My friend looked white as the wall, flung the “London Times” half across the room, kicked one slipper into the air and shouted, “Talmage, where on earth did you come from?” as one summer I stepped into his English home.  “Just come over the ferry to dine with you,” I responded.  After some explanation about the health of my family, which demanded a sea voyage, and thus necessitated my coming, we planned two or three excursions.

At eight o’clock in the morning we gathered in the parlor in the Red Horse Hotel, at Stratford-on-Avon.  Two pictures of Washington Irving, the chair in which the father of American literature sat, and the table on which he wrote, immortalizing his visit to that hotel, adorn the room.  From thence we sallied forth to see the clean, quaint village of Stratford.  It was built just to have Shakspeare born in.  We have not heard that there was any one else ever born there, before or since.  If, by any strange possibility, it could be proved that the great dramatist was born anywhere else, it would ruin all the cab drivers, guides and hostelries of the place.

We went of course to the house where Shakspeare first appeared on the stage of life, and enacted the first act of his first play.  Scene the first.  Enter John Shakspeare, the father; Mrs. Shakspeare, the mother, and the old nurse, with young William.

A very plain house it is.  Like the lark, which soars highest, but builds its nest lowest, so with genius; it has humble beginnings.  I think ten thousand dollars would be a large appraisement for all the houses where the great poets were born.  But all the world comes to this lowly dwelling.  Walter Scott was glad to scratch his name on the window, and you may see it now.  Charles Dickens, Edmund Kean, Albert Smith, Mark Lemon and Tennyson, so very sparing of their autographs, have left their signatures on the wall.  There are the jambs of the old fire-place where the poet warmed himself and combed wool, and began to think for all time.  Here is the chair in which he sat while presiding at the club, forming habits of drink which killed him at the last, his own life ending in a tragedy as terrible as any he ever wrote.  Exeunt wine-bibbers, topers, grogshop keepers, Drayton, Ben Jonson and William Shakspeare.  Here also is the letter which Richard Quyney sent to Shakspeare, asking to borrow thirty pounds.  I hope he did not loan it; for if he did, it was a dead loss.

We went to the church where the poet is buried.  It dates back seven hundred years, but has been often restored.  It has many pictures, and is the sleeping place of many distinguished dead; but one tomb within the chancel absorbs all the attention of the stranger.  For hundreds of years the world has looked upon the unadorned stone lying flat over the dust of William Shakspeare, and read the epitaph written by himself: 

  “Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbeare
  To dig the dust enclosed here;
  Bleste be ye man yt spares these stones,
  And curst be he that moves my bones.”