was dissolved; and that its possessions had come into the hands of the King. The charter of incorporation then grants to the bailiff and burgesses certain properties which were parcel of the possessions of the guild, for the general charges of the borough, for the maintenance of an ancient almshouse, " and that the Free Grammar-school, for the instruction and education of boys and youth, should be thereafter kept up and maintained as theretofore it used to be." The only qualifications necessary for the admission of a boy into the Free Grammar-school of Stratford were, that he should be a resident in the town, of seven years of age, and able to read. The Grammar-school was essentially connected with the corporation of Stratford; and it is impossible to imagine that, when the son of John Shakspere become qualified by age for admission to a school, where the best education of the time was given, literally for nothing, his father, in that year, being chief alderman, should not have sent him to the school. We assume, without any hesitation, that William Shakspere did receive, in every just sense of the word, the education of a scholar; and as such education was to be had at his own door, we also assume that he was brought up at the Free Grammar-school of his own town. The Grammar-school is now an ancient room, over the old Town-hall of Stratford-both, no doubt, offices of the ancient Guild. We enter from the street into a court, of which one side is formed by the Chapel of the Holy Cross. Opposite the chapel is a staircase; ascending which we are in a plain room, with a ceiling. But it is evident that this work of plaster is modern, and that above it we have the oak roof of the sixteenth century. In this room are a few forms, and a rude antique desk. But it appears that the Chapel of the Guild was also used as a school-room. This chapel is in great part a very perfect specimen of the plainer ecclesiastical architecture of the reign of Henry VII.; -a building of just proportions and some ornament, but not running into elaborate decoration. The interior now presents nothing very remarkable. But upon a general repair of the chapel in 1804, beneath the whitewash of successive generations, was discovered a series of most remarkable paintings - some in a portion of the building erected by Sir Hugh Clopton, and others in the far more ancient chancel. If this was the school-room of William Shakspere, those rude paintings must have produced a powerful effect upon his imagination. Many of them in the ancient chancel constituted a pictorial romance-the History of the Holy Cross, from its origin as a tree at the creation of the world to its rescue from the pagan Cosdroy, king of Persia, by the Christian king, Heraclius; and its final exaltation at Jerusalem,—the anniversary of which event was celebrated at Stratford at its annual fair, held on the 14th of September. There is a passage in one of Shakspere's sonnets, the 89th, which has induced a belief that he had the misfortune of a physical defect, which would render him peculiarly the object of maternal solicitude: "Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault, These and other lines have been interpreted to mean that William Shakspere was literally lame, and that his lameness was such as to limit him, when he became an actor, to the representation of the parts of old men. Of one thing, however, we may be quite sure-that, if Shakspere were lame, his infirmity was not such as to disqualify him for active bodily exertion. The same series of verses that have suggested this belief that he was lame, also show that he was a horseman. His entire works exhibit that familiarity with external nature, with rural occupations, with athletic sports, which is incompatible with an inactive boyhood. It is not impossible that some natural defect, or some accidental injury, may have modified the energy of such a child; and have cherished in him that love of books, and traditionary lore, and silent contemplation, without which his intellect could not have been nourished into its wondrous strength. But we cannot imagine William Shakspere a petted child, chained to home, not breathing the free air upon his native hills, denied the boy's privilege to explore every nook of his own river. We would imagine him communing from the first with Nature, as Gray has painted him,— "The dauntless child Stretch'd forth his little arms, and smiled." Much of the education of William Shakspere was unquestionably in the fields. A thousand incidental allusions manifest his familiarity with all the external aspects of nature. He is very rarely a descriptive poet, distinctively so called; but images of mead and grove, of dale and upland, of forest depths, of quiet walks by gentle rivers,-reflections of his own native scenery,― spread themselves without an effort over all his writings. All the occupations of a rural life are glanced at or embodied in his characters. The sports, the festivals, of the lone farm or the secluded hamlet, are presented by him with all the charms of an Arcadian age, but with a truthfulness that is not found in Arcadia. The nicest peculiarities in the habits of the lower creation are given at a touch; we see the rook wing his evening flight to the wood; we hear the drowsy hum of the sharded beetle. He wreathes all the flowers of the field in his delicate chaplets; and even the nicest mysteries of the gardener's art can be expounded by him. All this he appears to do as if from an instinctive power. His poetry in this, as in all other great essentials, is like the operations of nature itself; we see not its workings. But we may be assured, from the very circumstance of its appearing so accidental, so spontaneous in its relations to all external nature and to the country life, that it had its foundation in very early and very accurate observation. Stratford was especially fitted to have been the "green lap" in which the boy-poet was "laid." The whole face of creation here wore an aspect of quiet loveliness. Looking on its placid stream, its gently swelling hills, its rich pastures, its sleeping woodlands, the external world would to him be full of images of repose: it was in the heart of man that he was to seek for the sublime. Nature has thus ever with him something genial and exhilarating. There are storms in his great dramas, but they are the accompaniments of the more terrible storms of human passions: they are raised by the poet's art to make the agony of Lear more intense, and the murder of Duncan more awful. But his love of a smiling creation seems ever present. We must image Stratford as it was, to see how the young Shakspere walked "in glory and in joy" amongst his native fields. Upon the bank of the Avon, having a very slight rise, is placed a scattered town; a town whose dwellings have orchards and gardens, with lofty trees growing in its pathways. Its splendid collegiate church, in the time of Henry VIII., was described to lie half a mile from the town. Its eastern window is reflected in the river which flows beneath, as it is at present reflected (Cut, No. 2); its grey tower is embowered amidst lofty elm-rows. At the opposite end of the town is a fine old bridge, with a causeway whose "wearisome but needful length" tells of inundations in the low pastures that lie all around it. We look upon Dugdale's Map of Barichway Hundred, in which Stratford is situated, published in 1656, and we see four roads issuing from the town; as these are amongst the principal roads at the present day. (See Map.) The one to Henley-in-Arden, which lies through the street in which Shakspere may be supposed to have passed his boyhood, continues over a valley of some breadth and extent, unenclosed fields undoubtedly in the sixteenth century, with the hamlets of Shottery and Bishopton amidst them. The road leads into the then woody district of Arden. At a short distance from it is the hamlet of Wilmecote, where Mary Arden dwelt; and some two miles aside, more in the heart of the woodland district, and hard by the river Alne, is the village of Aston Cantlow. Another road indicated on this old map is that to Warwick. The wooded hills of Welcombe overhang it, and a little aside, some mile and a half from Stratford, is the meadow of Ingon, which John Shakspere rented in 1570. Very beautiful, even now, is this part of the neighbourhood, with its rapid undulations, little dells which shut in the scattered sheep, and sudden hills opening upon a wide landscape. Ancient crab-trees and hawthorns tell of uncultivated downs which have rung to the call of the falconer or the horn of the huntsman; and then, having crossed the ridge, we are amongst rich corn-lands, with farm-houses of no modern date scattered about; and deep in the hollow, so as to be hidden till we are upon it, the old village of Snitterfield, with its ancient church and its yew-tree as ancient. Here the poet's maternal grandmother had her jointure; and here, it has been conjectured, his father also had possessions. On the opposite side of Stratford the third road runs in the direction of the Avon to the village of Bidford, with a nearer pathway along the river-bank. We cross the ancient bridge by the fourth road (which also diverges to Shipston), and we are on our way to the celebrated house and estate of Charlcote, the ancient seat of the Lucys, the Shaksperian locality with which most persons are familiar through traditions of deer-stealing. A pleasant ramble, indeed, is this to Charlcote and Hampton Lucy, even with glimpses of the Avon from a turnpike-road. But let the road run through meadows without hedge-rows, with pathways following the river's bank, now diverging when the mill is close upon the stream, now crossing a leafy elevation, and then suddenly dropping under a precipitous wooded rock, and we have a walk such as poet might covet, and such as Shakspere did enjoy in his boy rambles. On the road to Henley-in-Arden, about two or three hundred yards from the house in Henley-street, where John Shakspere once dwelt, there stands even now a very ancient boundary-tree-an elm which is recorded in a Presentment of the Perambulation of the boun with its hamlets of Bishopton, Little Wilmecote, Shottery, and Drayton. As the marvellous boy of the Stratford Grammar-school looked upon that plain, how little could he have foreseen the course of his future life! For twenty years of his manhood he was to have no constant dwelling-place in that his native town; but it was to be the home of his affections. He would be gathering fame and opulence in an almost untrodden path, of which his young ambition could shape no definite image; but in the prime of his life he was to bring his wealth to his own Stratford, and become the proprietor and the contented cultivator of some of the loved fields that he now saw mapped out at his feet. Then, a little while, and an early tomb under that grey tower—a tomb so to be honoured in all ages to come, "That kings for such a tomb would wish to die." For some six miles the boundary runs from north to south, partly through land which was formerly barren, and still known as Drayton Bushes and Drayton Wild Moor. Here, "Far from her nest the lapwing cries away." The green bank of the Avon is again reached at the western extremity of the boundary, and the pretty hamlet of Luddington, with its cottages and old trees standing high above the river sedges, is included. The Avon is crossed where the Stour unites with it; and the boundary extends considerably to the south-east, returning to the town over Clopton's Bridge. As we become familiar with the neighbourhood of Stratford we find it associated with traditions of Shakspere's early manhood. The world has for the most part received these traditions as it found them, and has cared little to examine whether the stories were baseless that described the youth of the great master of wisdom as one of gay revelry, of bold daries of the Borough of Stratford, on the 7th of April, 1591, as "The Elme at the Dovehouse-Close end."* The boundary from that elm in the Henley road continued, in another direction, to "the two elms in Evesham highway." Such are the boundaries of the borough at this day. At a period, then, when it was usual for the boys of grammar-schools to attend the annual perambulations in Rogation Week of the clergy, the magistrates, and public officers, and the inhabitants, of parishes and towns, might William Shakspere be found, in gleeful companionship, under this old boundary elm. A wide parish is this of Stratford, including eleven villages and hamlets. A district of beautiful and varied scenery is this parish-hill and valley, wood and water. Following the Avon upon the north bank, against the stream, for some two miles, the processionists would walk through low and fertile meadows-unenclosed pastures then, in all likelihood. A little brook falls into the river, coming down from the marshy uplands of Ingon, where, in spite of modern improvement, the frequent bog attests the accuracy of Dugdale's description. The brook is traced upwards into the hills of Welcombe; and then, for nearly three miles from Welcombe Greenhill, the boundary lies. along a wooded ridge, opening prospects of surpassing beauty. There may the distant spires of Coventry be seen peeping above the intermediate hills, and the nearer towers of Warwick lying cradled in their surrounding woods. In another direction a cloud-like spot, in the extreme distance, is the far-famed Wrekin; and turning to the north-west are the noble hills of Malvern, with their well-defined outlines. The Cotswolds lock, in the landscape on another side; while in the middle distance the bold Bredon-hill looks down upon the vale of Evesham. All around is a country of unrivalled fertility, with now and then a plain of considerable extent; but more commonly a succession of undulating hills, some wood-crowned, but all culti-tree, well known to the country round as Shakspere's vated. At the northern extremity of this high land, which principally belongs to the estate of Clopton, and which was doubtless a park in early times, we have a panoramic view of the valley in which Stratford lies, * The original is in the possession of R. Wheler, Esq., of Stratford, adventure, and of rash love. We may take these associations as they present themselves, without very scrupulously examining into their historical value. Eight villages in the neighbourhood of Stratford old resident who had the talent of rhyme. It is rehave been characterized in well-known lines by some markable how familiar all the country-people are to this day with these lines, and how invariably they ascribe them to Shakspere: "Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston, It is maintained that these epithets have a real his- Crab-tree. The tradition which associates it with the name of Shakspere is, like many other traditions regarding the poet, an attempt to embody the general notion that his social qualities were as remarkable as Sulky, stubborn, în dudgeon, his genius. In an age when excess of joviality was by some considered almost a virtue, the genial fancy of the dwellers at Stratford may have been pleased to confer upon this crab-tree the honour of sheltering Shakspere from the dews of night, on an occasion when his merrymakings had disqualified him for returning homeward, and he had laid down to sleep under its spreading branches. It is scarcely necessary to enter into an examination of this apocryphal story. Indeed, although the crab-tree was long ago known by the name of Shakspere's Crab-tree,' the tradition, that he was amongst a party who had accepted a challenge from the Bidford topers to try which could drink hardest, and there bivouacked after the debauch, is difficult to be traced further than the hearsay evidence of Mr. Samuel Ireland. In the same way, the merry folks of Stratford will tell you to this day that the Falcon Inn in that town was the scene of Shakspere's nightly potations, after he had retired from London to his native home; and they will show you the shovelboard at which he delighted to play. Harmless traditions, ye are yet baseless!-The Falcon was not an inn at all in Shakspere's time, but a goodly private dwelling. Charlcote: the name is familiar to every reader of Shakspere; but it is not presented to the world under the influence of pleasant associations with the world's poet. The story, which was first told by Rowe, must be here repeated: "An extravagance that he was guilty of forced him both out of his country, and that way of living which he had taken up; and though it seemed at first to be a blemish upon his good manners, and a misfortune to him, yet it afterwards happily proved the occasion of exerting one of the greatest geniuses that ever was known in dramatic poetry. He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and, amongst them, some, that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlcote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to revenge that ill-usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time, and shelter himself in London." The good old gossip Aubrey is wholly silent about the deer-stealing and the flight to London, merely saying, "This William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen." But there were other antiquarian gossips of Aubrey's age, who have left us their testimony upon this subject. The Reverend William Fulman, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who died in 1688, bequeathed his papers to the Reverend Richard Davies, of Sandford, Oxfordshire; and on the death of Mr. Davies, in 1707, these papers were deposited in the library of Corpus Christi. Ful |