Royal Palms we remember in the West India Islands (photograph) had been spirited over seas and turned into stone.  Make your obeisance to the august shape of Sir Isaac Newton, reclining like a weary swain in the niche at the side of the gorgeous screen.  Pass through Henry VII.’s Chapel, a temple cut like a cameo.  Look at the shining oaken stalls of the knights.  See the banners overhead.  There is no such speaking record of the lapse of time as these banners,—­there is one of them beginning to drop to pieces; the long day of a century has decay for its dial-shadow.

We have had a glimpse of London,—­let us make an excursion to Stratford-on-Avon.

Here you see the Shakspeare House as it was,—­wedged in between, and joined to, the “Swan and Maidenhead” Tavern and a mean and dilapidated brick building, not much worse than itself, however.  The first improvement (as you see in No. 2) was to pull down this brick building.  The next (as you see in No. 3)—­was to take away the sign and the bay-window of the “Swan and Maidenhead” and raise two gables out of its roof, so as to restore something like its ancient aspect.  Then a rustic fence was put up and the outside arrangements were completed.  The cracked and faded sign projects as we remember it of old.  In No. 1 you may read “THE IMMORTAL SHAKES_peare ...  Born in This House_” about as well as if you had been at the trouble and expense of going there.

But here is the back of the house.  Did little Will use to look out at this window with the bull’s-eye panes?  Did he use to drink from this old pump, or the well in which it stands?  Did his shoulders rub against this angle of the old house, built with rounded bricks?  It a strange picture, and sets us dreaming.  Let us go in and up-stairs.  In this room he was born.  They say so, and we will believe it.  Rough walls, rudely boarded floor, wide window with small panes, small bust of him between two cactuses in bloom on window-seat.  An old table covered with prints and stereographs, a framed picture, and under it a notice “Copies of this Portrait” ... the rest, in fine print, can only be conjectured.

Here is the Church of the Holy Trinity, in which he lies buried.  The trees are bare that surround it; see the rooks’ nests in their tops.  The Avon is hard by, dammed just here, with flood-gates, like a canal.  Change the season, if you like,—­here are the trees in leaf, and in their shadow the tombs and graves of the mute, inglorious citizens of Stratford.

Ah, how natural this interior, with its great stained window, its mural monuments, and its slab in the pavement with the awful inscription!  That we cannot see here, but there is the tablet with the bust we know so well.  But this, after all, is Christ’s temple, not Shakspeare’s.  Here are the worshippers’ seats,—­mark how the polished wood glistens,—­there is the altar, and there the open prayer-book,—­you can almost read the service from it.  Of the many striking