Then let me go, and hinder not my course:
I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,
And make a pastime of each weary step,
Till the last step have brought me to my love;
And there I'll rest, as, after much turmoil,
A blessed soul doth in Elysium."
The river cannot now be materially different from what it was three hundred years ago, but the town has changed a good deal. I fear that we might not have enjoyed a visit to it in that olden time as we do in these latter days.
It is not pleasant to learn that the poet's father was fined for maintaining a sterquinarium, which being translated from the Latin is dung-heap, in front of his house in Henley Street—now, like the other Stratford streets, kept as clean as any cottage-floor in the town—and we have ample evidence that the general sanitary condition of the place was very bad. John Shakespeare would probably not have been fined if his sterquinarium had been behind his house instead of before it.
Stratford, however, was no worse in this respect than other English towns. The terrible plagues that devastated the entire land in those "good old times" were the natural result of the unwholesome habits of life everywhere prevailing—everywhere, for the mansions of noblemen and the palaces of kings were as filthy as the hovels of peasants. The rushes with which royal presence-chamber and banquet-hall were strewn in place of carpets were not changed until they had become too unsavory for endurance. Meanwhile disagreeable odors were overcome by burning perfumes—of which practice we have a hint in Much Ado About Nothing in the reference to "smoking a musty room."