I had come to Stratford on a poetical pilgrimage. My first visit was
to the house where Shakspeare was born, and where, according to
tradition, he was brought up to his father's craft of wool-combing. It
is a small, mean-looking edifice of wood and plaster, a true
nestling-place of genius, which seems to delight in hatching its
offspring in by-corners. The walls of its squalid chambers are covered
with names and inscriptions in every language, by pilgrims of all
nations, ranks, and conditions, from the prince to the peasant; and
present a simple, but striking instance of the spontaneous and
universal homage of mankind to the great poet of nature.
The house is shown by a garrulous old lady, in a frosty red face,
lighted up by a cold blue anxious eye, and garnished with artificial
locks of flaxen hair, curling from under an exceedingly dirty cap. She
was peculiarly assiduous in exhibiting the relics with which this,
like all other celebrated shrines, abounds. There was the shattered
stock of the very matchlock with which Shakspeare shot the deer, on
his poaching exploits. There, too, was his tobacco-box; which proves
that he was a rival smoker of Sir Walter Raleigh: the sword also
with which he played Hamlet; and the identical lantern with which
Friar Laurence discovered Romeo and Juliet at the tomb! There was an
ample supply also of Shakspeare's mulberry-tree, which seems to have
as extraordinary powers of self-multiplication as the wood of the true
cross; of which there is enough extant to build a ship of the line.
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