After leaving Warwick the Avon keeps winding towards the south-western boundary of the county till, before reaching this, it arrives at another and yet more noted town. Stratford-on-Avon is a household word wherever the English tongue is spoken. No American thinks his visit to the country of his ancestors is complete till he has made a pilgrimage to the birthplace and the grave of Shakespeare--nay, even our distant kinsmen in Germany are not seldom drawn thither by the same magnetic force. The town, till the days of railways, was a quietly prosperous, old-fashioned place, in harmony with the scenery of the neighbourhood. This is thoroughly characteristic of the Midlands, and exhibits one of their most attractive types. "The Avon, a fairly broad bright stream, sweeps silently along on its way to the Severn, through level meadows, where the grass grows green and deep. The higher ground on either side rolls gently down, descending sometimes to the margin of the stream, but elsewhere parted from it by broad stretches of level valley. The slopes are dotted with cornfields, and varied by clumps of trees and lines of hedgerow timber. It is a peaceful, unexciting land, where hurry would seem out of place."[4] The little house where Shakespeare was born--in 1564, on the 23rd of April, as they say--after many vicissitudes has been saved to the nation, and perhaps a little over-restored. It is a parcel-timbered dwelling without enrichment--one of those common in the Midlands--such as would be inhabited by an ordinary burgess of a country town.
[Illustration: THE AVON FROM WARWICK CASTLE (_p. 110_).]
When Shakespeare returned, a prosperous man, to his birthplace, he lived in a much better house near the church, which he purchased in 1597. This, however, was pulled down by an ill-tempered clerical vandal in the middle of the last century. Shottery, where we can still see the cottage of Anne Hathaway, whom Shakespeare loved not wisely but too well, is a mile away; and about four times that distance is the picturesque old brick and stone mansion of Charlecote, with its beautiful park. Here dwelt Sir Thomas Lucy, with whose deer the youth made too free, and on account of whose anger he ran away to London. The dramatist, it is said, took his revenge on the knight in the portrait of Justice Shallow, but when he looked back on the ultimate results of his flight from Stratford he might have justly said, "All's well that ends well!"