es have been built during the last half century. Hotels, tea rooms,
refreshment rooms, and the shops where the tripper may buy things to
remind him that he has been where greatness lived, give the place an air
at once prosperous and parasitic. The town contains a few comely old
buildings. The Shakespeare house, a detached double dwelling, once the
home of the poet's father, stands on the north side of Henley Street. A
room on the first floor, at the western end, is shown to visitors as the
room in which the poet was born. There is not the slightest evidence to
show that he was born there. One scanty scrap of fact exists to suggest
that he was born at the eastern end. The two dwellings have now been
converted into one, which serves as a museum. New Place, the house where
Shakespeare died, was pulled down in the middle of the eighteenth
century. For one museum the less let us be duly thankful.

The church in which Shakespeare, his wife, and little son are buried
stands near the river. It is a beautiful building of a type common in
the Cotswold country. It is rather larger and rather more profusely
carved than most. Damp, or some mildness in the stone, has given much of
the ornament a weathered look. Shakespeare is buried seventeen feet down
near the north wall of the chancel. His wife is buried in another grave
a few feet from him.

The country about Stratford is uninteresting, pretty, and well watered.
A few miles away the Cotswold hills rise. They have a bold beauty, very
pleasant after the flatness of the plain. The wolds towards Stratford
grow many oaks and beeches. Farther east, they are wilder and barer.
Little brooks spring up among the hills. The nooks and valleys are
planted with orchards. Old, grey Cotswold farmhouses, and little, grey,
lovely Cotswold villages show that in Shakespeare's time the country was
prosperous and alive. It was sheep country then. The wolds were sheep
walks. Life took thought for Shakespeare. She bred him, mind and bone,
in a two-fold district of hill and valley, where country life was at its
best and the beauty of England at its bravest. Afterwards she placed him
where there was the most and the best life of his time. Work so calm as
his can only have come from a happy nature, happily fated. Life made a
golden day for her golden soul. The English blessed by that soul have
raised no theatre for the playing of the soul's thanksgiving.

Legends about Shakespeare began to spring up in Str