After seeing the Shakespeare shrines, we drove over to Shottery, and visited the Anne Hathaway cottage.  I am not sure whether I ever saw it before, but it was as familiar to me as if I had lived in it.  The old lady who showed it was agreeably communicative, and in perfect keeping with the place.

A delightful excursion of ten or a dozen miles carried our party, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Flower, Mr. and Mrs. Willett, with A——­ and myself, to Compton Wynyate, a most interesting old mansion, belonging to the Marquis of Northampton, who, with his daughter-in-law, Lady William Compton, welcomed us and showed us all the wonders of the place.  It was a fine morning, but hot enough for one of our American July days.  The drive was through English rural scenery; that is to say, it was lovely.  The old house is a great curiosity.  It was built in the reign of Henry the Eighth, and has passed through many vicissitudes.  The place, as well as the edifice, is a study for the antiquarian.  Remains of the old moat which surrounded it are still distinguishable.  The twisted and variously figured chimneys are of singular variety and exceptional forms.  Compton Wynyate is thought to get its name from the vineyards formerly under cultivation on the hillsides, which show the signs of having been laid out in terraces.  The great hall, with its gallery, and its hangings, and the long table made from the trunk of a single tree, carries one back into the past centuries.  There are strange nooks and corners and passages in the old building, and one place, a queer little “cubby-hole,” has the appearance of having been a Roman Catholic chapel.  I asked the master of the house, who pointed out the curiosities of the place most courteously, about the ghosts who of course were tenants in common with the living proprietors.  I was surprised when he told me there were none.  It was incredible, for here was every accommodation for a spiritual visitant.  I should have expected at least one haunted chamber, to say nothing of blood-stains that could never be got rid of; but there were no legends of the supernatural or the terrible.

Refreshments were served us, among which were some hot-house peaches, ethereally delicate as if they had grown in the Elysian Fields and been stolen from a banquet of angels.  After this we went out on the lawn, where, at Lady William Compton’s request, I recited one or two poems; the only time I did such a thing in England.

It seems as if Compton Wynyate must have been written about in some novel or romance,—­perhaps in more than one of both.  It is the place of all others to be the scene of a romantic story.  It lies so hidden away among the hills that its vulgar name, according to old Camden, was “Compton in the Hole.”  I am not sure that it was the scene of any actual conflict, but it narrowly escaped demolition in the great civil war, and in 1646 it was garrisoned by the Parliament army.