Having seen the salt-making at Hayling, we will mount upon Portsdown, and then take leave of this busy corner of Hampshire. Portsdown is a long ridge northward of Portsea, and situated about five miles from Portsmouth. From it a most commanding prospect may be obtained. In one direction we see Chichester and the South Downs; in another, a fine woodland country, stretching nearly to Petersfield and Alton, meets the view; in the south, Portsea and Portsmouth, Hayling and Langston Harbour, Spithead, &c., the Isle of Wight, are comprised within the range of vision; a little in the west the view extends completely over the New Forest to the white cliffs of Purbeck. Such a spot is a treasure to sight-seers; and we need not wonder if, in the days of 'Portsdown Fair, in July, a vast concourse of persons are there gathered. Near the western extremity of the hill a monument to the memory of Nelson is erected, for which a fund was raised by a subscription of two days' pay from all his companions in arms at Trafalgar : it is not only a pleas ing memorial in itself, but it serves as a useful beacon to mariners on approaching Spithead, whether from the east or the west. Porchester Castle is on the northern margin of Portsmouth Harbour, beneath Portsdown. The antiquarians have had many a tough dispute as to the origin of this castle: the Britons, the Romans, the Saxons, and the Normans-all have had their advocates in the matter. Be its early history what it may, the castle now comprises an area between four and five hundred feet square. A Norman tower gives an eastern entrance to the court or quadrangle; and there is another Norman tower on the west. There are a keep and several towers yet remaining; and during the French war, many prisoners were confined in one of these towers. (Cut, No. 6.) Long may Portsmouth's fortifications, and the various establishments connected with them, remain useless in the sense which the batteries of Gibraltar have so long remained useless-by preventing the necessity for using them that best and most profitable of all idleness in such matters. spere. STRATFORD-UPON-AVON. WASHINGTON IRVING, in one of his pleasantest papers in the Sketch Book,' speaking of the tomb of Shakspere, in the chancel of Stratford Church, says, "There are other monuments around, but the mind refuses to dwell on anything that is not connected with ShakThis idea pervades the place." The American essayist could only look upon this fine old church as Shakspere's mausoleum.' Through the same predominant association, the pleasant town of Stratford, the gentle river, the quiet meadows, the old woods, the pretty villages, which are as interesting in themselves as many a locality which the topographer has delighted to describe, appear to have no value but in connexion with the memory of him who was born here and died here, who had knelt in this church, and conversed with neighbours in these streets, and gazed upon this river, and rambled amidst these meadows and woods, and had been familiar with all the features of these scenes that two centuries and a half of change have not yet obliterated. It is the Stratford of William Shak spere that we are about to present to our reader, and nothing more.* In the custody of the vicar of Stratford is a venerable book—a tall, thick, narrow book, whose leaves are of fine vellum-which contains various records that are interesting to us-to all Englishmen-to universal mankind. It is the Register of the Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials of the Parish of Stratford.' The record commences in 1558, the first year of Elizabeth, when the regulation for keeping such registers was strictly enforced. Let us pause on the one entry of that book, which most concerns the human race : "1564, April 26.-GULIELMUS FILIUS JOHANNES SHAKSPERE." John Shakspere, the father of William, was thus unquestionably dwelling in Stratford in 1564. He was dwelling there in 1558, for the same register in that year records the baptism of a daughter. His wife was Mary, the daughter of Robert Arden, of Wilmecote, (a neighbouring village,) who was unmarried in 1556, as we learn from the will of her father. Various have been the stories as to the occupation of John Shakspere: married, his wife's estate of Asbies, within a short ride of Stratford, came also into his possession. With these facts before us, scanty as they are, can we reasonably doubt that John Shakspere was living upon his own land, renting the land of others, actively engaged in the business of cultivation, in an age when tillage was becoming rapidly profitable,-so much so that men of wealth very often thought it better to take the profits direct than to share them with the tenant? A yeoman he might call himself, a yeoman he might be called by his neighbours; but he was in that social position that he readily passed out of the yeoman into the gentleman, and in all registers and records after 1569 he was styled Master John Shakspere. The parish of Stratford, then, was unquestionably the birth-place of William Shakspere. But in what part of Stratford dwelt his parents in the year 1564? It was ten years after this that his father became the purchaser of two freehold houses in Henley-streethouses which still exist-houses which the people of England are at this moment called upon to preserve as a precious relic of their greatest brother. William Shakspere, then, might have been born at either of his father's copy hold houses, in Greenhill-street, or in Henley-street; he might have been born at Ingon; or his father might have occupied one of the two freehold houses in Henley-street at the time of the birth of his eldest son. Tradition says, that William Shakspere was born in one of these houses; tradition points out the very room in which he was born. Whether Shakspere were born here, or not, there can be little doubt that this property was the home of his boyhood. It was purchased by John Shakspere, from Edmund Hall and Emma his wife, for forty pounds. In a copy of the chirograph of the fine levied on this occasion (which is now in the possession of Mr. Wheler, of Stratford) the property is described as two messuages, two gardens, and two orchards, with their appurtenances. This document does not define the situation of the property beyond its being in Stratford-upon-Avon; but in the deed of sale of another property in 1591, that property is described as situate between the houses of Robert Johnson and John Shakspere; and in 1597 John Shakspere himself sells a 'toft, or parcel of land,' in Henley-street, to the purchaser of the property in 1591. The properties can be traced, and leave no doubt of this house in Henley-street being the residence of John Shakspere. Stratford, in the middle of the 16th century, was a scattered town, no doubt with gardens separating the low and irregular tenements, sleeping ditches intersect In 1556, the year that Robert, the father of Mary Arden, died, John Shakspere was admitted at the Court-leet as the purchaser of two copyhold estates in Stratford. In 1570 John Shakspere is holding, as tenant under William Clopton, a meadow of fourteen acres, with its appurtenance, called Ingon, at the annual rent of eight pounds-equivalent to at least fortying the properties, and stagnant pools exhaling in the pounds of our present money. When John Shakspere Many of the passages in the following paper will be necessarily repeated from the writer's William Shakspere. A Biography.' The local descriptions of that work were the result of diligent observation. They are here condensed and brought together. road. Even in the reigns of Elizabeth and James the town was nearly destroyed by fire; and as late as 1618 the privy council represented to the corporation of Stratford that great and lamentable loss had " happened to that town by casualty of fire, which, of late years, "WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE WAS BORN IN THIS HOUSE. It is not now used as a butcher's shop, but there are the arrangements for a butcher's trade in the lower room-the cross-beams with hooks, and the windowboard for joints. We are now told by a sign-board, "THE IMMORTAL SHAKSPERE WAS BORN IN THIS HOUSE." Twenty-five years ago, when we made our first pilgrim- hath been very frequently occasioned by means of thatched cottages, stacks of straw, furzes, and suchlike combustible stuff, which are suffered to be erected and made confusedly in most of the principal parts of the town without restraint." If such were the case when the family of William Shakspere occupied the best house in Stratford, it is not unreasonable to suppose that sixty years earlier the greater number of houses in Stratford must have been mean timber buildings, thatched cottages run up of combustible stuff; and that the house in Henley Street which John Shakspere occupied and purchased, and which his son inherited and bequeathed to his sister for her life, must have been an important house,—a house fit for a man of substance; a house of some space and comfort, compared with those of the majority of the surrounding population. John Shakspere retained the property during his life; and it descended, as his heir-at-law, to his son William. In the last testament of the poet is this bequest to his "sister Joan :"-" I do will and devise unto her the house, with the appurtenances, in Stratford, wherein she dwelleth, for her natural life, under the yearly rent of twelve-pence." His sister Joan, whose name by marriage was Hart, was residing there in 1639, and she probably continued to reside there till her death in 1646. The one house in which Mrs. Hart resided was doubtless the half of the building now forming the butcher's shop and the tenement adjoining; for the other house was known as the Maidenhead Inn, in 1642. In another part of Shakspere's will he bequeaths, amongst the bulk of his property, to his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall, with remainder to her male issue, "two messuages or tene- | ments, with the appurtenances, situate, lying, and being in Henley-street, within the borough of Stratford." There are existing settlements of this very property in the family of Shakspere's eldest daughter and grand-daughter; and this grand-daughter, Elizabeth Nash, who was married a second time to Sir John Barnard, left both houses; namely, "the inn, called the Maidenhead, and the adjoining house and barn," to her kinsmen Thomas and George Hart, the grandsons of her grandfather's "sister Joan." These persons left descendants, with whom this property remained until the beginning of the present century. But it was gradually diminished. The orchards and gardens were originally extensive: a century ago tenements had been built upon them, and they were alienated by the Hart then in possession. The Maidenhead Inn became the Swan Inn, and is now the Swan and Maidenhead. The White Lion, on the other side of the property, was extended, so as to include the remain-western half had been divided into two tenements ;ing orchards and gardens. The house in which Mrs. Hart had lived so long became divided into two tenements; and at the end of the last century the lower part of one was a butcher's shop. Mr. Wheler, in a very interesting account of these premises, and their mutations, published in 1824, tells us that the butcheroccupant, some thirty years ago, having an eye to every gainful attraction, wrote up, The engraving which occupies the first page exhibits John Shakspere's houses in Henley-street under three different aspects. No. 1 (the top) is from an original drawing made by Colonel Delamotte in 1788. The houses, it will be observed, then presented one uniform front; and there were dormer windows connected with rooms in the roof. We have a plan before us, accompanying Mr. Wheler's account of these premises, which shows that they occupied a frontage of thirty-one feet. No. 2 is from an original drawing made by Mr. Pyne, after a sketch by Mr. Edridge, in 1807. We now see that the dormer windows are removed, as also the gable at the east end of the front. The house has been shorn of much of its external importance. No. 3 is from a lithograph engraving in Mr. Wheler's account, published in 1824. The premises, we now see, have been pretty equally divided. The Swan and Maidenhead half has had its windows modernized, and the continuation of the timber-frame has been obliterated by a brick casing. In 1807, we observe that the the fourth of the whole premises, that is the butcher's shop, the kitchen behind, and the two rooms over, being the portion commonly shown as Shakspere's House. Some years ago, upon a frontage, in continuation of the tenement at the west, three small cottages were built. The Royal Shaksperian Club of Stratfordupon-Avon have purchased the whole of this portion of the property. In their address, dated the 2nd of How shrines, abounds." The engravings at page 233 exhi- August, they make the following statement :-" There | ing the relics with which this, like all other celebrated are within the area of the property on the western side, belonging to Mrs. Izod, four tenements, three of which were apparently erected or converted into habitations, at the beginning of the last century; for before that period they seem to be unnoticed; and the fourth, which, from the continuation of the framed timber front, and from the old doorways communicating internally, evidently forms part of the birth-place; but which, in 1771, was separated from it. The Committee have much satisfaction in stating, that they have within the last few days purchased of Mrs. Izod the four tenements above-mentioned, for the sum of £820; which, as it puts them in actual possession of a part of the house in which Shakspere was born, cannot but be regarded as a most important acquisition at the present moment." The property, whose future destination is to be decided by the auctioneer's hammer, comprises the remainder of the original two messuages. far the one messuage extended, in which John Shakspere lived, which William Shakspere, his heir, gave to his sister for life, and which did not pass out of the hands of Shakspere's descendants till 1807, cannot, we think, be exactly determined without a professional inspection of the internal walls. It is evident, from the plan, that in some parts doors have been stopped up, and in others doors have been cut through; and we are inclined to think that the second messuage, which became the public-house in 1642, occupied less of the frontage than it now claims. At any rate the Shaksperian Club have done wisely in purchasing one isolated portion of the property. If the public obtain the remainder, there can be no difficulty in restoring the whole to its condition at the end of the sixteenth century. The Shaksperian Club assume, without hesitation, that in these premises William Shakspere was born. Mr. Wheler says, "In this lowly abode it has been the invariable and uncontradicted tradition of the town, that our inimitable Bard drew his first breath." Disturb not the belief. To look upon this ancient house,—perhaps one of the oldest in Stratford, votaries have gathered from every region where the name of Shakspere is known. Washington Irving says, "I had come to Stratford on a poetical pilgrimage. My first visit was to the house where Shakspere was born; and where, according to tradition, he was brought up to his father's craft of wool-combing. It is a small mean-looking edifice of wood and plaster, -a true nestling-place of genius, which seems to delight in hatching its offspring in by-corners. The walls of its squalid chambers are covered with names and inscriptions in every language, by pilgrims of all nations, ranks, and conditions, from the prince to the peasant; and present a simple but striking instance of the spontaneous and universal homage of mankind to the great poet of nature. The house is shown by a garrulous old lady, with a frosty red face, lighted up by a cold blue anxious eye, and garnished with artificial locks of flaxen hair, curling from under an exceedingly dirty cap. She was particularly assiduous in exhibit solemn, confiding, grateful, humble-clustering round their hearts in that hour. The autographs of Byron and Scott are amongst hundreds of perishable inscriptions. Disturb not the belief that William Shakspere first saw the light in this venerated room. Pursuing the associations connected with Shakspere, we naturally turn from the home of his childhood to his school, and his school-boy days. In the seventh year of the reign of Edward VI., a royal Charter was granted to Stratford for the incorporation of the inhabitants. That charter recites, "That the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon was an ancient borough, in which a certain Guild was theretofore founded, and endowed with divers lands, tenements, and possessions, out of the rents, revenues, and profits, whereof a certain Free Grammar-school for the education of boys there was made and supported." The charter further recites the other public objects to which the property of the Guild had been applied ;-that it |