Abbey had done Washington Irving's Knickerbocker tales and the various "Washington's Headquarters." He worked exclusively in black and white—crayon, pencil or pen and ink. His hand had taken on a style—powdered wigs, spit-curls, hoops, flaring sunbonnets, cocked hats and the tallyho! These were his properties. He worked from model plus imagination. He had exhausted the antique in America—he thirsted to refresh his imagination in England. The Centennial Exhibition had done its deadly work—Abbey and Parsons were dissatisfied—they wanted to see more. Back of the stagecoach times lay the days of the castle. Back of the musket was the blunderbuss, and back of these were the portcullis, the moat, the spear and coats of mail.
A deluxe edition of "Herrick" was proposed by the Publishing Department: some say the Art Department made the suggestion. Anyway, there was a consultation in the manager's office, and young Abbey was to go to England to look up the scene and with his pencil bring the past up to the present.
Abbey was going to England, that is just all there was about it, and Harper and Brothers did not propose to lose their hold upon him. Salary was waived, but expenses were advanced, and the understanding was that Abbey was Harper's man. This was in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-eight, with Abbey's twenty-sixth birthday yet to come. Abbey had gone around and bidden everybody good-by, including his old-time chum, Alfred Parsons. Parsons was going to the dock to see him off.
"I wish you were going, too," said Edwin, huskily. "I believe I will," said Alfred, swallowing hard. And he did.
The Managing Editor growled furiously, but to no avail, for the
Cunarder that bore the boys was then well out toward the Banks.
It was an American that discovered Stratford; and it is the Peter's pence of American tourists that now largely support the town. At Stratford, Washington Irving jostles the Master for the first place, and when we drink at the George W. Childs fountain we piously pour a libation to all three.
Like all bookish and artistic Americans, when Abbey and Parsons thought of England they thought of Shakespeare's England—the England that Washington Irving had made plain.
Washington Irving seemed very close to our young men—London held them only a few days and then they started for Stratford. They went afoot, as became men who carried crayons that scorned the steam- horse. They took the road for Oxford and stopped at the tavern where the gossips aver that the author of "Love's Labor's Lost" made love to the landlord's wife—a thing I never would believe, e'en though I knew 't were true. From Oxford the young men made their way to storied Warwick, where the portcullis is raised—or lowered, I do not remember which—every evening at sundown to tap of drum. It is the same old Warwick Castle that Shakespeare knew; the same cedars of Lebanon that he saw; the same screaming peacocks; the same circling rooks and daws, and down across the lazy Avon over the meadows the same skylark vibrates the happy air.
Young Abbey saw these things, just as Washington Irving saw them, and he saw them just as the boy William Shakespeare saw them.
Nine miles from Warwick lies Stratford. But at Stratford the tourist is loosed; the picnicker is abroad; the voice of the pedant is heard in the land, and the Baconian is upon us. Abbey and Parsons stopped at the Red Horse Inn and slept in the room that Washington Irving occupied, and they do say now that Irving occupied every room in the house. Stratford was not to the liking of our friends. They wanted to be in the Shakespeare country for six months, that was what the Managing Editor said—six months, mind you. But they did not want to study the tourist. They wanted to be just a little off the beaten track of travel, away from the screech of the locomotive, where they could listen and hear the echoes of a tallyho horn, the crack of the driver's whip, and the clatter of the coming stagecoach.