Warwickshire is hallowed by shining names of persons illustrious in the annals of art. Drayton, Greene, and Heminge, who belong to the Shakespeare period, were born there. Walter Savage Landor was a native of Warwick,--in which quaint and charming town you may see the house of his birth, duly marked. Croft, the composer, was born near Ettington, hard by Stratford: there is a tiny monument, commemorative of him, in the ruins of Ettington church, near the manor-house of Shirley. And in our own day Warwickshire has enriched the world with "George Eliot" and with that matchless actress,--the one Ophelia and the one Beatrice of our age--Ellen Terry. But it is a chief characteristic of England that whichever way you turn in it your footsteps fall on haunted ground. Everyday life here is continually impressed by incidents of historic association. In an old church at Greenwich I asked that I might be directed to the tomb of General Wolfe. "He is buried just beneath where you are now standing," the custodian said. It was an elderly woman who showed the place, and she presently stated that when a girl she once entered the vault beneath that church and stood beside the coffin of General Wolfe and took a piece of laurel from it, and also took a piece of the red velvet pall from the coffin of the old Duchess of Bolton, close by. That Duchess was Lavinia Fenton, the first representative of Polly Peachem, in _The Beggars' Opera_, who died in 1760, aged fifty-two.[28] "Lord Clive," the dame added, "is buried in the same vault with Wolfe." An impressive thought, that the ashes of the man who established Britain's power in America should at last mingle with the ashes of the man who gave India to England! CHAPTER X SHAKESPEARE'S TOWN