesham. All around is a country of unrivalled fertility, with now and then a plain of considerable extent; but more commonly a succession of undulating hills, some wood-crowned, but all cultivated. At the northern extremity of this high land, which principally belongs to the estate of Clopton, and which was doubtless a park in early times, we have a panoramic view of the valley in which Stratford lies,

* The original is in the possession of R. Wheler, Esq., of Stratford.

"Far from her nest the lapwing cries away."

The green bank of the Avon is again reached at the western extremity of the boundary, and the pretty hamlet of Luddington, with its cottages and old trees standing high above the river sedges, is included. The standing high above the river sedges, is included.

Avon is crossed where the Stour unites with it; and the boundary extends considerably to the south-east, returning to the town over Clopton's Bridge.

As we become familiar with the neighbourhood of Stratford we find it associated with traditions of Shakspere's early manhood. The world has for the most part received these traditions as it found them, and has cared little to examine whether the stories were baseless that described the youth of the great master of wisdom as one of gay revelry, of bold adventure, and of rash love. We may take these associations as they present themselves, without very scrupulously examining into their historical value.

Eight villages in the neighbourhood of Stratford have been characterized in well-known lines by some old resident who had the talent of rhyme. It is remarkable how familiar all the country-people are to this day with these lines, and how invariably they ascribe them to Shakspere:

"Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillborough, hungry Grafton,
Dudging Exhall, Papist Wicksford,
Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford."

It is maintained that these epithets have a real historical truth about them. The neighbourhood of Bidford is associated with a "drunken" tradition. About a mile from the little town on the road to Stratford was, some twenty years ago, an ancient crabtree, well known to the country round as Shakspere's Crab-tree. The tradition which associates it with the name of Shakspere is, like many other traditions regarding the poet, an attempt to embody the general notion that his social qualities were as remarkable as

* Sulky, stubborn, in dudgeon.