Could not remain and muse in such company; in the body of the church from a pulpit which I so looked hurriedly round at the countless names cannot see. Every now and then, however, I scribbled all over the walls and ceiling, noticing hear the word "Shakespeare," and catch por"Walter Scott" awkwardly scratched on one of tions of familiar quotations from his works, and, the diamond panes of the window, and rendered straining my car, I hear the archbishop say by almost illegible by the names of Brown and way of peroration, that Shakespeare was a gift Jones and Robinson that had been scrawled from Heaven, for which we ought to give through it, over it, under it, and all about it; thanks. And after a three hours' sederunt, we saw also the name of Thackeray neatly written stream out of the beautiful church, and march in pencil on the ceiling, the place nearest his home to our dinners (getting cold) to the martial hand; and observed generally that the names strains of the town band; and as I keep step to that were written in the largest characters and "See the conquering hero," I wonder if Exeter in the most conspicuous places, were those of Hall is present, and what he is thinking of all ladies and gentlemen from the United States this. of America. Paid another sixpence to the Museum, where I saw many interesting things, including Shakespeare's ring, which he must have worn on his thumb; the desk at which he sat at school, and on which he had only partly accomplished the carving of his initials, having been unable, apparently, to turn the tail of the S, leaving it in the condition of a C; many documents of the period, one relating to house property, with John Shakespeare, his mark (a very unsteady cross), at the foot of it; a letter to the poet from a friend in London, asking him for the loan of thirty pounds-the only epistle extant addressed to the poet; a large folio manuscript book, recently discovered in the Lord Chamberlain's office, in which Shakespeare is mentioned at the head of a list of other players, as having received "iiij yardes of skarlet red cloth," to enable him to appear in a procession on the occasion of the entry of King James into London; a flat candlestick found at the bottom of the well in New Place, the site of the Bard's grand house, a candlestick with which he may often have gone up to bed, and which, having been found at the bottom of a well, I am inclined to regard as a true relic; much mulberry and many clay pipes of modern aspect, which I reject altogether. I walk across the fields in the evening to Ann Hathaway's cottage, and am charmed with the quiet rural beauty of the scene. The fields are sparkling with daisies and wild flowers, like stars in a firmament of green; the rooks are cawing high up on the trees; the groves are ringing with the songs of birds; the air is laden with the perfume of new leaves. That long-expected thrill comes unbidden now. Truly a place to nurse a poet. I sit lingering upon every stile, drawing in great draughts of the fresh exhilarating air, as if I could take in a stock of it to last me when I have returned to the murky city. And by-and-by little maidens come round me with offerings of bunches of daisies and cowslips, with a view to halfpence-and when I inquire the whereabouts of the cottage, they all volunteer to be my guides; and remonstrance and halfpence being equally in vain, I proceed onwards escorted by a whole troop of maidens, who seem to conduct me in triumph. find the cottage more real than the house; no paint and varnish here; but all the old beams, many of the old stones, and a thatched roof that might be any age. A female descendant of the Hathaways receives me at the door joyfully, and conducts me through the apartments-the sittingroom and kitchen combined, where I imagined From the house to the church, where I deem William and Ann sitting courting on the stone myself fortunate in finding a seat in the chancel ledge under the great chimney-if, indeed, Ann's exactly opposite the Bard's monument. I am father ever allowed the lad to come beyond the afraid I paid more attention to the bust than to garden-gate-up-stairs to the bedroom, where the service. The effigy struck me very much, and Ann probably arrayed herself in bridal attire gave me quite a new idea of the Bard's features previous to proceeding on William's arm to and expression. Give me this bust, and I resign Luddington church. And here there is a wonto you all the portraits. I have here the counter-derful old bedstead of black oak, which I feit presentment of a face suggestive above all things of strong vitality, freshness of spirit, and liveliness of disposition. I can imagine this to be the face of a man who was full of natural genius and did not know it; whose animal and mental spirits never flagged; who never toiled at anything; whose head never ached. I cannot discuss the question of the plaster cast of the face, said to have been taken after death, and used as a model by the artist who executed this effigy. I can only say that the effigy satisfies me, and that I can believe Shakespeare to have been exactly such a man as it represents. I am in a very favourable position in the chancel for making these observations and revolving these thoughts, but not for hearing the Archbishop of Dublin's sermon, which is preached far away up | imagined might be that " second-best" which the Bard bequeathed to his widow. The female descendant of the Hathaways could not say: perhaps it might be. Express myself very much pleased with the cottage, and descendant of the Hathaways hopes I will tell my friends that the show is worth seeing. On looking at the visitors' book I can understand her anxiety in this respect. Very few pilgrims have as yet walked across the fields to view Ann Hathaway's cottage. I return by the way I came, and find a missionary preaching under a hedge to a select congregation of rustics, denouncing the established clergy, especially in the form of archbishops, calling down vengeance upon the Pavilion, and describing Shakespeare as a worm. The expected influx of visitors from all corners of the earth did not take place at the beginning even by the Haymarket company which imof the week, as the natives fondly hoped; and pressions, I have no doubt, were induced by the sleeping became a less expensive luxury. Beds beauty and the comfort of the theatre. I had declined in the market, and sofas that had been seen all the plays and all the actors, but I went looking up on Saturday, were entirely at a dis- night after night simply to enjoy the rare English count. Omnibuses came rattling up from the luxury of being comfortable in a theatre. station with only three or four persons in them. Wombwell's menagerie came in with a little village of yellow vans and many men and horses, looked about and thought it would go away again. Eventually, however, drew up beside the Scotch giant, and blew brass horns until it was black in the face; but to no purpose. Performing elephants were reported to be engaged in an entirely new and astonishing feat-that of eating their heads off. I call at the office of the committee, and find that a poet has sent in an invocation beginning: over. Come let us Tercentenerate Wander forth again and invoke the town in the poet's words: Come let us tercentenerate, by all means. But at present all the tercentenerating is done by the town band, which for wind is a paragon. The performance of the Messiah at the Pavilion in the afternoon is, as respects the attendance, a failure. The audience consisted chiefly of the gentry of the neighbourhood, who came in in their carriages and went away again immediately the performance was It was a bitter sight for the natives to see the horses eating out of their own nosebags, and the owners of the horses sitting in the carriages eating out of their own nose-bagsnot patronising the town to the extent of a feed of corn, nor a biscuit and a glass of sherry. Prospect brightens, however, on Tuesday, when the players come. Tickets for Twelfth Night going off rapidly, and the indefatigable mayor, who is ubiquitous, begins to look more cheerful. The vicar, beloved of all the natives high and low, is seen driving through the town a phaeton, in which are seated side by side the Bishop of St. Andrews and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the bishop craving for something more solid than Twelfth Night, and asking Sir Andrew why he doesn't play Macbeth. I go to the Pavilion for the first time to see the comedy, and am delighted with the splendid proportions of the building; consider it a model of what a theatre ought to be, and can only account for its perfection by the supposition that the architect set to work to construct a wooden tent and by accident hit upon a perfect theatre. The Pavilion is larger in area than any theatre in London, and yet the spectator can see and hear in every part of it, and this seems to be owing to the low roof and the absence of piled-up tiers of boxes. Will some one confer a great obligation on the London play-going public by bringing the Pavilion up to London, and planting it, say, in Leicester-square? Sitting in a wide open balcony, with plenty of room to move about, and neither oppressed with heat nor chilled with draughts of cold air, I thought Twelfth Night a more enjoyable comedy than I had ever thought it before, and considered that I had never seen it so well played Now that the players were coming down every day, there was an agreeable combination of the rus in urbe, of London and Stratford, about the place. When I had heard the band blow from all quarters of the town, and marched hither and thither, always turning into Henleystreet to see the House, and never finding anybody near it, except on one occasion, when Punch was giving his performance exactly op posite; when I had mused myself nearly asleep in the old churchyard, or by the banks of the placid Avon; when I had inspected the portraits! of the Bard in the Town-hall, and the plaster cast with some hairs adhering to the moustache, concerning which I had grave doubts, and the walking-stick and drinking-cup under the glass case, and more pipes from New Place; and gazed in through a window at an old rusty piece of iron, said to be the original key of the church where Shakespeare was married; and dropped in for a glass of ale at the Falcon, whose parlour is lined with the oak panelling from the Bard's grand house, and where the Bard himself is said to have sat of an evening and smoked a pipe, to the wonder and amazement of the village gossips-when I had done all these things, and tercentenerated (poet, I thank thee for that word!) to my heart's content, it was very pleasant to betake me to a certain snug room in the Red Horse, there to foregather with Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch, and Malvolio, and the two Dromios, and Touchstone, and many more, who were well bestowed at that hostel, when they were not being entertained by the most hospitable Mayor and the no less hospitable Vicar. And here, whenever a new comer arrived, Washington Irving's poker was brought in, tenderly encased in a blue baize sheath, and handed round to be admired. Washington Irving had stirred the fire with that very poker, in that very room, and so it has been a holy poker ever since. And here the Irish "busker" stole in one evening and gave us a recitation with remarkable emphasis and propriety, showing that, when occasion required, he had a soul above Limerick Races and Irish jigs. Away on the top of an omnibus to Charlcote Park, the scene of the Bard's poaching exploit. An unbelieving phantom who has haunted me for days, and denied the birthplace, and the tomb, and everything else, now denies the poaching. I shut him up finally, by myself denying Shakespeare altogether. After a three miles' ride, we come upon the park, which is swarming with tame deer, and I picture young Will sneaking under the shadow of the wall to knock one of them on the head. Seeing that the deer are all as tame as hens or ducks, it came into my head that it was not poaching but something else, which I will not mention. Drive up to the new gate, beside which is preserved an old post, which we are left to imagine is the very post on which the youthful poet fixed his lampoon upon Sir Thomas. And now a strange thought. The house and park of the Lucys are thrown open to visitors to-day in the name of one who once did the family the honour to steal a deer from its park. If the story be not true, it is still more remarkable that a slander in connexion with the Bard's name should have been enough to immortalise a house, and render a family famous. The house and grounds very beautiful-the gardens laid out to realise a picture by Watteau: the house reminding one of the magnificence of Versailles-oak floors, emblazoned ceilings, and the walls hung with rare pictures by old masters. The portrait of Sir Thomas Lucy over the mantelpiece, and the marble monument in the church forbid the idea of Justice Shallow. They are emphatically the portraits of a gentleman--a chivalrous-looking gentleman, with a fine head and a noble coun tenance. Returning over the old bridge to Stratford, I am horrified to see the calm bosom of the Avon being ruffled by the paddle-wheels of a dirty steam-boat from the Birmingham Soho. Man on the bank touting for passengers to go up the river to Luddington, where the Bard was married. I have seen his birthplace, and I have seen his tomb, and I should like to view the scene of the middle event of his life; but I decline to navigate the Avon in a steam-boat, so forego Luddington, and content myself with another sight of the old key in the shop window in High-street. successful entertainment in the Pavilion, specially erected for the purpose of performing his works, was a masked ball. SUSSEX IRONMASTERS. THE ironworks of Sussex and Kent were the most important in England for sixteen hundred years. In the sandstone beds of the Forest Ridge, called by geologists the Hastings sand, which lies between the chalk and the oolitelayers, there is an abundance of ironstone. The ironstone beds lie in a north-easterly direc tion from Ashburnham and Heathfield to the neighbourhood of Crowborough; and timber for the ironstone, fuel suitable for smelting the ores, lay handy and plentiful- the country about having been called the Forest of Anderida, and the Weald, or wild wood, and being full of large oaks. The district thus combined both the conditions suitable for iron-making. When, in the far and obscure past, the iron-smelting began here, nobody can tell, but more than seventeen hundred years ago, in the year 120, the iron-ores of Sussex were extensively worked by the Romans, or by Teutonic iron-workers using Roman pottery, and the coins of Nero, of Vespasian, and Diocletian. Coins of Roman emperors and fragments of Roman pottery have been plentifully found, in a bed of cinder-heaps extending over several acres, at Old Land Farm, near Maresfield. Throughout the county, old mansions, places, and farm-houses occur, bearing such names as Furnace-place, Cinder Hill, Hammer Pond, and Forge Farm. But Sussex iron is now a mere curiosity, for the Sussex furnaces, which were probably blazing long before the Christian era, were all except one blown out by the end of the eighteenth century. Now, if you ask me if I passed a pleasant time and enjoyed myself, I answer that I passed a very pleasant time, and never enjoyed myself more in my life. Nature has made the neighbouring country a paradise of quiet beauty, and the mayor and the committee, as the repre- The discovery of the art of smelting iron by sentatives of Art, certainly did everything in their pit coal enabled the districts combining ironpower to add to the delights of the town. The stone and coal to undersell the district in which, erection of that handsome Pavilion I regard as a although the ores remained, the fuel was always great achievement, and too much praise cannot becoming scarcer and dearer; but, whilst the be awarded to the committee for its spirit and iron trade flourished in Sussex, noteworthy inenterprise in providing entertainments utterly cidents marked its history, and notable men regardless of expense. As an example, the pursued it. Several wealthy families in the whole of the scenery and properties that were county owe their fortunes to the iron trade. used in Romeo and Juliet at the Princess's Smith, the most common of all names, is one Theatre, on Tuesday night, in London, were which is now disguised and abandoned, but it used in Stratford on Wednesday, and were seen ought to be remembered that this commonness again in London on the evening of Thursday. of the name ought to accompany the characI think, as a whole, the celebration was as teristic of the English nation, for the Englishsuccessful as could have been reasonably ex- man is pre-eminently the blacksmith of the pected. The Pavilion was never filled, but it world. A Saxon means a sharp blade. Whatwould have been difficult to fill so large a build-ever other superiorities he may boast, it is ing even in London. If the visitors from the chiefly in reference to iron tools and machinery neighbourhood came and went away again the that the superiority of the Englishman is adsame day without spending money in the town, mitted. He may call himself John Bull, but he the natives had only themselves to blame. is John Smith. And, in ancient times, the Thousands were scared away by the false blacksmith was a great man, holding a high reports of overcrowded hotels and high charges. place at court, sitting at royal tables, and But that honour to the Bard had much to do quenching the spark in his throat after hobbing with the celebration, I will not pretend to and nobbing with kings. Indeed, Smith and declare, in the face of the fact, that the most | Smithson (Hadad and Benhadad) were the names of a Syrian dynasty, and even when an to his steward requesting him to buy iron in the usurper of another family seized the throne, he neighbourhood of Gloucester for an hospital at took the names with it. Vegetable and animal decomposition in the bed and delta of a mighty river produced, say the geologists, the iron of the ferruginous clays and sands of the Wealden. The clay ironstone was the ore of the Forest Ridge; at the western extremity of the Iron District the ferruginous sands were used; and in the Clay Country, a comparatively recent concretion, or bog iron, called iron rag, is frequently turned up by the plough. This pudding stone is composed of clay and gravel, and about twenty-five or thirty per cent of oxide of iron. Crowborough is the loftiest point of this Iron District, being about eight hundred and four feet above the level of the sea. Mr. Mark Antony Lower, the authority followed by all compilers of information on this subject, is of opinion that the iron of this district was wrought long before the conquest of this island by the Romans. The Britons apprised the invaders that they knew already the uses of iron for military purposes, by mowing their ranks with their scythe-armed chariots. Cesar says their coins were iron rings of a certain weight-a description applicable at the present day to certain coins or moneys used by the Chinese. Sussex and Kent were, probably, the maritime regions, which, he says, produced iron, although only in small quantities. Pliny alludes to the iron smelted in Britain. Abundant proofs of the activity of this industry during the period of the Roman occupation have been discovered. Scoriæ, or the cinders of the extinct furnaces, have been extensively used in repairing roads; and, in a heap of cinders lying ready for use on the side of the London-road, in 1844, a small bit of pottery attracted the attention of the Rev. Edward Turner. On examination, it proved to be undoubtedly Roman. The cinders, he learned on inquiry, came from Maresfield, his own parish, where lay a large heap of them at a place called Old Land Farm, near Buxted. When he visited this cinder-bed, six or seven acres in extent, the labourers were laying bare the remains of a Roman settlement. In a sort of grave lay a funeral deposit of pottery. Scarcely a barrow-load of cinders was driven out that did not contain fragments of pottery. Brass coins of Nero, Vespasian, Tetricus, and Diocletian, were identified. Deeming them old halfpence, the labourers had “chucked" Roman coins away because "the letters on 'em was pretty near rubbed out." Besides coins, there were found in these acres of cinders fragments of red or Samian ware, implements, fibulæ, armillæ, and mortaria. Cæsar had recorded the unimportance of the iron industry of the maritime regions of Albion, and such was its insignificance in the period subsequent to the Roman occupation, that Sussex was not mentioned in Domesday Book as an iron producing country, although the iron trade of Somerset, Hereford, Gloucester, Cheshire, and Lincoln are mentioned. A Bishop of Chichester, even in the thirteenth century, wrote! Winchester. Of the Sussex ironworks, the earliest record is in a murage grant of Henry the Third, authorising the town of Lewes to exact a penny toll on every cart-load of iron from the neighbouring weald. A Master Henry, of Lewes, received payments a quarter of a century later for iron work in this king's chamber, and for his monument in Westminster Abbey. The Crown, in the reign of Edward the First, smelted the iron ores of St. Leonard's Forest. A complaint was laid before the Lord Mayor by the ironmongers of London against the smiths of the Weald, because the irons for wheels were shorter than they ought to be. The roads, if roads there were in those days, were so impassable that Sussex iron was carried to London by water. On the authority of the Wardrobe account (Carlton Ride MSS.), Mr. Mark Antony Lower says: "In the thirteenth year of Edward the Second, Peter de Walsham, sheriff of Surrey and Sussex, by virtue of a precept from the King's Exchequer, made a provision of horse-shoes and nails of different sorts for the expedition against the Scots. The number furnished on the occasion was 3000 horse-shoes and 29,000 nails, and the expense of their purchase from various places within the sheriff's jurisdiction, and their delivery in London, by the hands of John de Norton, clerk, was 147. 13s. 10d.” Iron ore paid tithe in Western Sussex in 1342. There is a cast-iron slab, much worn by being trodden upon, in Durwash church, with the inscription, in Latin: " Pray for the soul of John Collins." Until the civil war in the time of Charles the First, sewing needles were made in Chichester. In many old farm-houses in Sussex, brand-irous, brand-dogs or andirons, such as are still used in countries which burn wood fires, and supported the merry yule logs of our forefathers, still retain the places they have occupied for centuries within the ample chimneys. The cast-iron chimney-backs were ornamented with figures in relief of the most various kinds. Some of the heads appear to be portraits: one of them reminded me of the casts of Oliver Cromwell. Among these ornaments in relief are armorial bearings, the Royal arms, grapes and vine-leaves, the Tudor badge of rose and crown. Edward the Third used hooped cannon against the Scots in 1327, nineteen years before they were employed at Crecy against the French, but there is no evidence bearing on the question whether or not they were made in Sussex. But two centuries later, in the reign of Henry the Eighth, Ralph Hogge, aided by one Peter Baude, a Frenchman, cast cannon at Buxted. The device of the Hoggs, Hoggés, Hoggéts, or Huggets, is the animal, and the name was, says Mr. Lower, probably of Norman origin. The traditionary distich is still devoutly believed in the neighbourhood of Huget's Furnace, near Buxted and Mayfield— Master Bugget and his man John, ALL THE YEAR ROUND. Down to the present day many Huggets are blacksmiths in East Sussex. The terms pig and Sow are still associated with iron, and this may be the origin of the device, and the name. Master Huggett and his man John may have a And more assured place in the Story of the Guns than has yet been won by either Armstrong or Whitworth. Two of Peter Baude's brass guns are still to be seen in the Tower of London. The cannon made at Robert's Bridge were floated down the Rother by means of "shuts," a sort of locks. As men of free minds, the Sussex ironmasters furnished several Protestant martyrs during the Reformation struggle. Richard Woodman, of Wartleton, in one of his examinations before the Bishop of Winchester, said: "Let me go home, I pray you, to my wife and children, to see them kept, and other poore folke that I would set aworke, by the help of God. I have set aworke a hundreth persons, ere this, all the yeare together." Richard Woodman was burnt at Lewes in 1557. Archbishop Parker nounced the iron trade to Queen Elizabeth as "a plague." one daughter; and when I was between sixteen and seventeen years of age, my father and mother going to visit a friend at Sensom and quickly after they came home, my mother (Kemsing?) in the said county, took the plague, fell sick, and about six days after died, nobody thinking of such a disease. My father made a great burial for her, and abundance came to it, not fearing anything, and notwithstanding several women layd my mother forth, and no manner of clothes were taken out of the took the distemper; this I set down as a miracle. chamber when she died, yet not one person After her burial, we were all well one whole week, and a great many people frequented our house, and we our neighbours' houses, but at the week's end, in two days, fell sick my father, my eldest brother, my sister, and myself; and in three days after this my two younger brothers, Edward and John, fell sick, and though I was very ill, my father sent me to market to buy provisions, but before I came home it was de-noysed abroad that it was the plague, and as soon as I was come in adoors they charged us all this while no one took the distemper of or to keep in, and set a strong watch over us, yet. from us, and about the sixth day after they were taken, three of them dyed in three hours, one after another, and were all buryed in one grave, and about two days after the two youngest dyed both together, and were buryed in one grave. All this while I lay sick in another bed, and the tender looked every hour for my death; but it pleased God most miraculously to preserve me, and without any sore breaking, only I had a swelling in my groin, which was long ere it sunk away, and I have been the worse for it shut up with two women, one man, and one ever since, and when I was recovered, I was child, for three months, and neither of them had the distemper. And now, at between sixteen and seventeen, I came into the world, to shift for myself, having one brother left, which was out at prentice, who presently fell out with me about what my father had left me, and when I had been at about 107. charges, we came to an agreement. Early editions of Camden's Britannia contain quaint and graphic pictures of the iron districts of the days of the Tudors and the Stuarts. Speaking of Sussex, he says: "Full of iron mines it is in sundry places, where, for the making and founding thereof, there be furnaces on every side, and a huge deal of wood is yearly burnt, to which purpose divers brooks in many places are brought to run in one channel, and sundry meadows turned into pools and waters that they might be of power sufficient to drive hammer-mills, which, beating upon the iron, resound all over the places adjoining." Extracts from Memoirs of the Gale Family, supplied by Mr. R. W. Blencowe to the Transactions of the Sussex Archæological Society, give us an insight into the minds and characters of the ironmasters whose energy and sagacity guided this noisy industry, which contrasts so strikingly with the quiet now reigning among the Sussex downs, except where it is disturbed occasionally by the distant roar of a railway train, or the screech of the locomotive whistle. In the prospect of leaving his sons "in a world of fraud and deceit, a world of all manner of wickedness in all sorts of people," Leonard Gale wrote the following breviate of his birth and living, The advice of me, Leonard Gale, to my two sons, Leonard and Harry, being in the 67th year of my age, A.D. 1687. My sons hearken unto the words of your loving father, who earnestly desireth your welfare, and encreasing of grace, learning, and riches. I was born in the parish of Sevenoake in Kent, my father, a blacksmith, living in Riverheadstreet, in the parish aforesaid, who lived there in very good repute, and drove a very good trade; his name Francis Gale: my mother was the daughter of one George Pratt, a very good yeoman, living at Chelsford, about five miles from Riverhead; my father had, by a former wife, two sons, and by my mother three sons and administration, and my brother quickly spent all I, by my guardian, had the his portion, and went to sea, and died; and I, entering into the world at this age, worth about 2007., within the space of two years and a half, ran out 150/. of it, not with ill husbandry, for I laboured night and day to save what I had left to me, but bad servants and trusting was the ruin of me, and then I turned away both man and maid, and lived starke alone for the space of one month, in which time I cast up my accounts, and found that I was not worth 50%. if I had sold myself to my shirt; then I was in a great strait, and knew not which way to steer, but I cried unto the Lord with my whole heart and with tears, and He heard my cry, and put into my mind to try one year more, to see what I could do, for I resolved to spend nothing but mine own, and I resolved always to keep a conscience void of offence towards God and towards man.' Then I took a boy to strike and to blow |