nd sculptors to foist their idealized
nonsense on us all, instead of the genuine man. For my part, the
Shakspeare of my mind's eye is henceforth to be a personage of a ruddy
English complexion, with a reasonably capacious brow, intelligent and
quickly observant eyes, a nose curved slightly outward, a long, queer
upper-lip, with the mouth a little unclosed beneath it, and cheeks
considerably developed in the lower part and beneath the chin. But when
Shakspeare was himself, (for nine-tenths of the time, according to all
appearances, he was but the burgher of Stratford,) he doubtless shone
through this dull mask and transfigured it into the face of an angel.

Fifteen or twenty feet behind the row of Shakspeare gravestones is the
great east-window of the church, now brilliant with stained glass of
recent manufacture. On one side of this window, under a sculptured arch
of marble, lies a full-length marble figure of John a' Combe, clad in
what I take to be a robe of municipal dignity, and holding its hands
devoutly clasped. It is a sturdy English figure, with coarse features,
a type of ordinary man whom we smile to see immortalized in the
sculpturesque material of poets and heroes; but the prayerful attitude
encourages us to believe that the old usurer may not, after all, have
had that grim reception in the other world which Shakspeare's squib
foreboded for him. By-the-by, till I grew somewhat familiar with
Warwickshire pronunciation, I never understood that the point of those
ill-natured lines was a pun. "'Oho!' quoth the Devil, ''tis my John a'
Combe!'"--that is, "my John has come!"

Close to the poet's bust is a nameless, oblong, cubic tomb, supposed to
be that of a clerical dignitary of the fourteenth century. The church
has other mural monuments and altar-tombs, one or two of the latter
upholding the recumbent figures of knights in armor and their dames,
very eminent and worshipful personages in their day, no doubt, but
doomed to appear forever intrusive and impertinent within the precincts
which Shakspeare has made his own. His renown is tyrannous, and suffers
nothing else to be recognized within the scope of its material presence,
unless illuminated by some side-ray from himself. The clerk informed me
that interments no longer take place in any part of the church. And it
is better so; for methinks a person of delicate individuality, curious
about his burial-place, and desirous of six feet of earth for himself
alone, c