I returned to Stourbridge, where I baited to get some refreshment, and wait the coach for Hales Owen, in an oldfashioned inn, with its overhanging gable of mingled beam and brick fronting the street, and its some six or seven rooms on the ground-floor, opening in succession into each other like the rattles of a snake's tail. Three solid-looking Englishmen, two of them farmers evidently, the third a commercial traveller, had just sat down to a late dinner; and, on the recommendation of the hostess, I drew in a chair and formed one of the party. A fourth Englishman, much a coxcomb apparently, greatly excited, and armed with a whip, was pacing the floor of the room in which we sat; while in an outer room of somewhat inferior pretensions, there was another Englishman, also armed with a whip, and also pacing the floor; and the two, each from his own apartment, were prosecuting an angry and noisy dispute together. The outer-room Englishman was a groom, inner-room Englishman deemed himself a gentleman: They had both got at the races into the same gig, the property of the innkeeper, and quarrelled about who should drive. The groom had argued his claim on the plea that he was the better driver of the two, and that driving along a crowded race-ground was difficult and dangerous: the coxcomb had insisted on driving, because he liked to drive, and because, he said, he didn't choose to be driven in such a public place by a groom. The groom retorted, that though a groom, he was as good a man as he was, for all his fine coat, perhaps a better man; and so the

the

"For a

sorrows, in the form of a nightingale, over the tomb of Zuleika. belief that the souls of the dead inhabit birds," says the poet, 66 we need not travel to the east: Lord Lyttelton's ghost story, and many other instances, bring this superstition nearer home." The Lord Westcote, Lord Lyttelton's uncle, who related the story to Johnson, succeeded to the title and estate, and the present Lord Lyttelton is, I believe. Lord Westcote's grandson.

controversy went on, till the three solid Englishmen, worried at their meal by the incessant noise, interfered in behalf of the groom. "Thou bee'st a foolish man," said one of the farmers to the coxcomb; "better to be driven by a groom than to wrangle with a groom."—"Foolish man!" iterated the other farmer, "thou's would have broken the groom's neck and thee's own." -"Ashamed," exclaimed the commercial gentleman, "to be driven by a groom, at such a time as this, the groom a good driver too, and, for all that appears, an honest man! I don't think any one should be ashamed to be driven by a groom; I know I would n't."- "The first un-English thing I have seen in England," said I: "I thought you English people were above littlenesses of that kind."-"Thank you, gentlemen, thank you," exclaimed the voice from the other room; "I was sure I was right. He's a low fellow: I would box him for sixpence." The coxcomb muttered something between his teeth, and stalked into the apartment beyond that in which we sat; the commercial gentleman thrust his tongue into his cheek as he disappeared; and we were left to enjoy our pudding in peace. It was late and long this evening ere the six o'clock coach started for Hales Owen. At length, a little after eight, when the night had fairly set in, and crowds on crowds had come pouring into the town from the distant race-ground, away it rumbled, stuck over with a double fare of passengers, jammed on before and behind, and occupying to the full every square foot atop.

Though sorely be-elbowed and be-kneed, we had a jovial ride. England was merry England this evening in the neighborhood of Stourbridge. We passed cart, and wagon, and gig, parties afoot and parties on horseback; and there was a free interchange of gibe and joke, hail and halloo. There seemed to be more hearty mirth and less intemperance afloat

than I have seen in Scotland on such occasions; but the whole appeared just foolish enough notwithstanding; and a knot of low blackguard gamblers, who were stuck together on the coach front, and conversing with desperate profanity on who they did and by whom they were done, showed me that to the foolish there was added not a little of the bad. The Hales Owen road runs for the greater part of the way within the southern edge of the Dudley coal-field, and, lying high, commands a downward view of its multitudinous workings for many miles. It presented from the coach-top this evening a greatly more magnificent prospect than by day. The dark space, -a nether firmament, for its gray wasteful desolation had disappeared with the vanished daylight, was spangled bright by innumer able furnaces, twinkling and star-like in the distance, but flaring like comets in the foreground. We could hear the roaring of the nearer fires; here a tall chimney or massy engine peered doubtfully out, in dusky umber, from amid the blackness; while the heavens above glowed in the reflected light, a bloodred. It was near ten o'clock ere I reached the inn at Hales Owen; and the room into which I was shown received, for more than an hour after, continual relays of guests from the races, who turned in for a few minutes to drink gin and water, and then took the road again. They were full of their backings and their bets, and animated by a life-and-death eagerness to demonstrate how Sir John's gelding had distanced my Lord's

mare.

CHAPTER VIII.

Abbotsford and the Leasowes. The one place naturally suggestive of the other. Shenstone. The Leasowes his most elaborate Composition. The English Squire and his Mill. - Hales Owen Abbey; interesting, as the Subject of one of Shenstone's larger Poems. - The old anti-Popish Feeling of England well exemplified by the Fact. Its Origin and History. - Decline. - Infidelity naturally favorable to the Resuscitation and Reproduction of Popery. The two Naileresses. Cecilia and Delia. Skeleton Description of the Leasowes. - Poetic filling up. The Spinster. - The Fountain.

I HAD come to Hales Owen to visit the Leasowes, the patrimony which poor Shenstone converted into an exquisite poem, written on the green face of nature, with groves and thickets, cascades and lakes, urns, temples, and hermitages, for the characters. In passing southwards, I had seen from the coach-top the woods of Abbotsford, with the turrets of the mansion-house peeping over; and the idea of the trim-kept desolation of the place suggested to me that of the paradise which the poet of Hales Owen had, like Sir Walter, ruined himself to produce, that it, too, might become a melancholy desert. Nor was the association which linked Abbotsford to the Leasowes by any means arbitrary: the one place may be regarded as having in some degree arisen out of the other. "It had been," says Sir Walter, in one of his prefaces, "an early wish of mine to connect myself with my mother earth, and prosecute those experiments by which a species of creative power is exercised over the face of nature. I can trace, even to childhood, a pleasure derived from Dodsley's account of Shenstone's Leasowes; and I envied the poet much more for the pleasure of accomplishing

the objects detailed in his friend's sketch of his grounds, ti an for the possession of pipe, crook, flock, and Phillis to boot." Alas!

"Prudence sings to thoughtless bards in vain."

In contemplating the course of Shenstone, Sir Walter could see but the pleasures of the voyage, without taking note of the shipwreck in which it terminated; and so, in pursuing identically the same track, he struck on identically the same shoal.

I had been intimate from a very immature period with the writings of Shenstone. There are poets that require to be known early in life, if one would know them at all to advantage. They give real pleasure, but it is a pleasure which the mind outgrows; they belong to the "comfit and confectionaryplum" class; and Shenstone is decidedly one of the number. No mind ever outgrew the "Task," or the "Paradise Lost," or the dramas of Shakspeare, or the poems of Burns: they please in early youth; and, like the nature which they embody and portray, they continue to please in age. But the Langhorns, Wartons, Kirke Whites, Shelleys, Keatses, shall I venture to say it? Byrons, are flowers of the spring, and bear to the sobered eye, if one misses acquainting one's self with them at the proper season, very much the aspect of those herbarium specimens of the botanist, which we may examine as matters of curiosity, but scarce contemplate, as we do the fresh uncropped flowers, with all their exquisite tints and delicious odors vital within them, -as the objects of an affectionate regard. Shenstone was one of the ten or twelve English poets whose works I had the happiness of possessing when a boy, and which, during some eight or ten years of my life,- for books at the time formed luxuries of difficult procurement, and I had to make the most of those I had, I used to read over and over at the rate of about twice in the twelvemonth. And every time I read the poems, I was sure also to read Dodsley's appended