Interior of the Grammar School.
Warwickshire is hallowed by shining names of persons illustrious in the annals of art. Drayton, Greene, and Heminge, who belong to the Shakespeare period, were born there. Walter Savage Landor was a native of Warwick,—in which quaint and charming town you may see the house of his birth, duly marked. Croft, the composer, was born near Ettington, hard by Stratford: there is a tiny monument, commemorative of him, in the ruins of Ettington church, near the manor-house of Shirley. And in our own day Warwickshire has enriched the world with "George Eliot" and with that matchless actress,—the one Ophelia and the one Beatrice of our age—Ellen Terry. But it is a chief characteristic of England that whichever way you turn in it your footsteps fall on haunted ground. Everyday life here is continually impressed by incidents of historic association. In an old church at Greenwich I asked that I might be directed to the tomb of General Wolfe. "He is buried just beneath where you are now standing," the custodian said. It was an elderly woman who showed the place, and she presently stated that when a girl she once entered the vault beneath that church and stood beside the coffin of General Wolfe and took a piece of laurel from it, and also took a piece of the red velvet pall from the coffin of the old Duchess of Bolton, close by. That Duchess was Lavinia Fenton, the first representative of Polly Peachem, in The Beggars' Opera, who died in 1760, aged fifty-two.[28] "Lord Clive," the dame added, "is buried in the same vault with Wolfe." An impressive thought, that the ashes of the man who established Britain's power in America should at last mingle with the ashes of the man who gave India to England!
CHAPTER X
SHAKESPEARE'S TOWN
To traverse Stratford-upon-Avon is to return upon old tracks, but no matter how often you visit that delightful place you will always see new sights in it and find new incidents. After repeated visits to Shakespeare's town the traveller begins to take more notice than perhaps at first he did of its everyday life. In former days the observer had no eyes except for the Shakespeare shrines. The addition of a new wing to the ancient, storied, home-like Red Horse, the new gardens around the Memorial theatre, the completed chime of Trinity bells,—these, and matters like to these, attract attention now. And now, too, I have rambled, in the gloaming, through scented fields to Clifford church; and strolled through many a green lane to beautiful Preston; and climbed Borden hill; and stood by the maypole on Welford common; and journeyed along the battle-haunted crest of Edgehill; and rested at venerable Compton-Wynyate;[29] and climbed the hills of Welcombe to peer into the darkening valleys of the Avon and hear the cuckoo-note echoed and re-echoed from rhododendron groves, and from the great, mysterious elms that embower this country-side for miles and miles around. This is the life of Stratford to-day,—the fertile farms, the garnished meadows, the avenues of white and coral hawthorn, masses of milky snow-ball, honeysuckle and syringa loading the soft air with fragrance, chestnuts dropping blooms of pink and white, and laburnums swinging their golden censers in the breeze.
Trinity Church—Stratford-upon-Avon.