It is a quiet, old-fashioned place, with wide and well-kept streets, and many handsome mansions. The Town Hall was dedicated to the memory of the poet. Here is a statue of Shakespeare, presented by Garrick, on the pedestal of which are the lines from Hamlet; “Take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again.” Very interesting is the Shakespeare Memorial Building and Theater, in a charming situation by the Avon, the outgrowth of the feeling that the poet should have a suitable monument in his native town.
Shakespeare’s House, in Henley Street, became national property in 1847, and has been carefully restored. The room in which the poet is said to have been born seems to have undergone but little change since that day. In another room there is a small museum of Shakespearian curiosities.
Stratford Church, in which Shakespeare is buried, is on the bank of the Avon. It is a large and elegant structure, with a graceful stone spire [464] one hundred and sixty-three feet high, erected in 1764 to replace a wooden one that had been taken down. The building has been judiciously restored in recent years. There is an elegant window illustrating Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages,” the contribution of Americans.
The grave of Shakespeare is in the chancel, covered by a plain flagstone, while above, on the wall to the left, is the monumental bust which is the most trustworthy representation of the poet. His wife lies near him, with his favorite daughter, “good Mistris Hall,” and Dr. John Hall, her husband. In the chancel there is also an elegant marble monument to John Combe, the poet’s friend.
Shottery, where Anne Hathaway lived before she became the wife of Shakespeare, is about a mile from Stratford, and may be reached by a footpath through the fields. The cottage that was Anne’s home has a timber and plaster front, and a thatched roof. The interior contains the oaken seat on which Shakespeare and Anne were wont to sit; many bits of venerable furniture; and, upstairs, a vast bed, on which many a Hathaway has drawn the last breath of life.
Stratford also possesses a memorial fountain, presented by George W. Childs of Philadelphia, and Harvard House, the birthplace of the mother of John Harvard, founder of Harvard University. It is still an important agricultural center; but its chief prosperity depends on the thirty thousand or so pilgrims who visit it yearly.
Ayr, forty miles from Glasgow, Scotland, by railway, is noted especially as the birthplace of Burns, the poet; as also the place where Wm. Wallace was imprisoned. The town is divided by the river Ayr, over which are the “twa brigs” of Burns. The Burns Cottage, or birthplace, the scene of his “Cotter’s Saturday Night,” is two miles south of the town, and is now used as a public memorial. It contains few articles associated with Burns.
Alloway Kirk, mentioned in “Tam O’Shanter,” or what remains of it, is one-half mile south of the Cottage. Near the church are the Burns monument, a circular shaft sixty feet in height, erected 1820, and the Doon, immortalized in the “Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon.”
Burns died at Dumfries, where he had lived three years, and was buried in the churchyard there. Nineteen years later, upon the completion of the monument to his memory, his body was exhumed and placed within the Mausoleum at Dumfries.
Melrose, in the county of Roxburgh, thirty-one miles southeast of Edinburgh, is celebrated for the abbey founded by King David in 1136; destroyed by Edward II. in 1322; rebuilt by Bruce in 1326, and partly demolished by the English in 1545. Sir Walter Scott has given it an enduring description in his Lay of the Last Minstrel.