This room, and the entire house, so far as I saw it, are whitewashed and exceedingly clean; nor is there the aged, musty smell with which old Chester first made me acquainted, and which goes far to cure an American of his excessive predilection for antique residences.  An old lady, who took charge of me up-stairs, had the manners and aspect of a gentlewoman, and talked with somewhat formidable knowledge and appreciative intelligence about Shakspeare.  Arranged on a table and in chairs were various prints, views of houses and scenes connected with Shakspeare’s memory, together with editions of his works and local publications about his home and haunts, from the sale of which this respectable lady perhaps realizes a handsome profit.  At any rate, I bought a good many of them, conceiving that it might be the civillest way of requiting her for her instructive conversation and the trouble she took in showing me the house.  It cost me a pang (not a curmudgeonly, but a gentlemanly one) to offer a downright fee to the lady-like girl who had admitted me; but I swallowed my delicate scruples with some little difficulty, and she digested hers, so far as I could observe, with no difficulty at all.  In fact, nobody need fear to hold out half a crown to any person with whom he has occasion to speak a word in England.

I should consider it unfair to quit Shakspeare’s house without the frank acknowledgment that I was conscious of not the slightest emotion while viewing it, nor any quickening of the imagination.  This has often happened to me in my visits to memorable places.  Whatever pretty and apposite reflections I may have made upon the subject had either occurred to me before I ever saw Stratford, or have been elaborated since.  It is pleasant, nevertheless, to think that I have seen the place; and I believe that I can form a more sensible and vivid idea of Shakspeare as a flesh-and-blood individual now that I have stood on the kitchen-hearth and in the birth-chamber; but I am not quite certain that this power of realization is altogether desirable in reference to a great poet.  The Shakspeare whom I met there took various guises, but had not his laurel on.  He was successively the roguish boy,—­the youthful deer-stealer,—­the comrade of players,—­the too familiar friend of Davenant’s mother,—­the careful, thrifty, thriven man of property, who came back from London to lend money on bond, and occupy the best house in Stratford,—­the mellow, red-nosed, autumnal boon-companion of John a’ Combe, who (or else the Stratford gossips belied him) met his death by tumbling into a ditch on his way home from a drinking-bout, and left his second-best bed to his poor wife.  I feel, as sensibly as the reader can, what horrible impiety it is to remember these things, be they true or false.  In either case, they ought to vanish out of sight on the distant ocean-line of the past, leaving a pure, white memory, even as a sail, though perhaps darkened with many stains, looks snowy white