148 A Visit to Stratford [1894 



friendship in the streets. She had been kind to him, just as had been 

 the case with De Quincy, and Thompson refused to go anywhere where 

 he should be unable to see her. But the girl insisted that he should go 

 to the hospital, and when he came out of it cured she had disappeared. 

 I asked Meynell whether it was not a case of love rather than friend- 

 ship, but he said : ' No. Thompson told me that it was not so, that 

 in his condition there could have been no question of physical love ; he 

 was too constantly starved.' Thus Thompson was saved. He has 

 now for the last year been sent to Pantasaph, the Capuchin monastery, 

 where he is taken care of and kept away from drugs. He writes poetry 

 and prose and has no other occupation. Meynell will bring him here 

 one day. He showed us a fine poem of his still in manuscript, entitled 

 ' Amphicypellon,' which he will have printed privately." 



This was followed by a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon, which I 

 had long intended, and which I now accomplished, going by road with 

 my four horses, and taking my cousin Alfred Douglas with me, stop- 

 ping at several friends' houses on our way, Lady Hayter's at South 

 Hill, and Dr. Watney's at Buckholt, and Mr. Harvey's at Woodstock. 

 Then across the Wolds by Chipping Norton to Stanway, where we were 

 amongst relations, and so on, two days later, to Stratford. Of this I 

 write : 



' i^th Aug. — All the way to Stratford there are lovely villages, 

 houses of the seventeenth century built of stone, with stone roofs, peo- 

 ple harvesting magnificent crops, but it is a thing to remark that in all 

 this country, north of the Wiltshire and Oxfordshire downs there is 

 no single common, or bit of waste land where a traveller might pitch 

 his tent. Stratford itself is a very pretty town, standing on a fine, 

 clear river, with little that is modern about it, marred only by the 

 monstrous Shakespeare memorial, a Victorian building, perhaps the 

 most degraded in architecture of our graceless age. Here Alfred left 

 me in a hurry to return to London, while I stayed on fulfilling the ob- 

 ject of my pilgrimage by reading the Sonnets at the poet's tomb. 



" Sitting on the chancel steps and in full view of the monument with 

 the poet's portly bust and its inscription, a new light broke on me with 

 regard to his character, and I seemed to see him with less mystery, the 

 full fed prosperous citizen he doubtless was in his later years, affecting 

 gentility and honoured of his neighbours. The truth is there is nothing 

 really more romantic in a poet than in other men when seen at home. 

 The original cast of his face they show in Shakespeare's house, said to 

 have been taken after death, shows him a strong practical man, not over 

 refined, one who at the present day would have been a successful jour- 

 nalist and man of letters. The Shakespeare of the Sonnets does not 

 appear in this bust, rather the playwright and ready writer of dialogue 

 for the stage. I can imagine him in this year of grace, 1894, figuring 



