g quite level, you are struck and
surprised by nothing so much as the tameness of the general scene; as
if Shakspeare's genius were vivid enough to have wrought pictorial
splendors in the town where he was born. Here and there, however, a
queer edifice meets your eye, endowed with the individuality that
belongs only to the domestic architecture of times gone by; the house
seems to have grown out of some odd quality in its inhabitant, as a
sea-shell is moulded from within by the character of its inmate; and
having been built in a strange fashion, generations ago, it has ever
since been growing stranger and quainter, as old humorists are apt to
do. Here, too, (as so often impressed me in decayed English towns,)
there appeared to be a greater abundance of aged people wearing
small-clothes and leaning on sticks than you could assemble on our side
of the water by sounding a trumpet and proclaiming a reward for the most
venerable. I tried to account for this phenomenon by several theories:
as, for example, that our new towns are unwholesome for age and kill it
off unseasonably; or that our old men have a subtile sense of fitness,
and die of their own accord rather than live in an unseemly contrast
with youth and novelty: but the secret may be, after all, that
hair-dyes, false teeth, modern arts of dress, and other contrivances of
a skin-deep youthfulness, have not crept into these antiquated English
towns, and so people grow old without the weary necessity of seeming
younger than they are.

After wandering through two or three streets, I found my way to
Shakspeare's birthplace, which is almost a smaller and humbler house
than any description can prepare the visitor to expect; so inevitably
does an august inhabitant make his abode palatial to our imaginations,
receiving his guests, indeed, in a castle in the air, until we unwisely
insist on meeting him among the sordid lanes and alleys of lower earth.
The portion of the edifice with which Shakspeare had anything to do is
hardly large enough, in the basement, to contain the butcher's stall
that one of his descendants kept, and that still remains there,
windowless, with the cleaver-cuts in its hacked counter, which projects
into the street under a little penthouse-roof, as if waiting for a new
occupant. The upper half of the door was open, and, on my rapping at it,
a young person in black made her appearance and admitted me: she was not
a menial, but remarkably genteel (an Ameri