the ignominy was deserved. And they never have
known it, to this day, nor ever will.
The next intelligence that I had of Miss Bacon was
io 4 OUR OLD HOME
by a letter from the mayor of Stratford-on-Avon. He
was a medical man, and wrote both in his official and
professional character, telling me that an American lady,
who had recently published what the mayor called a
" Shakspeare book," was afflicted with insanity. In a
lucid interval she had referred to me, as a person who
had some knowledge of her family and affairs. What
she may have suffered before her intellect gave way,
we had better not try to imagine. No author had ever
hoped so confidently as she; none ever failed more
utterly. A superstitious fancy might suggest that the
anathema on Shakspeare's tombstone had fallen heavily
on her head in requital of even the unaccomplished pur-
pose of disturbing the dust beneath, and that the " Old
Player " had kept so quietly in his grave, on the night of
her vigil, because he foresaw how soon and terribly he
would be avenged. But if that benign spirit takes any
care or cognizance of such things now, he has surely re-
quited the injustice that she sought to do him the high
justice that she really did by a tenderness of love and
pity of which only he could be capable. What matters
it, though she called him by some other name ? He had
wrought a greater miracle on her than on all the world
besides. This bewildered enthusiast had recognized a
depth in the man whom she decried, which scholars,
critics, and learned societies, devoted to the elucidation
of his unrivalled scenes, had never imagined to exist
there. She had paid him the loftiest honor that all these
ages of renown have been able to accumulate upon his
memory. And when, not many months after the out-
ward failure of her lifelong object, she passed into the
better world, I know not why we should hesitate to be-
lieve that the immortal poet may have met her on the
threshold and led her in, reassuring her with friendly and
comfortable words, and thanking her (yet with a smile
of gentle humor in his eyes at the thought of certain
mistaken speculations) for having interpreted him to
mankind so well.
I believe that it has been the fate of this remarkable
book never to have had more than a single reader. I
RECOLLECTIONS 105
myself am acquainted with it only in insulated chapters
and scattered pages and paragraphs. But, since my re-
turn to America, a young man of genius and enthusiasm
has assured me that he has positively read the book from
beginning to end, and is completely a convert to its doc-
trines. It belongs to him, therefore, and not to me,
whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her,
she declared unworthy to meddle with her work, it
belongs surely to this one individual, who has done her
so much justice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss
Bacon in her due position before the public and posterity.
This has been too sad a story. To lighten the recol-
lection of it, I will think of my stroll homeward past
Charlecote Park, where I beheld the most stately elms,
singly, in clumps, and in groves, scattered all about in
the sunniest, shadiest, sleepiest fashion ; so that I could
not but believe in a lengthened, loitering, drowsy enjoy-
ment which these trees must have in their existence.
Diffused over slow-paced centuries, it need not be keen
nor bubble into thrills and ecstasies, like the momentary
delights of short-lived human beings. They were civil-
ized trees, known to man and befriended by him for ages
past. There is an indescribable difference as I believe
I have heretofore endeavored to express between the
tamed, but by no means effete (on the contrary, the
richer and more luxuriant) Nature of England, and
the rude, shaggy, barbarous Nature which offers us its
racier companionship in America. No less a change has
been wrought among the wildest creatures that inhabit
what the English call their forests. By-and-by, among
those refined and venerable trees, I saw a large herd of
deer, mostly reclining, but some standing in picturesque
groups, while the stags threw their large antlers aloft, as if
they had been taught to make themselves tributary to the
scenic effect. Some were running fleetly about, vanish-
ing from light into shadow and glancing forth again, with
here and there a little fawn careering at its mother's
heels. These deer are almost in the same relation to
the wild, natural state of their kind that the trees of an
English park hold to the rugged growth of an American
io6 OUR OLD HOME
forest. They have held a certain intercourse with man
for immemorial years ; and, most probably, the stag that
Shakspeare killed was one of the progenitors of this very
herd, and may himself have been a partly civilized and
humanized deer, though in a less degree than these re-
mote posterity. They are a little wilder than sheep, but
they do not snuff the air at the approach of human
beings, nor evince much alarm at their pretty close
proximity; although if you continue to advance, they
toss their heads and take to their heels in a kind of
mimic terror, or something akin to feminine skittishness,
with a dim remembrance or tradition, as it were, of their
having come of a wild stock. They have so long been
fed and protected by man, that they must have lost many
of their native instincts, and, I suppose, could not live
comfortably through even an English winter without
human help. One is sensible of a gentle scorn at them
for such dependency, but feels none the less kindly dis-
posed towards the half -domesticated race ; and it may
have been his observation of these tamer characteristics
in the Charlecote herd that suggested to Shakspeare the
tender and pitiful description of a wounded stag in " As
You Like It."
At a distance of some hundreds of yards from Charle-
cote Hall, and almost hidden by the trees between it and
the roadside, is an old brick archway and porter's lodge.
In connection with this entrance there appears to have
been a wall and an ancient moat, the latter of which is
still visible, a shallow, grassy scoop along the base of an
embankment of the lawn. About fifty yards within the
gateway stands the house, forming three sides of a square,
with three gables in a row on the front, and on each of
the two wings ; and there are several towers and turrets
at the angles, together with projecting windows, antique
balconies, and other quaint ornaments suitable to the
half-Gothic taste in which the edifice was built. Over
the gateway is the Lucy coat-of-arms, emblazoned in its
proper colors. The mansion dates from the early days
of Elizabeth, and probably looked very much the same
as now when Shakspeare was brought before Sir Thomas
RECOLLECTIONS 107
Lucy for outrages among his deer. The impression is
not that of gray antiquity, but of stable and time-honored
gentility, still as vital as ever.
It is a most delightful place. All about the house and
domain there is a perfection of comfort and domestic
taste, an amplitude of convenience, which could have
been brought about only by the slow ingenuity and labor
of many successive generations, intent upon adding all
possible improvement to the home where years gone by
and years to come give a sort of permanence to the in-
tangible present. An American is sometimes tempted
to fancy that only by this long process can real homes be
produced. One man's lifetime is not enough for the ac-
complishment of such a work of Art and Nature, almost
the greatest merely temporary one that is confided to
him; too little, at any rate, yet perhaps too long
when he is discouraged by the idea that he must make
his house warm and delightful for a miscellaneous race
of successors, of whom the one thing certain is, that his
own grandchildren will not be among them. Such re-
pinings as are here suggested, however, come only from
the fact, that, bred in English habits of thought, as most
of us are, we have not yet modified our instincts to the
necessities of our new forms of life. A lodging in a
wigwam or under a tent has really as many advantages,
when we come to know them, as a home beneath the
roof-tree of Charlecote Hall. But, alas ! our philosophers
have not yet taught us what is best, nor have our poets
sung us what is beautifullest, in the kind of life that we
must lead ; and therefore we still read the old English
wisdom, and harp upon the ancient strings. And thence
it happens, that, when we look at a time-honored hall, it
seems more possible for men who inherit such a home,
than for ourselves, to lead noble and graceful lives,
quietly doing good and lovely things as their daily
work, and achieving deeds of simple greatness when
circumstances require them. I sometimes apprehend
that our institutions may perish before we shall have
discovered the most precious of the possibilities which
they involve.
LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER
AFTER my first visit to Leamington Spa, I went by
an indirect route to Lichfield, and put up at the
Black Swan. Had I known where to find it, I would
much rather have established myself at the inn formerly
kept by the worthy Mr. Boniface, so famous for his ale in
Farquhar's time. The Black Swan is an old-fashioned
hotel, its street-front being penetrated by an arched pas-
sage, in either side of which is an entrance-door to the
different parts of the house, and through which, and over
the large stones of its pavement, all vehicles and horse-
men rumble and clatter into an enclosed court-yard, with
a thunderous uproar among the contiguous rooms and
chambers. I appeared to be the only guest of the spa-
cious establishment, but may have had a few fellow-lodgers
hidden in their separate parlors, and utterly eschewing
that community of interests which is the characteristic
feature of life in an American hotel. At any rate, I had
the great, dull, dingy, and dreary coffee-room, with its
heavy old mahogany chairs and tables, all to myself, and
not a soul to exchange a word with, except the waiter,
who, like most of his class in England, had evidently
left his conversational abilities uncultivated. No former
practice of solitary living, nor habits of reticence, nor
well-tested self-dependence for occupation of mind and
amusement, can quite avail, as I now proved, to dissipate
the ponderous gloom of an English coffee-room under
such circumstances as these, with no book at hand save
the county-directory, nor any newspaper but a torn local
journal of five days ago. So I buried myself, betimes, in
a huge heap of ancient feathers, (there is no other kind of
bed in these old inns,) let my head sink into an unsub-
stantial pillow, and slept a stifled sleep, infested with
such a fragmentary confusion of dreams that I took them
108
LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 109
to be a medley, compounded of the night-troubles of all
my predecessors in that same unrestful couch. And
when I awoke, the musty odor of a bygone century
was in my nostrils a faint, elusive smell, of which I
never had any conception before crossing the Atlantic.
In the morning, after a mutton-chop and a cup of chic-
cory in the dusky coffee-room, I went forth and bewildered
myself a little while among the crooked streets, in quest
of one or two objects that had chiefly attracted me to the
spot. The city is of very ancient date, and its name in
the old Saxon tongue has a dismal import that would
apply well, in these days and forever henceforward, to
many an unhappy locality in our native land. Lichfield
signifies " The Field of the Dead Bodies " an epithet,
however, which the town did not assume in remembrance
of a battle, but which probably sprung up by a natural
process, like a sprig of rue or other funereal weed, out of
the graves of two princely brothers, sons of a pagan king
of Mercia, who were converted by Saint Chad, and after-
wards martyred for their Christian faith. Nevertheless,
I was but little interested in the legends of the remote
antiquity of Lichfield, being drawn thither partly to see
its beautiful cathedral, and still more, I believe, because
it was the birthplace of Dr. Johnson, with whose sturdy
English character I became acquainted, at a very early
period of my life, through the good offices of Mr. Boswell.
In truth, he seems as familiar to my recollection, and
almost as vivid in his personal aspect to -my mind's eye,
as the kindly figure of my own grandfather. It is only
a solitary child left much to such wild modes of cul-
ture as he chooses for himself while yet ignorant what
culture means, standing on tiptoe to pull down books
from no very lofty shelf, and then shutting himself up,
as it were, between the leaves, going astray through the
volume at his own pleasure, and comprehending it rather
by his sensibilities and affections than his intellect that
child is the only student that ever gets the sort of inti-
macy which I am now thinking of, with a literary per-
sonage. I do not remember, indeed, ever caring much
about any of the stalwart Doctor's grandiloquent produc-
I 10
OUR OLD HOME
tions, except his two stern and masculine poems, " Lon-
don," and "The Vanity of Human Wishes"; it was as
a man, a talker, and a humorist, that I knew and loved
him, appreciating many of his qualities perhaps more
thoroughly than I do now, though never seeking to put
my instinctive perception of his character into language.
Beyond all question, I might have had a wiser friend
than he. The atmosphere in which alone he breathed
was dense ; his awful dread of death showed how much
muddy imperfection was to be cleansed out of him,
before he could be capable of spiritual existence ; he
meddled only with the surface of life, and never cared
to penetrate farther than to ploughshare depth ; his very
sense and sagacity were but a one-eyed clear-sighted-
ness. I laughed at him, sometimes, standing beside his
knee. And yet, considering that my native propensities
were towards Fairy Land, and also how much yeast is
generally mixed up with the mental sustenance of a New
Englancler, it may not have been altogether amiss, in
those childish and boyish days, to keep pace with this
heavy-footed traveller and feed on the gross diet that he
carried in his knapsack. It is wholesome food even now.
And, then, how English ! Many of the latent sym-
pathies that enabled me to enjoy the Old Country so
well, and that so readily amalgamated themselves with
the American ideas that seemed most adverse to them,
may have been derived from, or fostered and kept alive
by, the great English moralist. Never was a descriptive
epithet more nicely appropriate than that ! Dr. John-
son's morality was as English an article as a beefsteak.
The city of Lich field (only the cathedral-towns are
called cities, in England) stands on an ascending site.
It has not so many old gabled houses as Coventry, for
example, but still enough to gratify an American appe-
tite for the antiquities of domestic architecture. The
people, too, have an old-fashioned way with them, and
stare at the passing visitor, as if the railway had not yet
quite accustomed them to the novelty of strange faces
moving along their ancient sidewalks. The old women
whom I met, in several instances, dropt me a courtesy ;
LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL
LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER in
and as they were of decent and comfortable exterior,
and kept quietly on their way without pause or further
greeting, it certainly was not allowable to interpret their
little act of respect as a modest method of asking for
sixpence ; so that I had the pleasure of considering it a
remnant of the reverential and hospitable manners of
elder times, when the rare presence of a stranger might
be deemed worth a general acknowledgment. Posi-
tively, coming from such humble sources, I took it all
the more as a welcome on behalf of the inhabitants, and
would not have exchanged it for an invitation from the
mayor and magistrates to a public dinner. Yet I wish,
merely for the experiment's sake, that I could have em-
boldened myself to hold out the aforesaid sixpence to at
least one of the old ladies.
In my wanderings about town, I came to an artificial
piece of water, called the Minster Pool. It fills the im-
mense cavity in a ledge of rock, whence the building
materials of the cathedral were quarried out a great
many centuries ago. I should never have guessed the
little lake to be of man's creation, so very pretty and
quietly picturesque an object has it grown to be, with its
green banks, and the old trees hanging over its glassy
surface, in which you may see reflected some of the
battlements of the majestic structure that once lay here
in unshaped stone. Some little children stood on the
edge of the Pool, angling with pin-hooks ; and the scene
reminded me (though really, to be quite fair with the
reader, the gist of the analogy has now escaped me,)
of that mysterious lake in the Arabian Nights, which
had once been a palace and a city, and where a fisher-
man used to pull out the former inhabitants in the guise
of enchanted fishes. There is no need of fanciful asso-
ciations to make the spot interesting. It was in the
porch of one of the houses, in the street that runs beside
the Minster Pool, that Lord Brooke was slain, in the time
of the Parliamentary war, by a shot from the battlements
of the cathedral, which was then held by the Royalists
as a fortress. The incident is commemorated by an in-
scription on a stone, inlaid into the wall of the house.
ii2 OUR OLD HOME
I know not what rank the Cathedral of Lichfield
holds among its sister edifices in England, as a piece of
magnificent architecture. Except that of Chester, (the
grim and simple nave of which stands yet unrivalled in
my memory,) and one or two small ones in North Wales,
hardly worthy of the name of cathedrals, it was the first
that I had seen. To my uninstructed vision, it seemed
the object best worth gazing at in the whole world ; and
now, after beholding a great many more, I remember it
with less prodigal admiration only because others are
as magnificent as itself. The traces remaining in my
memory represent it as airy rather than massive. A
multitude of beautiful shapes appeared to be compre-
hended within its single outline ; it was a kind of kalei-
doscopic mystery, so rich a variety of aspects did it
assume from each altered point of view, through the
presentation of a different face, and the rearrangement
of its peaks and pinnacles and the three battlemented
towers, with the spires that shot heavenward from all
three, but one loftier than its fellows. Thus it im-
pressed you, at every change, as a newly created struc-
ture of the passing moment, in which yet you lovingly
recognized the half-vanished structure of the instant
before, and felt, moreover, a joyful faith in the inde-
structible existence of all this cloudlike vicissitude. A
Gothic cathedral is surely the most wonderful work
which mortal man has yet achieved, so vast, so intricate,
and so profoundly simple, with such strange, delightful
recesses in its grand figure, so difficult to comprehend
within one idea, and yet all so consonant that it ulti-
mately draws the beholder and his universe into its har-
mony. It is the only thing in the world that is vast
enough and rich enough.
Not that I felt, or was worthy to feel, an unmingled
enjoyment in gazing at this wonder. I could not ele-
vate myself to its spiritual height, any more than I
could have climbed from the ground to the summit of
one of its pinnacles. Ascending but a little way, I con-
tinually fell back and lay in a kind of despair, conscious
that a flood of uncomprehended beauty was pouring
LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 113
down upon me, of which I could appropriate only the
minutest portion. After a hundred years, incalculably
as my higher sympathies might be invigorated by so
divine an employment, I should still be a gazer from
below and at an awful distance, as yet remotely excluded
from the interior mystery. But it was something gained,
even to have that painful sense of my own limitations,
and that half-smothered yearning to soar beyond them.
The cathedral showed me how earthly I was, but yet
whispered deeply of immortality. After all, this was
probably the best lesson that it could bestow, and, tak-
ing it as thoroughly as possible home to my heart, I was
fain to be content. If the truth must be told, my ill-
trained enthusiasm soon flagged, and I began to lose
the vision of a spiritual or ideal edifice behind the time-
worn and weather-stained front of the actual structure.
Whenever that is the case, it is most reverential to look
another way; but the mood disposes one to minute
investigation, and I took advantage of it to examine the
intricate and multitudinous adornment that was lavished
on the exterior wall of this great church. Everywhere,
there were empty niches where statues had been thrown
down, and here and there a statue still lingered in its
niche; and over the chief entrance, and extending
across the whole breadth of the building, was a row of
angels, sainted personages, martyrs, and kings, sculp-
tured in reddish stone. Being much corroded by the moist
English atmosphere, during four or five hundred winters
that they had stood there, these benign and majestic
figures perversely put me in mind of the appearance of
a sugar image, after a child has been holding it in his
mouth. The venerable infant Time has evidently found
them sweet morsels.
Inside of the minster there is a long and lofty nave,
transepts of the same height, and side-aisles and chapels,
dim nooks of holiness, wherein catholic times the lamps
were continually burning before the richly decorated
shrines of saints. In the audacity of my ignorance, as
I humbly acknowledge it to have been, I criticised this
great interior as too much broken into compartments,
n 4 OUR OLD HOME
and shorn of half its rightful impressiveness by the
interposition of a screen betwixt the nave and chancel.
It did not spread itself in breadth but ascended to the
roof in lofty narrowness. One large body of worship-
pers might have knelt down in the nave, others in each
of the transepts, and smaller ones in the side-aisles, be-
sides an indefinite number of esoteric enthusiasts in the
mysterious sanctities beyond the screen. Thus it seemed
to typify the exclusiveness of sects rather than the
world-wide hospitality of genuine religion. I had
imagined a cathedral with a scope more vast. These
Gothic aisles, with their groined arches overhead, sup-
ported by clustered pillars in long vistas up and down,
were venerable and magnificent, but included too much
of the twilight of that monkish gloom out of which they
grew. It is no matter whether I ever came to a more
satisfactory appreciation of this kind of architecture ;
the only value of my strictures being to show the folly
of looking at noble objects in the wrong mood, and the
absurdity of a new visitant pretending to hold any opin-
ion whatever on such subjects, instead of surrendering
himself to the old builder's influence with childlike
simplicity.
A great deal of white marble decorates the old stone-
work of the aisles, in the shape of altars, obelisks,
sarcophagi, and busts. Most of these memorials are
commemorative of people locally distinguished, especially
the deans and canons of the cathedral, with their rela-
tives and families; and I found but two monuments
of personages whom I had ever heard of, one being
Gilbert Walmesley, and the other Lady Mary Wortley
Montague, a literary acquaintance of my boyhood. It
was really pleasant to meet her there ; for after a friend
has lain in the grave far into the second century, she
would be unreasonable to require any melancholy emo-
tions in a chance interview at her tombstone. It adds
a rich charm to sacred edifices, this time-honored custom
of burial in churches, after a few years, at least, when
the mortal remains have turned to dust beneath the
pavement, and the quaint devices and inscriptions still
LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 115
speak to you above. The statues, that stood or reclined
in several recesses of the Cathedral, had a kind of life,
and I regarded them with an odd sort of deference, as
if they were privileged denizens of the precinct. It
was singular, too, how the memorial of the latest buried
person, the man whose features were familiar in the
streets of Lichfield only yesterday, seemed precisely as
much at home here as his mediaeval predecessors.
Henceforward he belonged to the cathedral like one of
its original pillars. Methought this impression in my