We lingered for a moment at the building to which went Shakspeare as a
“Whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping, like snail,
Unwillingly to school.”
It is “the thing” to quote the line before the gray walls capped by mossy slates, of the Grammar-School founded by Henry IV. The quadrangle about which the lecture-rooms and offices are ranged is not large, and is entered by a low gateway. Over the stones of this court-yard Shakspeare’s feet,
“Creeping in to school,
Went storming out to playing.”
Boy-nature, in 1574, was the same, in these respects, as in 1874, Shakspeare and Whittier being judges.
Stratford-on-Avon is a clean, quiet country town, that would have dwindled into a village long ago had not John Shakspeare’s son been born in her High Street. Antique houses, with peaked gables and obtrusive beams, deep-stained by years—(Time’s record is made with inky dyes, and in broad English down-strokes, in this climate)—are to be seen on every street. Every second shop along our route had in its one window a show of what we would call “Shakspeare Notions;” stamped handkerchiefs, mugs, platters, paper-cutters and paper-weights, and a host of photographs, all commemorative of the town and the Man.
“New Place” was purchased by Shakspeare in 1597, and enlarged and adorned as befitted his amended fortunes. We like to hear that, while he lived in London, not a year elapsed without his paying a visit to Stratford, and that in 1613, upon his withdrawal from public life, he made New Place his constant residence, spending his time “in ease, retirement and the society of friends.” In the garden grew, and, long after his death flourished, the mulberry-tree planted by his own hands. In the museum we had seen a goblet carved out of the wood of this tree, and, in a sealed bottle, the purple juice of its berries. New Place did not pass from the poet’s family until the death of his granddaughter, Lady Barnard. It is recorded that, in 1643, this lady and her husband were the hosts of Henrietta Maria, Queen of Charles I. She was thankful in the turmoil and distrust of civil war, to find an asylum for three weeks under the roof that had covered a greater than the lordliest Stuart who ever paltered with a nation’s trust. At Lady Barnard’s decease, New Place was sold, first to one, then another proprietor, until Sir Hugh Clopton remodelled and almost rebuilt the house. After him came the Rev. Francis Gastrell who, in a fit of passion at what he conceived to be the exorbitant tax levied upon the mansion, pulled it down to the foundation-stones. In the same Christian frame of mind, he hewed down the mulberry-tree, then in a vigorous old age, a giant of its tribe, “because so many people stopped in the street to stare at it, thereby inconveniencing himself and family.” Peevish fatuousness that has a parallel in the discontent of the present incumbent of Haworth that, “because he chances to inhabit the parsonage in which the Brontë sisters lived and died, he must be persecuted by throngs of visitors to it and the church.” It is not his fault, he pathetically reminds the public, that people of genius once dwelt there, and he proposes to demonstrate the dissimilarity of those who now occupy it by renovating Haworth Rectory and erecting a new church upon the site of that in which the Brontës are buried.