I had come to Stratford on a poetical pilgrimage. My first visit
was to the house where Shakespeare 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
Shakespeare 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.
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