CHAPTER XIV.

Drive from Birmingham to Stratford rather tame. — Ancient Building in a modern-looking Street; of rude and humble Appearance. "The Immortal Shakspeare born in this House."- Description of the Interior. The Walls and Ceiling covered with Names. — Albums. — Shakspeare, Scott, Dickens; greatly different in their Intellectual Stature, but yet all of one Family. - Principle by which to take their Measure. No Dramatist ever draws an Intellect taller than his own. - Imitative Faculty. The Reports of Dickens. - Learning of Shakspeare. New Place. The Rev. Francis Gastrall. Stratford Church. The Poet's Grave; his Bust; far superior to the idealized Representations. - The Avon. - The Jubilee, and Cowper's Description of it. The true Hero Worship. Quit Stratford for Olney. Get into bad Company by the way. Gentlemen of the Fancy. - Adventure.

THE drive from Birmingham, for the greater part of the way, is rather tame. There is no lack of fields and hedge-rows, houses and trees; but, from the great flatness of the country, they are doled out to the eye in niggardly detail, at the rate of about two fields and three hedge-rows at a time. Within a few miles of Stratford-on-Avon, however, the scenery improves. We are still on the Upper New Red Sandstone, and on this formation the town is built: but the Lias beyond shoots out, just in the line of our route, into a long promontory, capped by two insulated outliers, that, projected far in advance, form the outer piquets of the newer and higher system; and for some four or five miles ere we enter the place, we coast along the tree-mottled shores of this green headland and its terminal islands. A scattered suburb introduces us to a rather commonplace-looking street of homely brick houses, that seem as if they had all been reared within the last half century; all, at least,

save one, a rude, unsightly specimen of the oak-framed domicile of the days of Elizabeth and James. Its walls are incrusted with staring white-wash, its beams carelessly daubed over with lamp-black; a deserted butcher's shop, of the fifth-rate class, with the hooks still sticking in the walls, and the sill-board still spread out, as if to exhibit the joints, occupies the groundfloor; the one upper story contains a single rickety casement, with a forlorn flower-pot on the sill; and directly in front of the building there is what seems a rather clumsy sign-board, hung between two poles, that bears on its weather-beaten surface a double line of white faded letters on a ground of black. We read the inscription, and this humblest of dwellings humble, and rather vulgar to boot rises in interest over the palaces of kings:-"The immortal Shakspeare was born in this house." I shall first go and see the little corner his birthplace, I said, and then the little corner his burial-place: they are scarce half a mile apart; nor, after the lapse of more than two centuries, does the intervening modicum of time between the two events, his birth and his burial, bulk much larger than the modicum of space that separates the respective scenes of them; but how marvellously is the world filled with the cogitations which employed that one brain in that brief period! Could it have been some four pounds' weight of convoluted matter, divided into two hemispheres, that, after originating these buoyant immaterialities, projected them upon the broad current of time, and bade them sail onwards and downwards forever? I cannot believe it: the sparks of a sky-rocket survive the rocket itself but a very few seconds. I cannot believe that these thoughts of Shakspeare, "that wander through eternity," are the mere sparks of an exploded rocket, the mere scintillations of a little galvanic battery, made of fibre and

albumen, like that of the torpedo, and whose ashes would now lie in the corner of a snuff-box.

I passed through the butcher's shop, over a broken stone pavement, to a little gloomy kitchen behind, and then, under charge of the guide, up a dark narrow stair, to the low-browed room in which the poet was born. The floor of old oak, much worn in the seams, has apparently undergone no change since little Bill, be-frocked and be-booted in woolen prepared from the rough material by the wool-comber his father, coasted it along the walls, in bold adventure, holding on, as he went, by tables and chairs. The ceiling, too, though unluckily covered up by modern lath and plaster, is in all probability that which stretched over the head of the boy. It presents at least no indication of having been raised. A man rather above the middle size may stand erect under its central beam with his hat on, but with certainly no room to spare; and it seems more than probable that, had the old ceiling been changed for another, the new one would have been heightened. But the walls have been sadly altered. The one window of the place is no longer that through which Shakspeare first saw the light; nor is the fireplace that at which he stealthily lighted little bits of stick, and twirled them in the air, to see the fiery points converted into fiery circles. There are a few old portraits and old bits of furniture, of somewhat doubtful lineage, stuck round the room; and, on the top of an antique cabinet, a good plaster cast of the monumental bust in the church, in which, from its greater accessibility, one can better study than in the original the external signs affixed by nature to her mind of largest. calibre. Every part of the walls and ceiling is inscribed with names. I might add mine, if I chose, to the rest, the woman told me; but I did not choose it. Milton and Dryden would have added theirs: he, the sublimest of poets, who, ere criticism

had taken the altitude of the great writer whom he so fervently loved and admired, could address him in the fondness of youthful enthusiasm as "my Shakspeare; " and he, the sympathetic ;" critic, who first dared to determine that "of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, Shakspeare had the largest and most comprehensive soul." Messrs. Wiggins and Tims, too, would have added their names; and all right. They might not exactly see for themselves what it was that rendered Shakspeare so famous; but their admiration, entertained on trust, would be at least a legitimate echo of his renown; and so their names would have quite a right to be there as representatives of the outer halo- the second rainbow, if I may so express myself — of the poet's celebrity. But I was ashamed to add mine. I remembered that I was a writer; that it was my business to write, to cast, day after day, shavings from off my mind, the figure is Cowper's, - that went rolling away, crisp and dry, among the vast heap already on the floor, and were never more heard of; and so I did n't add my name. The woman pointed to the album, or rather set of albums, which form a record of the visiters, and said her mother could have turned up for me a great many names that strangers liked to look at; but the old woman was confined to her bed, and she, considerably less at home in the place, could show me only a few. The first she turned up was that of Sir Walter Scott; the second, that of Charles Dickens. "You have done remarkably well," I said "your mother could n't have done better. Now, shut the book."

It was a curious coincidence. Shakspeare, Scott, Dickens! The scale is a descending one; so is the scale from the lion to the leopard, and from the leopard to the tiger-cat; but cat, leopard, and lion, belong to one great family; and these three poets belong unequivocally to one great family also. They are

generically one; masters, each in his own sphere, not simply of the art of exhibiting character in the truth of nature, for that a Hume or a Tacitus may possess, but of the rarer and more difficult dramatic art of making characters exhibit themselves. It is not uninstructive to remark how the peculiar ability of portraying character in this form is so exactly proportioned to the general intellectual power of the writer who possesses it. No dramatist, whatever he may attempt, ever draws taller men than himself: as water in a bent tube rises to exactly the same height in the two limbs, so intellect in the character produced rises to but the level of the intellect of the producer. Milton's fiends, with all their terrible strength and sublimity, are but duplicates of the Miltonic intellect united to vitiated moral natures; nor does that august and adorable Being, who perhaps should not have been dramatically introduced into even the "Paradise Lost," excel as an intelligence the too daring poet by whom he is exhibited. Viewed with reference to this simple rule, the higher characters of Scott, Dickens, and Shakspeare, curiously indicate the intellectual stature of the men who produced them. Scott's higher characters possess massive good sense, great shrewdness, much intelligence: they are always very superior, if not always great men; and by a careful arrangement of drapery, and much study of position and attitude, they play their parts wonderfully well. The higher characters of Dickens do not stand by any means so high; the fluid in the original tube rests at a lower level: and no one seems better aware of the fact than Dickens himself. He knows his proper walk; and, content with expatiating in a comparatively humble province of human life and character, rarely stands on tiptoe, in the vain attempt to portray an intellect taller than his own. The intellectual stature of Shakspeare rises, on the other hand, to the highest level of