In our wanderings through England we occasionally cross the path Shakespeare went with his company of actors. The court in the “George Inn” in Salisbury, to-day transformed into a pleasant little garden, was once the scene where the “Strolling Players” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used to give their performances, and here Shakespeare himself acted when he visited Salisbury. A police ordinance allowed only in the “George” theatrical amusements, and demanded that all plays should be ended by seven o’clock in the evening. This George Hotel was first mentioned in 1401 as “Georgysyn.” Oliver Cromwell slept here October 17, 1645, on his way to the army. The old beams which carry the ceiling of the parlor, and which a shrewd landlord has discovered in other rooms and freed from the hiding plaster, are the delight of American travelers, who refuse to sleep in rooms without beams. In the days of Pepys it was an elegant hostelry. In his “Diary,” in which he praises Salisbury as “a very brave place,” he puts down the following remarks: “Come to the George Inn where lay in a silk bed, and very good diet.” Less pleased he was with the bill, which he thought “so exorbitant that I was mad and resolved to truble the mistress about it and get something for the poor; and came away in that humour.” The result of his protest was not great. After paying £2 5_s._ 6_d._ for the night he gains just two shillings for the poor (one for “an old woman in the street”). Similar privileges for theatrical performances had the “Red Lion” in Boston, the little English mother of her big American daughter, and the “Mayde’s Hede” in Norwich. The closed space of these old innyards, with its staircases leading to the surrounding gallery, was thoroughly fitted for the theatrical representations, and it is quite possible that this gallery of the innyard influenced the architecture of the later theaters. Few of these innyards have survived, unfortunately, but we have still a wonderful example in the charming court of the so-called “New Inn” in Gloucester. It was new in the fifteenth century. How enchanting a Shakespeare play would be in the frame of its verdure! In the First Part of “Henry IV,” the poet himself has introduced us into such an innyard. It is very early morning and everything still dark. Carters come to look after their goods and to harness their horses, exchanging remarks in plain language: “I think this be the most villanous house in all London road for fleas”; or, “God’s body! the turkeys in my pannier are quite starved. What, ostler! A plague on thee! hast thou never an eye in thy head?”--a master scene of realistic observation in the style Lessing and Goethe admired so much, and Voltaire hated so that he proclaimed: “Shakespeare was a remarkable genius, but he had no taste, since for two hundred years he has spoiled the taste of the English nation.”