It was a warm evening, as his father had observed, but in one sense he had been turned out into the cold, and he felt it bitterly.
CHAPTER III.
A RECITATION.
There is one spot, and only one, in all England, which can in any general sense be called hallowed—sacred to the memory of departed man. Priests and kings have done their best for other places, with small effect; here and there, as in Westminster Abbey, an attempt has been made to make sacred soil by collecting together the bones of our greatest men—warriors, authors, divines, statesmen; but these various elements do not kindly mix: the devotion we would pay to our own particular idol is chilled perhaps by the neighbourhood of those with whom we feel no especial sympathy. In all cathedrals, too, there is a certain religious feeling, artificial as the light which finds its way through the ‘prophets blazoned on its panes;’ it is difficult in them to feel enthusiasm. In other places, again, exposed to the free air of heaven, association is weakened by external influences. I, at least, only know of one place where Nature, as it were, effaces herself, and becomes the setting and framework to the epitaph of a dead man. It is Stratford-on-Avon.
There, save once a year, when Shakespeare’s birthday is commemorated, fashion brings but few persons to simulate admiration. It is not as at some great funeral, where curiosity or official position or other extraneous motive brings men together to do honour to the departed; they come like humble friends, to pay tribute to one whom they not only admire, but revere, to this little Warwickshire town. It is too remote from the places where men congregate to entice the thoughtless crowd; nor has it any attractions save its associations with that marvellous mind, of which the crowd has but a vague and cold conception. It is, to my poor thinking, a very comfortable sign of the advance of human intelligence that, year after year, in hundreds and in thousands, but not in crowds—for they arrive alone, or in twos or threes together—there come, from the uttermost parts of our island, and even from the ends of the earth, more and more pilgrims to this simple shrine.
In the days of which I write, Stratford, of course, had far fewer visitors than at present; but those it did have were certainly not inferior in enthusiasm. Indeed, it was a time when Shakespeare, if not more read than now, was certainly more talked about and thought about. His plays were much oftener acted. The theatre occupied a more intellectual position in society. Kemble and his majestic sister, Mrs. Siddons, trod the boards; quotations from Shakespeare were as common in the mouths of clerks and counter-jumpers as are now the most taking rhymes from a favourite burlesque; even the paterfamilias who did not ‘hold by’ stage plays made an exception in honour of the Bard of Avon. In literary circles an incessant war was waging concerning him; pamphlet after pamphlet—attack and rejoinder—was published almost every week by this or that partisan of a phrase, or discoverer of a new reading. Mr. Samuel Erin was in the fore-front of this contest, and, as a rule, a stickler for the text. He opposed the advocates for change in the same terms which Dr. Johnson used to reformers in politics. The devil, he was wont to say, was the first commentator. The famous Shakespearean critic Malone was the object of his special aversion, which was most cordially reciprocated, and often had they transfixed one another with pens dipped in gall.
It was curious, since the object of Mr. Erin’s adoration has taken such pains to instil gentleness and feeling among his fellow-creatures, that his disciple should have harboured the sentiments he sometimes expressed; and yet it is hardly to be wondered at when one remembers that the advocates of Christianity itself have fallen into the same error, and from the same cause. Mr. Samuel Erin was not only a devotee, but a fanatic.
As the coach crossed the river, near their journey’s end, Mr. Dennis broke a long silence by a reference to the beauty of the scenery, which his friend had come professionally to illustrate.