From Ben Jonson to William Cowper every poet has associated the name of Shakspere with that of his river. There is, however, little need to quote them to convince any one that the Avon is Shakspere's Avon: his own verses tell it, and in strolling along this part of its course, we cannot but feel how entirely he had made it his own. We are again approaching his town; yonder is the tower of the church wherein lie his bones, giving a sober and solemn finish to this graceful landscape. And as the sun is setting rapidly there, see how it shapes out for us images such as perhaps here formed themselves before his eyes:

"Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish :
A vapour, sometime, like a bear, or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock,

A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon 't, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air:

They are black vesper's pageants

That, which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns; and makes it indistinct,
As water is in water."

CHAPTER XII.

THE HOME OF THE POET AND HIS GRAVE.

STRATFORD is a clean, quiet town, pleasantly situated on the right bank of the Avon: it is a place of no large size, without any manufactures, of little traffic; its buildings are not very remarkable: one who knew nothing about it might ride carelessly through it without a wish to stop his horse. Were he told that he was in Stratford-the birthplace, the chosen retreat, and the grave of Shakspere, he would however look on all about him with very different sentiments. He would eagerly examine every spot connected with our great bard, or that existed when he dwelt here; especially would he desire to realize the Stratford of Shakspere, to divest the place of all that has been added to it since he walked about its streets, and to reconstruct whatever has been destroyed.

Dugdale gives the history of Stratford pretty fully, and, to what he collected, a pains-taking inhabitant added, some years back, such additional information as the researches of himself and others had brought to light since Dugdale wrote. So that the history of Stratford is pretty well known, and by calling in all the comparative aids that are available to the student of borough and parochial antiquities, its condition at any particular period can be guessed at without much fear of any great

error.

The value of this is manifest with regard to the vexed question of the position of the father of Shakspere in society, and its probable influence upon the character and fortunes of the son, the means he might possess of educating him, and many other points of great interest bearing more or less closely upon the early life of the poet. This is treated at length in the Biography above referred to, and there the reader will find the inferences arising from the several facts, or suggested by them, fully illustrated.

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Stratford is the name of several towns in various parts of the country, and the same derivation applies to all of them, a ford or passage over the water upon a great street or road," and belongs to the time when bridges were few or none. The addition, upon-Avon, explains itself. Though a place of some importance long before the Conquest, its early history is a blank. It was ecclesiastical property, and nought of importance disturbed its quiet life. The different monarchs granted to it fairs and so forth at the request of its owners, the Bishops of Worcester; and the inhabitants gradually increased in numbers and in wealth, as numbers and wealth were then counted. In 1542 the Bishop. of Worcester exchanged Stratford for some lands in Worcestershire, belonging to the Duke of Northumberland: a few years afterwards Edward VI. bestowed upon it a charter of incorporation, and when, about 1558, John Shakspere commenced housekeeping, it was apparently a flourishing corporate town, with all the array of officers, from high-bailiff and aldermen, to third-boroughs and ale-conner and with somewhat more than a thousand inhabitants. It had too, no doubt, its market

place, with the town-hall just by. And the approach was no longer by the ford, or the rude wooden bridge that succeeded it, for a lord-mayor of London had, in Henry the Seventh's time, built for the inhabitants a substantial stone bridge. Then, attached to the guild, there was a grammar-school, which must have been in tolerable order, for Edward VI. was careful to provide for that in his charter, whence its name had been changed to the king's new school.' "But we are not to infer that when John Shakspere removed the daughter and heiress of Arden from the old hall of Wilmecote he placed her in some substantial mansion in his corporate town, ornamental, as well as solid in its architecture, spacious, convenient, fitted up with taste, if not with splendour. Stratford had, in all likelihood, no such houses to offer; it was a town of wooden houses, a scattered town,-no doubt with gardens separating the low and irregular tenements, sleeping ditches intersecting the properties, and stagnant pools exhaling in the road. Even in the reigns of Elizabeth and James the town was nearly destroyed by fire; and as late as 1618 the privy council represented to the corporation of Stratford that great and lamentable loss had 'happened to that town by casualty of fire, which, of late years, hath been very frequently occasioned by means of thatched cottages, stacks of straw, furzes, and such-like combustible stuff, which are suffered to be erected and made confusedly in most of the principal parts of the town without constraint.' (Chalmer's Apology, p. 618.) If such were the case when the family of William Shakspere occupied the best house in Stratford- -a house in which Queen Henrietta Maria resided for three weeks,