children and friends are, in several instances, still secure from the destructive hand of time; there are still wide stretches of sloping hillside shaded by the ancient Forest of Arden; there are quaint half-timbered fronts upon which he must have looked; the "bank where the wild thyme blows" is still to be found by those who know the foot-path to Shottery and the road over the hill; the Warwickshire landscape has the same ripe and tender beauty which Shakespeare knew; and the Avon flows as in the days when he heard the nightingales singing in the level meadows across the river from the church, or slipped silently in his punt through the mist which softly veils it on summer nights.

When Shakespeare was born, on April twenty-second or twenty-third, in the year fifteen hundred and sixtyfour, Stratford was an insignificant hamlet, off the main highways of travel, although within reach of important towns like Coventry, and of stately old English homes like Warwick and Kenilworth castles. The streets were narrow, irregular, and, like most streets in most towns in that unsanitary age, badly kept and of an evil odour; the houses were set among gardens or in the open, with picturesque indifference to modern ideas of community orderliness; the black-oak structure showing curious designs of triangles and squares through the plaster. Thatched roofs, projecting gables, rough walls, unpaved lanes, foot-paths through the fields, the long front of the Guild Hall with the Grammar School, the Guild Chapel, the Church of the Holy Trinity, the bridge across the Avon built by Sir Hugh Clopton in the time of Henry VII., made up the picture which Shakespeare saw when he looked upon the place of his birth. On High Street, when he came back from London to live in Stratford, he found, not far from his house in New Place, the carved half-timbered front of the house in which tradition says the mother of John Harvard was born.

The population of Stratford is now about nine thousand; in 1564 it was probably less than fifteen hundred. It was surrounded by fields which were sometimes white with grain, and were always, in the season, touched with the splendour of the scarlet poppy. The villagers were sturdy English folk with more vigour than intelligence, and with more capacity than education. Many of them were unable to sign their own names, and among these John Shakespeare, the father of the poet, has sometimes been included: documents exist, however, which bear what is believed to be his signature. There was nothing unusual in this lack of literary training; comparatively few Englishmen of the station of John Shakespeare had mastered, in that period, the art of writing. Men who could not sign their own names were often men of mark, substance, and ability.

The family name was not uncommon in Warwickshire, and was borne by a good yeoman stock. When John Shakespeare applied, in 1596, for the right to use a coat of arms, he declared that Henry VII. had made a grant of lands to his grandfather in return for services of importance. The college of heraldry has been so prolific of fictitious genealogies that this claim is open to suspicion; what is certain is the substantial character of the poet's ancestors, their long residence in Warwickshire, and the fact that some of them were farmers, land-renters, and land-owners. The grandfather of the poet was probably Richard Shakespeare, a farmer who lived within easy walking distance of Stratford. John Shakespeare removed to Stratford about the middle of the sixteenth century, and became a trader in all manner of farm produce. Then, as now, malt and corn were staple articles of commerce in Stratford; John Shakespeare dealt in these and in wool, skins, meat, and leather. He has been called a glover and a butcher; he was both, and had several other vocations besides.

Henley Street was then one of the thoroughfares of Stratford, and got its name from the fact that it led to Henley-on-Avon, a market town of local importance. That John Shakespeare was an active man of affairs, with a keen instinct for business, if not with a sound judgment, is clear, not only from the variety and number of his business interests, but from the frequency of the suits for the recovery of small debts in which he appeared. His early ventures were successful, and he soon became a man of substance and influence. His prosperity was increased by his marriage, in 1557, to Mary Arden, the youngest daughter of a well-to-do farmer of Wilmcote, not far from Stratford. She brought her husband a house and fifty acres of land, some money, and other forms of property. During the year before his marriage John Shakespeare had purchased the house, with a garden, in Henley Street, which is now accepted as the birthplace of the poet. In the following year his growing influence was evidenced by his election as a tester of the quality of bread and of malt liquors. Various public duties were devolved upon him. He was elected a burgess or member of the town council; he became a chamberlain of the borough; and later was advanced to the highest position in the gift of the municipality, that of Bailiff. There were two daughters who died in infancy; then came the first son, William, who was christened, the parish register tells us, on the 26th day of April, 1564. The custom of the time with regard to the interval between birth and baptism was so well settled that there seems no reason to doubt that the poet was born on the 22d or 23d of the month. There were then two detached houses standing in Henley Street where the present house now stands; tradition assigns the house to the west as the place of the poet's birth. This house finally came into the possession, by the bequest of the poet's granddaughter, of the family of his sister Joan Hart, and until 1806 was occupied by them; the adjoining house to the east was let as an inn. In 1846 both houses were secured for preservation, restored as far as possible to the condition in which they were in the poet's time, joined in a single structure, and made one of the most interesting museums in the world. In this structure there is every reason to believe that Shakespeare was born. The continued possession of the part which was once the western house by the poet's kinsfolk was probably

the basis for a tradition which runs back for an indefinite period.

The Birthplace, as it is called, is a cottage of plaster and timber, two stories in height, with dormer windows, and a pleasant garden in the rear- all that remains of a considerable piece of land. It stands upon the street, and the visitor passes at once, through a little porch, into a low room, ceiled with black oak, paved with flags, and with a fireplace so wide that one sees at a glance what the chimney-corner once meant of comfort and cheer. On those seats, looking into the glowing fire, the imagination of a boy could hardly fail to kindle. A dark and narrow stair leads to the little bare room on the floor above in which Shakespeare was probably born. The place seems fitted, by its very simplicity, to serve as the starting-point for so great a career. There is a small fireplace; the low ceiling is within reach of the hand; on the narrow panes of glass which fill the casement names and initials are traced in irregular profusion. This room has been a place eagerly sought by literary pilgrims since the beginning of the century. The low ceiling and the walls were covered, in the early part of the century, with innumerable autographs. In 1820 the occupant, a woman who attached great importance to the privilege of showing the house to visitors, was compelled to give up that privilege, and, by way of revenge, removed the furniture and whitewashed the walls of the house. A part of the wall of the upper room escaped the sacrilegious hand of the jealous custodian, and names running back to the third decade of the