grounds one sees in the old prints which illustrate, in our early English translations, the pastorals of Virgil and Theocritus. Next succeeds an extended plane of the richly-cultivated New Red Sandstone, which, occupying fully two-thirds of the entire landscape, forms the whole of what a painter would term its middle ground, and a little more. There rises over this plane, in the distance, a ridgy acclivity, much fretted by inequalities, composed of an Old Red Sandstone formation, coherent enough to have resisted those denuding agencies by which the softer deposits have been worn down; while the distant sea of blue hills, that seems as if toppling over it, has been scooped out of the Silurian formations, Upper and Lower, and demonstrates, in its commanding altitude and bold wavy outline, the still greater solidity of the materials which compose it.

The entire prospect-one of the finest in England, and eminently characteristic of what is best in English sceneryenabled me to understand what I had used to deem a peculiarity-in some measure a defect—in the landscapes of the poet Thomson. It must have often struck the Scotch reader, that in dealing with very extended prospects, he rather enumerates than describes. His pictures are often mere catalogues, in which single words stand for classes of objects, and in which the entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of vast extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. I cannot better illustrate my meaning than by his introductory description to the "Panegyric on Great Britain" :—

"Heavens! what a goodly prospect spreads around,

Of hills, and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires,
And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all
The stretching landscape into smoke decays!"

Now, the prospect from the hill at Hagely furnished me with the true explanation of this enumerative style. Measured along the horizon, it must, on the lowest estimate, be at least

fifty miles in longitudinal extent; measured laterally, from the spectator forwards, at least twenty. Some of the Welsh mountains which it includes are nearly thrice that distance; but then they are mere remote peaks, and the area at their bases not included in the prospect. The real area, however, must rather exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles; the fields into which it is laid out are small, scarcely averaging a square furlong in superficies; so that each square mile must contain about forty, and the entire landscape,—for all is fertility,—about forty thousand. With these there are commixed innumerable cottages, manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the surface is dimpled by unreckoned hollows; there fretted by uncounted mounds; all is amazing, overpowering multiplicity,—a multiplicity which neither the pen nor the pencil can adequately express; and so description, in even the hands of a master, sinks into mere enumeration. The picture becomes a catalogue; and all that genius can accomplish in the circumstances is just to do with its catalogue what Homer did with his,-dip it in poetry. I found, however, that the innumerable details of the prospect, and its want of strong leading features, served to dissipate and distract the mind, and to associate with the vast whole an idea of littleness, somewhat in the way that the minute hieroglyphics on an Egyptian obelisk serve to divert attention from the greatness of the general mass, or the nice integrity of its proportions; and I would have perhaps attributed the feeling to my Scotch training, had I not remembered that Addison, whose early prejudices must have been of an opposite cast, represents it as thoroughly natural. Our ideas of the great in nature he describes as derived from vastly-extended, not richly-occupied prospects. “Such,” he says, “are the prospects of an open champaign country, a vast uncultivated desert of huge heaps

of mountains, high rocks, and precipices, or a wide expanse of water. Such extensive and undetermined prospects," he adds, " are as pleasing to the fancy as the speculations of eternity or infinitude are to the understanding." Shenstone, too, is almost equally decided on the point; and certainly no writer has better claims to be heard on questions of this kind than the author of the Leasowes. "Grandeur and beauty," he remarks, " are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Large, unvariegated, simple objects have always the best pretensions to sublimity: a large mountain, whose sides are unvaried by art, is grander than one with infinite variety. Suppose it chequered with different-coloured clumps of wood, scars of rock, chalk-quarries, villages, and farm-houses,-you will perhaps have a more beautiful scene, but much less grand, than it was before. The hedge-row apple-trees in Herefordshire afford a lovely scenery at the time they are in blossom; but the prospect would be really grander did it consist of simple foliage. For the same reason, a large oak or beech in autumn is grander than the same in spring. The sprightly green is then obfuscated."

H

CHAPTER VII.

Hagely Parish Church.-The Sepulchral Marbles of the Lyttletons.-Epitaph on the Lady Lucy.-The Phrenological Doctrine of Hereditary Transmission; unsupported by History, save in a way in which History can be made to support anything.-Thomas Lord Lyttleton; his Moral Character a strange Contrast to that of his Father.-The Elder Lyttleton; his deathbed.-Aberrations of the Younger Lord.-Strange Ghost Story; Curious Modes of accounting for it.-Return to Stourbridge.Late Drive.-Hales Owen.

THE parish church of Hagely, an antique Gothic building of small size, much hidden in wood, lies at the foot of the hill, within a few hundred yards of the mansion-house. It was erected in the remote past, long ere the surrounding pleasuregrounds had any existence; but it has now come to be as thoroughly enclosed in them as the urns and obelisks of the rising ground above, and forms as picturesque an object as any urn or obelisk among them all. There is, however, a vast difference between jest and earnest; and the bona fide tombstones of the building inscribed with names of the dead, and its dark walls and pointed roof reared with direct reference to a life to which the present is but the brief vestibule, do not quite harmonize with temples of Theseus and the Muses, or political columns erected in honour of forgotten Princes of Wales, who quarrelled with their fathers, and were cherished, in conse

saw it

it unawares, and

quence, by the Opposition. As I came upon emerge from its dense thicket of trees, I felt as if, at an Egyptian feast, I had unwittingly brushed off the veil from the admonitory skeleton. The door lay open,-a few workmen were engaged in paving a portion of the floor, and repairing some breaches in a vault; and as I entered, one of their number was employed in shovelling, some five or six feet under the pavement, among the dust of the Lyttletons. The trees outside render the place exceedingly gloomy. "At Hagely," the too celebrated Thomas Lord Lyttleton is made to say, in the posthumous volume of Letters which bears his name, “there is a temple of Theseus, commonly called by the gardener the temple of Perseus, which stares you in the face wherever you go; while the temple of God, commonly called by the gardener the parish church, is so industriously hid by trees from without, that the pious matron can hardly read her Prayerbook within."* A brown twilight still lingers in the place: the lettered marbles along the walls glisten cold and sad in the gloom, as if invested by the dun Cimmerian atmosphere described by the old poet as brooding over the land of the dead,

"the dusky coasts

Peopled by shoals of visionary ghosts."

One straggling ray of sunshine, coloured by the stained glass of a narrow window, and dimmed yet more by the motty dust-reek raised by the workmen, fell on a small oblong tablet,

* This volume, though it contains a good many authentic anecdotes of the younger Lyttleton, is not genuine. It was written, shortly after his Lordship's death, when the public curiosity regarding him was much excited, by a person of resembling character,-Duke Combe, a man who, after dissipating in early life a large fortune, lived precariously for many years as a clever but rather unscrupulous author of all work, and succeeded in producing, when turned of seventy, a well-known volume,-" Dr Syntax's Tour in Search of the Picturesque."