Stratford-on-Avon is a remarkably bright-looking cheerful town, and is, of course, more visited than any other of its size in England. The population is not quite 4000. In the sixteenth century Stratford was an exceedingly beautiful town. The houses were mostly of wood, and each situated in its own garden. One of them still stands in High Street, and has a well-carved front, resembling one of the many that remain in Chester. Stratford derives its name from the ford over the Avon that was here, and which seems to have satisfied the primitive manners of the people till a wooden bridge was built; but this again was superseded by an excellent stone one. Of course the exterior of Shakespeare’s house, in Henley Street, is familiar to every one; it is an ordinary specimen of a house of about the early part of the sixteenth century. The one which Shakespeare himself built in New Place was pulled down in 1756, by the Rev. Francis Gastrell, who unhappily came into possession of the property. He first cut down the celebrated mulberry tree that the poet had planted, and when the inhabitants of Stratford were astounded, he showed them that he could even eclipse that by pulling down the house that Shakespeare had himself designed. From Kenilworth to Evesham, in Worcester, the Avon is full of beauty and interest. There is the celebrated Guy’s Cliff, Hatton Rock, where the river is confined in its course and rapid, the splendid Warwick Castle, the Marl Cliffs of Bidford, and Charlcote Park, while the river itself is full of quiet English beauty. It glides through richly cultivated meadows, and past overhanging boughs from wooded banks; there are long lines of alders and willows, and here and there some quaint quiet homestead, that looks the very embodiment of peace. Warton well describes this part of the river:-- “The willows that o’erhang thy twilight edge, Their boughs entangling with the embattled sedge, Thy brink with watery foliage quaintly fringed, Thy surface with reflected verdure tinged.” Eight villages round Stratford have been characterised, in some well-known lines, by some old resident who had the talent for rhyme. It is remarkable how familiar these are to the country people, and how invariably they ascribe them to Shakespeare. “Piping Petworth, Dancing Marston, Haunted Hillborough, Hungry Grafton, Dudging Exhall, Papist Wicksford, Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford.”