nd that had traced the Sonnets, and the eye that had plumbed
the depths of life. That was a solemn moment, and I do not think I ever
experienced so deep a thrill of speechless awe. I could not tear myself
away; I could only wonder and desire.

Presently, by the kind offices of a pleasant simple verger, I did more.
I mounted on some steps he brought, and looked face to face at the bust
in the monument.

I cannot share in the feelings of those who would consider it formal or
perfunctory. There was the high-domed forehead, like that of Pericles
and Walter Scott; there were the steady eyes, the clear-cut nose; and
as for the lips--I never for an instant doubted the truth of what I
saw--I am as certain as I can be that they are the lips of a corpse,
drawn up in the stiff tension of death, showing the teeth below. I am
absolutely convinced that here we get as near to the man as we can get,
and that the head is taken from a death-mask. What injures the dignity
and beauty of the face is the plumpness of the chin that testifies to
the burgher prosperity, the comfortable life, the unexercised brain of
the later days. I saw afterwards the various portraits; I suppose it is
a matter of evidence, but nothing convinced me of truth, not even the
bilious, dilapidated, dyspeptic, white face of the folio engraving,
with the horrible hydrocephalous development of skull. That is a
caricature only. The others seem mere fancies.

Then I saw patiently the other relics, the foundations of New Place,
the schoolhouse--but all without emotion, except a deep sense of shame
that the only records allowed to stand in the long, low-latticed room
in which the boy Shakespeare probably saw a play first acted, are
boards recording the names of school football and cricket teams. The
ineptitude of such a proceeding, the hideous insistence of the athletic
craze of England, drew from me a despairing smile; but I think that
Shakespeare himself would have viewed it with tolerance and even
amusement.

But most of these relics, like Anne Hathaway's Cottage, are restored
out of all interest, and only testify to the silly and frivolous
demands of trippers.

But, my dear Herbert, the treasure is mine. Feeble as the confession
is, I do not think I ever realised before the humanity of Shakespeare.
He seemed to me before to sit remote, enshrined aloof, the man who
could tell all the secrets of humanity that could be told, and whose
veriest hints still seem to ope