Loitering in Pleasant Paths

by Marion Harland

after seeing the lanes between Leamington and Stratford-on-Avon. Double rows of noble trees screened us from the sun for a mile at a time, and the hedges, so skillfully clipped that the sides and rounded tops were never marred by redundant growth, yet bearing no sign of the shears in stubby or naked stems, were walls of richest verdure throughout the route. The freshness and trimness of the English landscape is a joy and wonder forever to those unused to the perfection of agriculture which is the growth of centuries. There is the finish and luxuriance of a pleasure-garden in every prospect in these midland counties, and, forgetting that the soil has acknowledged a master in the husbandman for more than a thousand years, and that, for more than half that time, the highest civilization known to man has held reign in this tiny island, we are tempted to think discontentedly of the contrast offered by our own magnificent, and, by contrast, crude spaces. It was not because of affectation or lack of patriotism that, upon our return home, the straggling fences, clogged with alder and brambles, the ragged pastures and gullied hillsides were a positive pain to sight and heart.

Any one who has seen a good photograph of Shakspeare’s house knows exactly how it looks. The black timbers of the frame-work are visible from the outside. The spaces between the beams are filled with cement or plaster. There are three gables in front, the third, at the upper corner, broader and higher than the others. The chimney is in the end-gable, joining this last at right angles, and is covered with ivy. A pent-house protects the main entrance. Wide latticed windows light the ground-floor; a latticed oriel projects from the second story of the taller division of the building. Smaller casements in line with this are set in each of the principal upper rooms. The house is flush with the street, and is probably smarter in its “restoration,” than when Master John Shakspeare, wool-dealer, lived here. We entered, without intervening vestibule or passage, a square room, the ceiling of which was not eight feet high. A peasant’s kitchen, that was also best-room, with a broken stone floor and plastered walls checquered by hewn beams.

Two sisters, who dressed, looked, moved and spoke absurdly alike, are the custodians of the cottage. One met us with a professional droop of a not-elastic figure, a mechanical smile and an immediate plunge into business:

“After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble tenement, it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration, and one that accounts for the dilapidation of the floor, it having been shattered by chopping meat upon it.”

No reasonable visitor could desire to linger in the apartment longer than sufficed for the delivery of the comprehensive formula, and she tiptoed into the adjoining room:

“In this the family were accustomed to sit when they were not dressed in their best clothes”—mincingly jocular.

Caput and I, regardless of routine, strayed back into the outer kitchen to get a more satisfactory look, and after our fashion, and that of Mr. Swiveller’s Marchioness, “to make-believe very hard.” We wanted to shut our eyes—and ears—and in a blessed interval of silence, to see the honest dealer in wool—member of the corporation; for two years chamberlain; high bailiff in 1569; and in 1571—his son William being then seven years of age—chief alderman of Stratford, standing in the street-door chatting with a respectful fellow-townsman; Mary his wife, passing from dresser to hearth, and, upon a stool in the chimney corner, the Boy, chin propped upon his hand, thinking—“idling,” his industrious seniors would have said.

We had hardly passed the door of communication when sister No. 1 having transferred the rest of the visitors to No. 2, and sent them up-stairs, reappeared. The same professional dip of the starched figure; the manufactured smile, and, mistaking us for fresh arrivals, she began, without variation of syllable or inflection:

“After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble tenement, it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration—”