their exact degrees of originality; above all, brings hundreds around him to experience an interest they never felt before, in questions of science; imparts facts to them never to be forgotten, and habits of observation not to be relinquished; in short, communicates to all its members a disposition of mind exactly the reverse of that indolent and passive quiescence of mood which Puseyism so strongly inculcates by homily and novelette, on at least its lay adherents. Truly, it is by no means strange that the revived principle, and those organs of the public press which it influences, should be determined enemies of the British Association. It is, however, but just to add, that Tractarianism and its myrmidons have not been the only assailants. Tractarianism first raised the fog, but not a few good simple people of the opposite party have since got bewildered in it; and, through the confusion incident on losing their way, they have fallen in the quarrel into the ranks of their antagonists, and have been doing battle in their behalf.*

On quitting the Puseyite chapel, I met a funeral, the first I had seen in England. It was apparently that of a person in the middle walks, and I was a good deal struck with its dissimilarity, in various points, to our Scotch funerals of the same class. The coffin of planed elm, finished off with all the care usually bestowed on pieces of household furniture made of the commoner forest hardwood, was left uncolored, save on the edges, which, like those of a mourning card, were belted with black. There was no pall covering it; and, instead of being borne on staves, or on the shoulders, it was carried, basketlike, by the handles. An official, bearing a gilded baton, marched in front; some six or eight gentlemen in black paced slowly beside the bearers; a gentleman and lady, in deep

*As shown by the assaults on the Association of such organs of the Low Church party as the Dublin "Statesman and London "Record."

mourning, walked arm-in-arm at the coffin-head; and a boy and girl, also arm-in-arm, and in mourning, came up behind them. Such was the English funeral, one of those things which, from their familiarity, are not described by the people of the country to which they belong, and which prove unfamiliar, in consequence, to the people of other countries. On the following Monday I took an outside seat on a stage-coach, for Stratford-on-Avon.

CHAPTER XIV.

Drive from Birmingham to Stratford rather tame.

Ancient Building in

"The Im

a modern-looking Street; of rude and humble Appearance. mortal Shakspeare born in this House." - Description of the Interior.The Walls and Ceiling covered with Names.- Albums. - Shakspeare, Scott, Dickens; greatly different in their Intellectual Stature, but yet all of one Family. - Principle by which to take their Measure. - No Dramatist ever draws an Intellect taller than his own. - Imitative Faculty. The Reports of Dickens. Learning of Shakspeare. - New Place. The Rev. Francis Gastrall. - Stratford Church. - The Poet's Grave; his Bust; far superior to the idealized Representations.

The

Avon. The Jubilee, and Cowper's Description of it. The true Hero Worship. Quit Stratford for Olney.-Get into bad Company by the way. Gentlemen of the Fancy. - Adventure.

THE drive from Birmingham, for the greater part of the way, is rather tame. There is no lack of fields and hedge-rows, houses and trees; but, from the great flatness of the country, they are doled out to the eye in niggardly detail, at the rate of about two fields and three hedge-rows at a time. Within a few miles of Stratford-on-Avon, however, the scenery improves. We are still on the Upper New Red Sandstone, and on this formation the town is built: but the Lias beyond shoots out, just in the line of our route, into a long promontory, capped by two insulated outliers, that, projected far in advance, form the outer piquets of the newer and higher system; and for some four or five miles ere we enter the place, we coast along the tree-mottled shores of this green headland and its terminal islands. A scattered suburb introduces us to a rather commonplace-looking street of homely brick houses, that seem as if they had all been reared within the last half century; all, at least,

save one, a rude, unsightly specimen of the oak-framed domicile of the days of Elizabeth and James. Its walls are incrusted with staring white-wash, its beams carelessly daubed over with lamp-black; a deserted butcher's shop, of the fifth-rate class, with the hooks still sticking in the walls, and the sill-board still spread out, as if to exhibit the joints, occupies the groundfloor; the one upper story contains a single rickety casement, with a forlorn flower-pot on the sill; and directly in front of the building there is what seems a rather clumsy sign-board, hung between two poles, that bears on its weather-beaten surface a double line of white faded letters on a ground of black. We read the inscription, and this humblest of dwellings humble, and rather vulgar to boot - rises in interest over the palaces of kings:-"The immortal Shakspeare was born in this house." I shall first go and see the little corner his birthplace, I said, and then the little corner his burial-place: they are scarce half a mile apart; nor, after the lapse of more than two centuries, does the intervening modicum of time between the two events, his birth and his burial, bulk much larger than the modicum of space that separates the respective scenes of them; but how marvellously is the world filled with the cogitations which employed that one brain in that brief period! Could it have been some four pounds' weight of convoluted matter, divided into two hemispheres, that, after originating these buoyant immaterialities, projected them upon the broad current of time, and bade them sail onwards and downwards forever? I cannot believe it: the sparks of a sky-rocket survive the rocket itself but a very few seconds. I cannot believe that these thoughts of Shakspeare, "that wander through eternity," are the mere sparks of an exploded rocket, - the mere scintillations of a little galvanic battery, made of fibre and 24

albumen, like that of the torpedo, and whose ashes w uld now lie in the corner of a snuff-box.

I passed through the butcher's shop, over a broken stone pavement, to a little gloomy kitchen behind, and then, under charge of the guide, up a dark narrow stair, to the low-browed room in which the poet was born. The floor of old oak, much worn in the seams, has apparently undergone no change since little Bill, be-frocked and be-booted in woolen prepared from the rough material by the wool-comber his father, coasted it along the walls, in bold adventure, holding on, as he went, by tables and chairs. The ceiling, too, though unluckily covered up by modern lath and plaster, is in all probability that which stretched over the head of the boy. It presents at least no indication of having been raised. A man rather above the middle size may stand erect under its central beam with his hat on, but with certainly no room to spare; and it seems more than probable that, had the old ceiling been changed for another, the new one would have been heightened. But the walls have been sadly altered. The one window of the place is no longer that through which Shakspeare first saw the light; nor is the fireplace that at which he stealthily lighted little bits of stick, and twirled them in the air, to see the fiery points converted into fiery circles. There are a few old portraits and old bits of furniture, of somewhat doubtful lineage, stuck round the room; and, on the top of an antique cabinet, a good plaster cast of the monumental bust in the church, in which, from its greater accessibility, one can better study than in the original the external signs affixed by nature to her mind of largest calibre. Every part of the walls and ceiling is inscribed with names. I might add mine, if I chose, to the rest, the woman told me; but I did not choose it. Milton and Dryden would have added theirs: he, the sublimest of poets, who, ere criticism