Mr. Sturge also has been equally zealous and engaged in movements for the ignorant and perishing classes at home.  At his own expense he has sustained a private Farm School for the reformation of juvenile offenders, and it has sometimes been found that boys, whom no severity and no punishment seemed to affect, have been entirely melted and subdued by the gentler measures here employed.  He has also taken a very ardent and decided part in efforts for the extension of the principles of peace, being a warm friend and supporter of Elihu Burritt.

The next morning it was agreed that we should take our drive to Stratford-on-Avon.  As yet this shrine of pilgrims stands a little aloof from the bustle of modern progress, and railroad cars do not run whistling and whisking with brisk officiousness by the old church and the fanciful banks of the Avon.

The country that we were to pass over was more peculiarly old English; that phase of old English which is destined soon to pass away, under the restless regenerating force of modern progress.

Our ride along was a singular commixture of an upper and under current of thought.  Deep down in our hearts we were going back to English days; the cumbrous, quaint, queer, old, picturesque times; the dim, haunted times between cock-crowing and morning; those hours of national childhood, when popular ideas had the confiding credulity, the poetic vivacity, and versatile life, which distinguish children from grown people.

No one can fail to feel, in reading any of the plays of Shakspeare, that he was born in an age of credulity and marvels, and that the materials out of which his mind was woven were dyed in the grain, in the haunted springs of tradition.  It would have been as absolutely impossible for even himself, had he been born in the daylight of this century, to have built those quaint, Gothic structures of imagination, and tinted them with their peculiar coloring of marvellousness and mystery, as for a modern artist to originate and execute the weird designs of an ancient cathedral.  Both Gothic architecture and this perfection of Gothic poetry were the springing and efflorescence of that age, impossible to grow again.  They were the forest primeval; other trees may spring in their room, trees as mighty and as fair, but not such trees.

So, as we rode along, our speculations and thoughts in the under current were back in the old world of tradition.  While, on the other hand, for the upper current, we were keeping up a brisk conversation on the peace question, on the abolition of slavery, on the possibility of ignoring slave-grown produce, on Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, and, in fact, on all the most wide-awake topics of the present day.