Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/682

 comes to see the odd little theatrical-looking refuge for superannuated warriors which, lurks in the shadow of one of the old gate-towers. Every one will remember Hawthorne's charming account of the place, which has left no touch of fancy to be added to any reference to it. The hospital struck me as a little museum kept up for the amusement and confusion of those Western travellers who are used to seeing charity more dryly and practically administered. The old hospitallers—I am not sure, after all, whether they are necessarily soldiers, but some of them happen to be—are at once the curiosities and the keepers. They sit on benches outside of their door, at the receipt of custom, all neatly brushed and darned, and ready, like Mr. Cook, to conduct you personally. They are only twelve in number, but their picturesque dwelling, perched upon the old city rampart, and full of dusky little courts, cross-timbered gable ends, and deeply sunken lattices, seems a wonderfully elaborate piece of machinery for its humble purpose. Each of the old gentlemen must be provided with a wife or "housekeeper"; each of them has a dusky parlor of his own; and they pass their latter days in their scoured and polished little refuge as softly and honorably as a company of retired lawgivers or pensioned soothsayers.

At Coventry I went to see a couple of old charities of a similar pattern—things with black-timbered fronts, and little clean-swept courts, and Elizabethan lattices. One of them was a picturesque residence for a handful of old women, who sat, each of them, in a cosy little bower, in a sort of mediæval darkness; the other was a school for little boys of humble origin, and this last establishment was charming. I found the little boys playing at "top" in a gravelled court, in front of the prettiest old building of tender-colored stucco and painted timber, ornamented with two delicate little galleries and a fantastic porch. They were dressed in little blue tunics and odd caps, like those worn by sailors, but, if I remember rightly, with little yellow tags affixed to them. I was free, apparently, to wander all over the establishment; there was no sign of pastor or master anywhere; nothing but the little yellow-headed boys playing before the ancient house, and practising most correctly the Warwickshire accent. I went indoors and looked at a fine old oaken staircase; I even ascended it, and walked along a gallery and peeped into a dormitory at a row of very short beds; and then I came down and sat for five minutes on a bench hardly wider than the top rail of a fence, in a little, cold, dim refectory, where there was not a crumb to be seen, nor any lingering odor of bygone repasts to be perceived. And yet I wondered how it was that the sense of many generations of boyish feeders seemed to abide there. It came, I suppose, from the very bareness and, if I may be allowed the expression, the clean-licked aspect of the place, which wore the appearance of the famous platter of Jack Sprat and his wife.

Inevitably, of course, the sentimental tourist has a great deal to say to himself about this being Shakespeare's county—about these densely verdant meadows and parks having been, to his musing eyes, the normal landscape. In Shakespeare's day, doubtless, the coat of nature was far from being so prettily trimmed as it is now; but there is one place, nevertheless, which, as he passes it in the summer twilight, the traveller does his best to believe unaltered. I allude, of course, to Charlecote park, whose venerable verdure seems a survival from an earlier England, and whose innumerable acres, stretching away, in the early evening, to vaguely seen Tudor walls, lie there like the backward years melting into a mighty date. It was, however, no part of my design in these remarks to pause before so thickly besieged a shrine as this; and if I were