should consider it unfair to quit Shakspeare's house without the frank
acknowledgment that I was conscious of not the slightest emotion while
viewing it, nor any quickening of the imagination. This has often
happened to me in my visits to memorable places. Whatever pretty and
apposite reflections I may have made upon the subject had either
occurred to me before I ever saw Stratford, or have been elaborated
since. It is pleasant, nevertheless, to think that I have seen the
place; and I believe that I can form a more sensible and vivid idea of
Shakspeare as a flesh-and-blood individual now that I have stood on the
kitchen-hearth and in the birth-chamber; but I am not quite certain that
this power of realization is altogether desirable in reference to a
great poet. The Shakspeare whom I met there took various guises, but had
not his laurel on. He was successively the roguish boy,--the youthful
deer-stealer,--the comrade of players,--the too familiar friend of
Davenant's mother,--the careful, thrifty, thriven man of property, who
came back from London to lend money on bond, and occupy the best house
in Stratford,--the mellow, red-nosed, autumnal boon-companion of John a'
Combe, who (or else the Stratford gossips belied him) met his death by
tumbling into a ditch on his way home from a drinking-bout, and left his
second-best bed to his poor wife. I feel, as sensibly as the reader can,
what horrible impiety it is to remember these things, be they true or
false. In either case, they ought to vanish out of sight on the distant
ocean-line of the past, leaving a pure, white memory, even as a sail,
though perhaps darkened with many stains, looks snowy white on the far
horizon. But I draw a moral from these unworthy reminiscences and this
embodiment of the poet, as suggested by some of the grimy actualities of
his life. It is for the high interests of the world not to insist upon
finding out that its greatest men are, in a certain lower sense, very
much the same kind of men as the rest of us, and often a little worse;
because a common mind cannot properly digest such a discovery, nor ever
know the true proportion of the great man's good and evil, nor how small
a part of him it was that touched our muddy or dusty earth. Thence comes
moral bewilderment, and even intellectual loss, in regard to what is
best of him. When Shakspeare invoked a curse on the man who should stir
his bones, he perhaps meant the larger share of it for him or th