the basin of the Dudley coal-field, and the parallel line of trap hills that stretches away amid the New Red Sandstone. I have described the lines as parallel, but, like the outstretched sides of a parallel-ruler, not opposite. There joins on, however, to the Silurian line, like a prolongation of one of the right lines of the mathematician indicated by dots, an extension of the chain, not Silurian, which consists of eminences of a flatter and humbler character than either the Wren's Nest or the Castle Hill, and which runs opposite to the trap chain for several miles. One of these supplementary eminences - the one adjoining the Castle Hill — is composed of the trap to which the entire line owes its elevation; and a tall, cairn-like group of apparent boulders, that seem as if they had been piled up by giants, but are mere components of a partially disintegrated projection from the rock below, occupies its summit. In the flat hill directly beyond it, though the trap does not appear, it has tilted up the Lower Coal Measures, amid the surrounding New Red Sandstone, saddlewise on its back; the strata shelve downwards on both sides from the anticlinal line atop, like the opposite sides of a roof from the ridge; and the entire hill, to use a still humbler illustration, resembles a huge blister in new plaster, formed by the expansion of some fragment of unslaked lime in the ground-coating beneath. Now, it is with this hill of the Lower Coal Measures this huge blister of millstone grit — that we have chiefly to do.

Let the reader imagine it of soft swelling outline, and ample base, with the singularly picturesque trap range full in front, some four miles away, and a fair rural valley lying between. Let him further imagine the side of the hill furrowed by a transverse valley, opening at right angles into the great front valley, and separating atop into two forks, or branches, that run up, shallowing as they go, to near the hill-top. Let him, in

short, imagine this great valley a broad right line, and tne transverse forked valley a gigantic letter Y resting on it. And this forked valley on the hill-side this gigantic letter Yis the Leasowes. The picturesqueness of such a position can be easily appreciated. The forked valley, from head to gorge, is a reclining valley, partaking along its bottom of the slope of the eminence on which it lies, and thus possessing, what is by no means common among the valleys of England, true downhill water-courses, along which the gathered waters may leap in a chain of cascades; and commanding, in its upper recesses, though embraced and sheltered on every side by the surrounding hill, extended prospects of the country below. It thus combines the scenic advantages of both hollow and rising ground,

the quiet seclusion of the one, and the expansive landscapes of the other. The broad valley into which it opens is rich and well wooded. Just in front of the opening we see a fine sheet of water, about twenty acres in extent, the work of the monks; immediately to the right stand the ruins of the abbey; immediately to the left, the pretty compact town of Hales Owen lies grouped around its fine old church and spire; a range of green swelling eminences rises beyond; beyond these, fainter in the distance, and considerably bolder in outline, ascends the loftier range of the trap hills, one of the number roughened by the tufted woods, and crowned by the obelisk at Hagley; and, over all, blue and shadowy on the far horizon, sweeps the undulating line of the mountains of Cambria. Such is the character of the grounds which poor Shenstone set himself to convert into an earthly paradise, and such the outline of the surrounding landscape. But to my hard anatomy of the scene I must add the poet's own elegant filling up :

"Romantic scenes of pendent hills,

And verdant vales and falling rills,

And mossy banks the fields adorn,
Where Damon, simple swain, was born.
The Dryads reared a shady grove,
Where such as think, and such as love,
Might safely sigh their summer's day,
Or muse their silent hours away.
The Oreads liked the climate well,
And taught the level plains to swell
In verdant mounds, from whence the eye
Might all their larger works descry.
The Naiads poured their urns around
From nodding rocks o'er vales profound;
They formed their streams to please the view,
And bade them wind as serpents do;

And having shown them where to stray,
Threw little pebbles in their way."

I got ready permission at the house of the Leasowes - a modern building erected on the site of that in which Shenstone resided to walk over the grounds; and striking upwards. directly along the centre of the angular tongue of land which divides the two forks of the valley, I gained the top of the hill, purposing to descend to where the gorge opens below along the one fork, and to reäscend along the other. On the hill-top, a single field's breadth beyond the precincts of the Leasowes, I met a tall middle-aged female, whose complexion, much embrowned by the sun, betrayed the frequent worker in fields, and her stiff angularity of figure, the state of single blessedness, and "maiden meditation, fancy free," which Shakspeare complimented in Elizabeth. I greeted her with fair good day, and asked her whether the very fine grounds below were not the Leasowes? or, as I now learned to pronounce the word, Lisos,

- for when I gave it its long Scotch sound, no one in the neighborhood seemed to know what place I meant. "Ah, yes," said she, "the Lisos!- they were much thought of long ago in Squire Shenstone's days; but they are all ruinated now;

and, except on Sundays, when the nailer lads get into them, when they can, few people come their way. Squire Shenstone was a poet," she added, "and died for love." This was not quite the case: the Squire, who might have married his Phillis had he not been afraid to incur the expense of a wife, died of a putrid fever at the sober age of forty-nine; but there would have been little wit in substituting a worse for a better story, and so I received without challenge the information of the spinster. In descending, I took the right-hand branch of the valley, which is considerably more extended than that to the left. A low cliff, composed of the yellow gritty sandstone of the Lower Coal Measures, and much overhung by stunted alder and hazel bushes, stands near the head of the ravine, just where the Leasowes begin; and directly out of the middle of the cliff, some three or four feet from its base, there comes leaping to the light, as out of the smitten rock in the wilderness, a clear and copious spring, - one of the "health-bestowing" fountains,

"All bordered with moss,

Where the harebells and violets grew."

Alas! moss, and harebells, and violets, were gone, with the path which had once led to the spot, and the seat which had once fronted it; the waters fell dead and dull into a quagmire, like young human life leaping out of unconscious darkness into misery, and then stole away through a boggy strip of rank grass and rushes, along a line of scraggy alders. All was changed, save the full-volumed spring, and it,

"A thousand and a thousand years,

'T will flow as now it flows."

CHAPTER IX.

Detour. The Leasowes deteriorated wherever the Poet had built, and improved wherever he had planted. View from the Hanging Wood. Stratagem of the Island Screen. - Virgil's Grave. Mound of the Hales Owen and Birmingham Canal; its sad Interference with Shenstone's Poetic Description of the Infancy of the Stour. - Vanished Cascade and Root-house. - Somerville's Urn. - "To all Friends round the Wrekin."— River Scenery of the Leasowes; their great Variety. Peculiar Arts of the Poet; his Vistas, when seen from the wrong end, Realizations of Hogarth's Caricature. — Shenstone the greatest of Landscape Gardeners. — Estimate of Johnson. - Goldsmith's History of the Leasowes; their after History.

THE water creeps downwards from where it leaps from the rock, to form a chain of artificial lakes, with which the bottom of the dell is occupied, and which are threaded by the watercourse, like a necklace of birds' eggs strung upon a cord.

Ere I struck down on the upper lake, however, I had to make a detour of a few hundred yards to the right, to see what Dodsley describes as one of the finest scenes furnished by the Leasowes, —a steep terrace, commanding a noble prospect, a hanging wood, an undulating pathway over uneven ground, that rises and falls like a snake in motion, a monumental tablet, three rustic seats, and a temple dedicated to Pan. The happy corner which the poet had thus stuck over with so much bravery is naturally a very pretty one.

The hill-side, so gentle

in most of its slopes, descends for about eighty feet, —— nearly at right angles with the forked valley, and nearly parallel to the great valley in front, as if it were a giant wave on the eve of breaking; and it is on this steep rampart-like declivity,