parque ornée-I suppose, approaching about as near to a garden as the park at Hagley. I give my place the title of a forme ornée." Still more significant is the frightful confession embodied in the following passage, written at a still earlier period:

"Every little uneasiness is sufficient to introduce a whole train of melancholy considerations, and to make me utterly dissatisfied with the life I now lead, and the life which I foresee I shall lead. I am angry, I am angry, and envious, and dejected, and frantic, and disregard all present things, just as becomes a madman to do. I am infinitely pleased, though it is a gloomy joy, with the application of Dr. Swift's complaint, that he is forced to die in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole." Amusement becomes, I am afraid, not very amusing when rendered the exclusive business of one's life. All that seems necessary in order to render fallen Adams thoroughly miserable, is just to place them in paradises, and, debarring them serious occupation, to give them full permission to make themselves as happy as they can. It was more in mercy than in wrath that the first father of the race, after his nature had become contaminated by the fall, was driven out of Eden. Well would it have been for poor Shenstone had the angel of stern necessity driven him also, early in the day, out of his paradise, and sent him into the work-day world beyond, to eat bread in the sweat of his brow. I quitted the Leasowes in no degree saddened by the consideration that I had been a hard-working man all my life, from boyhood till now; and that the future, in this respect, held out to me no brighter prospect than I had realized in the past.

When passing through York, I had picked up at a stall a good old copy of the poems of Philips-John, not Ambrose ; and in railway carriages and on coach-tops I had revived my acquaintance, broken off for twenty years, with "Cider, a Poem," "Blenheim," and the "Splendid Shilling;" and now, in due improvement of the lessons of so judicious a master, I resolved,

when taking my ease in the "Plume of Feathers," that, for one evening at least, I should drink only cider.

"Fallacious drink! ye honest men, beware,

Nor trust in smoothness; the third circling glass

Suffices virtue."

The cider of the "Plume" was, however, scarce so potent as that sung by Philips. I took the third permitted glass, after a dinner transposed far into the evening by the explorations of the day, without experiencing a very great deal of the exhilarating feeling described

"Or lightened heart,

Dilate with fervent joy, or eager soul,

Keen to pursue the sparkling glass amain."

Nor was the temptation urgent to make up in quantity what was wanting in strength: "the third circling glass sufficed virtue." Here, as at the inns in which I had baited, both at Durham and York, I was struck by the contrast which many of the older English dwelling-houses furnish to our Scotch ones of the same age. In Scotland the walls are of solid stone-work, thick and massy, with broad-headed, champer-edged rybats, and ponderous soles and lintels, selvedging the opening; whereas the wood-work of the interior is almost always slight and fragile, formed of spongy deal or moth-hollowed fir rafters. After the lapse of little more than a century, there are few of our Scotch floors on which it is particularly safe to tread. In the older English dwellings we generally find a reverse condition of things the outsides, constructed of slim brick-work, have a toy-like fragility about them; whereas inside we find strong oaken beams, and long-enduring floors and stairs of glossy wainscot. We of course at once recognise the great scarcity of good building-stone in the one country, and of well-grown forest-wood in the other, as the original and adequate cause of the peculiarity. Their dwelling-houses seem to have had different starting-points;

those of the one being true lineal descendants of the old Pict's house, complete from foundation to summit without woodthose of the other, lineal descendants of the old forest-dwellings of the Saxon, formed ship-like in their unwieldy oaken strength, without stone. Wood to the one class was a mere subordinate accident, of late introduction-stone to the other; and were I sent to seek out the half-way representatives of each, I would find those of England in its ancient beam-formed houses of the days of Elizabeth, in which only angular interstices in the walls are occupied by brick, and those of Scotland in its time-shattered fortalices of the type of the old Castle of Craig-house, in Rossshire, where floor rises above floor in solid masonry, or of the type of Borthwick Castle, near Edinburgh, stone from foundation to ridge.

I spent some time next morning in sauntering among the cross lanes of Hales Owen-now and then casting vague guesses, from the appearance of the humbler houses-for what else lies within reach of the passing traveller?-regarding the character and condition of the inmates; and now and then looking in through open windows and doors at the nailers, male and female, engaged amid their intermittent hammerings and fitful showers of sparks. As might be anticipated of a profession fixed very much down to the corner of a country, and so domestic in its nature, nail-making is hereditary in the families that pursue it. The nailers of Hales Owen at the present day are the descendants of the nailers who, as Shenstone tells us, were so intelligent in the cause of Hanover during the outburst of 1745. "The rebellion," he says, in writing a friend just two months after the battle of Prestonpans, " is, as you may guess, the subject of all conversation. Every individual nailer here takes in a newspaper, and talks as familiarly of kings and princes as ever Master Shallow did of John of Gaunt." Scarcely a century had gone by, and I now found, from snatches of conversation caught in the passing, that the nailers of Hales Owen were

interested in the five points of the Charter and the success of the League, and thought much more of what they deemed their own rights, than of the rights of either monarchs de facto or monarchs de jure. There was a nail manufactory established about seventy years ago at Cromarty, in the north of Scotland, which reared not a few Scotch nailers; but they seemed to compete on unequal terms with those in England; and after a protracted struggle of rather more than half a century, the weaker went to the wall, and the Cromarty nail-works ceased. There is now only a single nail-forge in the town; and this last of the forges is used for other purposes than the originally intended one. I found in Hales Owen the true key to the failure of the Cromarty manufactory, and saw how it had come to be undersold in its own northern field by the nail-merchants of Birmingham. The Cromarty nailer wrought alone, or, if a family man, assisted but by his sons; whereas the Hales Owen nailer had, with the assistance of his sons, that of his wife, daughters, and maiden sisters to boot; and so he bore down the Scotchman in the contest, through the aid lent him by his female auxiliaries, in the way his blue painted ancestors, backed by not only all the fighting men, but also all the fighting women of the district, used to bear down the enemy.

In passing a small bookseller's shop, in which I had marked on the counter an array of second-hand books, I dropped in to see whether I might not procure a cheap edition of Shenstone, with Dodsley's description, and found a tidy little woman behind the counter, who would fain, if she could, have suited me to my mind. But she had no copy of Shenstone, nor had she ever heard of Shenstone. She well knew Samuel Salt the Hales Owen teetotal poet, and could sell me a copy of his works; but of the elder poet of Hales Owen she knew nothing. I bought from her two of Samuel's broadsheets-the one a wrathful satire on the community of Odd-Fellows; the other, "A Poem on Drunkenness."

"O how silly is the drinker!

Swallowing what he does not need!
In the eyes of every thinker

He must be a fool indeed.
How he hurts his constitution!
All for want of resolution

Not to yield to drink at first!"

Such is the verse known within a mile of the Leasowes, while that of their poet is forgotten. Alas for fame! Poor Shenstone could scarce have anticipated that the thin Castalia of teetotalism was to break upon his writings, like a mill-dam during a thunderstorm, to cover up all their elegancies from the sight where they should be best known, and present instead but a turbid expanse of water.

I got access to the parish church, a fine old pile of red sandstone, with dates, in some of its more ancient portions, beyond the Norman conquest. One gorgeous marble, sentinelled by figures of Benevolence, Fidelity, and Major Halliday, all very classic and fine, and which cost, as my guide informed me, a thousand pounds, failed greatly to excite my interest: I at least found that a simple pedestal in front of it, surmounted by a plain urn, impressed me more. The pedestal bears a rather lengthy inscription, in the earlier half of which there is a good deal of verbiage; but in the concluding half the writer seems to have said nearly what he intended to say.

The Leasowes engaged me for the remainder of the day; and I again walked over them a few weeks later in the season, when the leaf hung yellow on the tree, and the films of grey silky gossamer went sailing along the opener glades in the clear frosty air. But I have already recorded my impressions of the place,