em who
should pry into his perishing earthliness, the defects or even the
merits of the character that he wore in Stratford, when he had left
mankind so much to muse upon that was imperishable and divine. Heaven
keep me from incurring any part of the anathema in requital for the
irreverent sentences above written!

From Shakspeare's house, the nest step, of course, is to visit his
burial-place. The appearance of the church is most venerable and
beautiful, standing amid a great green shadow of lime-trees, above which
rises the spire, while the Gothic battlements and buttresses and vast
arched windows are obscurely seen through the boughs. The Avon loiters
past the church-yard, an exceedingly sluggish river, which might seem
to have been considering which way it should flow ever since Shakspeare
left off paddling in it and gathering the large forget-me-nots that grow
among its flags and water-weeds.

An old man in small-clothes was waiting at the gate; and inquiring
whether I wished to go in, he preceded me to the church-porch, and
rapped. I could have done it quite as effectually for myself; but, it
seems, the old people of the neighborhood haunt about the church-yard,
in spite of the frowns and remonstrances of the sexton, who grudges them
the half-eleemosynary sixpence which they sometimes get from visitors.
I was admitted into the church by a respectable-looking and intelligent
man in black, the parish-clerk, I suppose, and probably holding a richer
incumbency than his vicar, if all the fees which he handles remain in
his own pocket. He was already exhibiting the Shakspeare monuments to
two or three visitors, and several other parties came in while I was
there.

The poet and his family are in possession of what may be considered the
very best burial-places that the church affords. They lie in a row,
right across the breadth of the chancel, the foot of each gravestone
being close to the elevated floor on which the altar stands. Nearest
to the side-wall, beneath Shakspeare's bust, is a slab bearing a Latin
inscription addressed to his wife, and covering her remains; then his
own slab, with the old anathematizing stanza upon it; then that of
Thomas Nash, who married his grand-daughter; then that of Dr. Hall,
the husband of his daughter Susannah; and, lastly, Susannah's own.
Shakspeare's is the commonest-looking slab of all, being just such a
flag-stone as Essex Street in Salem used to be paved with, when I was
a boy.