ilworth, of about the same age, and but a few miles away! Those walls are red, these are light gray, which recalls a remark I have somewhere seen, but whose truth I somewhat distrust, that English cathedrals are rather red than gray, varying from a yellowish cast at Canterbury, to a darker tint at Ely, and a pearly shade at Salisbury. Warwick, like many a feudal structure, has a Cæsar's Tower which never saw Cæsar's day. It held out successfully against the king in the civil war, and could hold out apparently to-day. The entrance is by a curved avenue, hewn deep through solid rock walls overgrown with ivy, and leading to a superb courtyard before the castle windows which is covered with a turf that would be the despair of an amateur gardener. Far down at the farther side lie the exquisite gardens, worthy of Windsor itself, and indeed even more beautiful; and in the conservatory stands the great Warwick Vase with the faultless lines which some forgotten Roman designed for Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. Our first view of the Avon was from the lofty windows in the steep outer wall of the castle; and the prospect of vale and river in this direction is too exquisite for words. We had

rung the door-bell of the castle, as if visiting an acquaintance, only that here the prerequisite for admittance was that the inmates should not be at home. A wordy commissionnaire escorted us through the vacant but noblyfurnished rooms (canvas-covered most of them at the time), and into the great hall, full of armor, with Cromwell's helmet and the Kingmaker's mace as its chief treasures. But details were as nothing to the thoroughly rounded impression into which all this grandeur (as Hawthorne says) "shapes out our indistinct ideas of the antique time."

It was on an afternoon all in a golden haze that we drove down to Stratford. The coachman would have taken us by the shorter cut away from the river, but we outwitted him, and turned to the left by Barford, and so past the lodge-gate of Charlecote Park, where we are told that wild young Will trespassed on the grounds of "Justice Shallow." The gate was locked; but the Elizabethan mansion, still occupied by the Lucy family, is in sight between the ancient trees; and the red deer were browsing quietly as then in the glade by the banks of the Avon. For appreciative and noble de

scriptions of the Shakespeare country one turns to the work of Americans, rather than to that of Englishmen. Hawthorne and Irving and Winter have here set a standard quite unsurpassed; and he who would glean after them, even in so fascinating a field, must expect to find his aftermath of little higher value than stubble. All travellers quote the old estimate that from Coventry to Stratford, or vice versa, is the loveliest drive in Great Britain. Perhaps I hardly know; let us say one of the loveliest, and none fairer. I think that parts of our coaching trip in Surrey were not excelled by it; and probably others can speak of equal beauties elsewhere. If one is to subject it to rigid analysis, there are parts of America which need not shrink from comparison. Trees and rivers are as beautiful in America as here; though highways are not so, nor are there, at delightfully frequent intervals, the little squaretowered stone churches embowered in ivy among the trees, or the peaceful hamlets which here one passes through, with little walled kitchen gardens of brick or stone, "all grown together like the cells of a honeycomb," and blossoming hawthorn hedges and wild flowers in profusion, roofs of tile, tiny latticed windows