The outer walls of Kenilworth Castle encompassed an area of seven acres; but walls and tower, great hall and oriel, are now but masses of ruined masonry, half shrouded in a screen of ivy, and giving but a feeble idea of what the castle was in its days of pride, when graced by Queen Elizabeth and her court, and made such a scene of splendor and regal magnificence as to excite even the admiration of the sovereign herself. Time has marked the proud castle with its ineffable signet, and notwithstanding the aid of imagination, Kenilworth seems but a mere ghost of the past.
From Kenilworth Castle we took train for Stratford-on-Avon,—the place which no American would think of leaving England without visiting,—a quiet little English town, but whose inns have yearly visitors from half the nations of the civilized world, pilgrims to this shrine of genius, the birthplace of him who wrote "not for a day, but all time." A quaint, old-fashioned place is Stratford, with here and there a house that might have been in existence during the poet's time; indeed, many were, for I halted opposite the grammar school, which was founded by Henry IV., and in which Will Shakespeare studied and was birched; the boys were out to play in the little square close, or court-yard, and as I entered through the squat, low doorway, which, like many of these old buildings in England, seems compressed or shrunk with age, I was surrounded by the whole troup of successors of Shakespeare, the gates closed, and my deliverance only purchased by payment of sixpence.
That antique relic of the past, the poet's birthplace, which we at once recognize from the numerous pictures we have seen of it, I stood before with a feeling akin to that of veneration—something like that which must fill the mind of a pilgrim who has travelled a weary journey to visit the shrine of some celebrated saint.
It is an odd, and old-fashioned mass of wood and plaster. The very means that have been taken to preserve it seem almost a sacrilege, the fresh paint upon the wood-work outside, that shone in the spring sunlight, the new braces, plaster and repairs here and there, give the old building the air of an old man, an octogenarian, say, who had discarded his old-time rags and tatters for a suit of new cloth cut in old style; but something must, of course, be done to preserve the structure from crumbling into the dust beneath the inexorable hand of time, albeit it was of substantial oak, filled in with plaster, but has undergone many "improvements" since the poet's time.
The first room we visit in the house is the kitchen with its wide chimney, the kitchen in which John Shakespeare and his son Will so often sat, where he watched the blazing logs, and listened to strange legends of village gossips, or stories of old crones, or narratives of field and flood, and fed his young imagination to the full with that food which gave such lusty life to it in after years. Here was a big arm-chair—Shakespeare's chair, of course, as there was in 1820, when our countryman Washington Irving visited the place; but inasmuch as the real chair was purchased by the Princess Czartoryska in 1790, one cannot with a knowledge of this fact feel very enthusiastic over this.
From the kitchen we ascend into the room in which the poet was born—a low, rude apartment, with huge beams and plastered walls, and those walls one mosaic mass of pencilled autographs and inscriptions of visitors to this shrine of genius. One might spend hours in deciphering names, inscriptions, rhymes, aphorisms, &c., that are thickly written upon every square inch of space, in every style of chirography and in every language: even the panes of glass in the windows have not escaped, but are scratched all over with autographs by the diamond rings of visitors; and among these signatures I saw that of Walter Scott. At the side of the fireplace in this room is the well-known actor's pillar, a jamb of the fireplace thickly covered with the autographs of actors who have visited here; among the names I noticed the signatures of Charles Kean, Edmund Kean, and G. V. Brooke. Visitors are not permitted now to write upon any portion of the building, and are always closely accompanied by a guide, in order that no portion of it may be cut and carried away by relic-hunters.
The visitors' book which is kept here is a literary as well as an autographic curiosity; it was a matter of regret to me that I had only time to run over a few of the pages of its different volumes filled with the writing of all classes, from prince to peasant, and in every language and character, even those of Turkish, Hebrew, and Chinese. The following, I think, was from the pen of Prince Lucien:—
"The eye of genius glistens to admire
How memory hails the soul of Shakespeare's lyre.