_April,_ 1892.--A record that all lovers of the Shakespeare shrines have long wished to make can at last be made. The Anne Hathaway Cottage has been bought for the British Nation, and that building will henceforth be one of the Amalgamated Trusts that are guarded by the corporate authorities of Stratford. The other Trusts are the Birthplace, the Museum, and New Place. The Mary Arden Cottage, the home of Shakespeare's mother, is yet to be acquired. CHAPTER XXII A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT _"I must become a borrower of the night, For a dark hour or twain."_--MACBETH. Midnight has just sounded from the tower of St. Martin. It is a peaceful night, faintly lit with stars, and in the region round about Trafalgar Square a dream-like stillness broods over the darkened city, now slowly hushing itself to its brief and troubled rest. This is the centre of the heart of modern civilisation, the middle of the greatest city in the world--the vast, seething alembic of a grand future, the stately monument of a deathless past. Here, alone, in my quiet room of this old English inn, let me meditate a while on some of the scenes that are near me--the strange, romantic, sad, grand objects that I have seen, the memorable figures of beauty, genius, and renown that haunt this classic land. Illustration: "Church of St. Martin." How solemn and awful now must be the gloom within the walls of the Abbey! A walk of only a few minutes would bring me to its gates--the gates of the most renowned mausoleum on earth. No human foot to-night invades its sacred precincts. The dead alone possess it. I see, upon its gray walls, the marble figures, white and spectral, staring through the darkness. I hear the night-wind moaning around its lofty towers and faintly sobbing in the dim, mysterious spaces beneath its fretted roof. Here and there a ray of starlight, streaming through the sumptuous rose window, falls and lingers, in ruby or emerald gleam, on tomb, or pillar, or dusky pavement. Rustling noises, vague and fearful, float from those dim chapels where the great kings lie in state, with marble effigies recumbent above their bones. At such an hour as this, in such a place, do the dead come out of their graves? The resolute, implacable Queen Elizabeth, the beautiful, ill-fated Queen of Scots, the royal boys that perished in the Tower, Charles the Merry and William the Silent--are these, and such as these, among the phantoms that fill the haunted aisles? What a wonderful company it would be, for human eyes to behold! And with what passionate love or hatred, what amazement, or what haughty scorn, its members would look upon each other's faces, in this miraculous meeting? Here, through the glimmering, icy waste, would pass before the watcher the august shades of the poets of five hundred years. Now would glide the ghosts of Chaucer, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Dryden, Cowley, Congreve, Addison, Prior, Campbell, Garrick, Burke,