Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. AS TO THE HOUSE IN WHICH JOHN SHAKSPER LIVED. I quote White's "England Without and Within," p. 526: "Of all that I saw connected with his (William Shaksper) memory, his house was the most disappointing; and more, it was sad, depressing. The house had recently been 'restored,' and so destroyed. Its outside has an air of newness that is positively offensive. All expression of rural antiquity has been scraped and painted, and roofed, and clap-boarded out of it. "Within, however, not much of this smoothing has been done. My heart sank within me as I looked around upon the rude, mean dwelling-place of him who had filled the world with the splendor of his imaginings. It is called a house, and any building intended for a dwelling-place is a house; but the interior of this one is hardly that of a rustic cottage; it is almost that of a hovel, poverty-stricken, squalid, ken- ncl-like. A house so cheerless and comfortless I had not seen in rural England. The poorest, meanest farm-house that I had ever entered in New England or on Ivoug Island was a more cheerful habitation. And amid these sordid surroundings William Shakespeare grew to manhood. . . . Then for the first time I knew and felt from how low a condition of life Shake- peare had arisen. For his family were not reduced tothis; they had risen to it. This was John Shaksper's home in the days of his brief prosperity. The upper part of the house, to which you climb by a little rude stairway that is hardly good enough for a decent stable, has been turned into a musenm of doubtful relics and gimcracks, and is made as unlike as possible what it must have been when Shakespeare lived there. There is very little of this musenm that is worth attention, but there is one object of some interest. It is a letter written to Wm....