With sylvan Jed, thy tributary brook),

To where the north's inflated tempest foams
O'er Orcas or Betubium's highest peak."

Shenstone's recess, true to his character, excludes, as I have said, the distant landscape. It is, however, an exceedingly pleasing, though somewhat gloomy spot, shut up on every side by the encircling hills,—here feathered with wood, there projecting its soft undulating line of green against the blue sky; while, occupying the bottom of the hollow, there is a small sheltered lake, with a row of delicate limes, that dip their pendent branches in the water.

Yet a little further on, we descend into an opener and more varied inflection in the hilly region of Hagely, which is said to have been as favourite a haunt of Pope as the two others of Thomson and Shenstone, and in which an elaboratelycarved urn and pedestal records Lyttleton's estimate of his powers as a writer, and his aims as a moralist: "the sweetest and most elegant," says the inscription, " of English poets, the severest chastiser of vice, and the most persuasive teacher of wisdom." Lyttleton and Pope seem to have formed mutually high estimates of each other's powers and character. In the "Satires," we find three several compliments paid to the "young Lyttleton,”

"Still true to virtue, and as warm as true."

And when, in the House of Commons, one of Sir Robert Walpole's supporters accused the rising statesman of being the facile associate of an "unjust and licentious lampooner,"for, as Sir Robert's administration was corrupt and the satirist severe, such was Pope's character in the estimate of the ministerial majority, he rose indignantly to say, "that he deemed it an honour to be received into the familiarity of so great a poet." But the titled paid a still higher, though perhaps un

designed compliment, to the untitled author, by making his own poetry the very echo of his. Among the English literati of the last century, there is no other writer of equal general ability, so decidedly, I had almost said so servilely, of the school of Pope, as Lyttleton. The little crooked man, during the last thirteen years of his life, was a frequent visitor at Hagely; and it is still a tradition in the neighbourhood, that in the hollow in which his urn has been erected, he particularly delighted. He forgot Cibber, Sporus, and Lord Fanny ; -flung up with much glee his poor shapeless legs, thickened by three pairs of stockings apiece, and far from thick after all; and called the place "his own ground." It certainly does no discredit to the taste that originated the gorgeous though somewhat indistinct descriptions of "Windsor Forest." There are noble oaks on every side,-some in their vigorous middle-age, invested with that "rough grandeur of bark, and wide protection of bough," which Shenstone so admired,some far gone in years, mossy and time-shattered, with white skeleton branches atop, and fantastic scraggy roots projecting, snake-like, from the broken ground below. An irregular open space in front permits the eye to range over the distant prospect; a small clump of trees rises so near the urn, that, when the breeze blows, the slim branch-tips lash it as if in sport; while a clear and copious spring comes bubbling out at its base.

I passed somewhat hurriedly through glens and glades,over rising knolls and wooded slopes,-saw statues and obelisks, temples and hermitages, and lingered a while, ere I again descended to the lawn, on the top of an eminence which commands one of the richest prospects I had yet seen. The landscape from this point,-by far too fine to have escaped the eye of Thomson,-is described in the "Seasons ;" and the

hill which overlooks it represented as terminating one of the walks of Lyttleton and his Lady,—that Lady Lucy whose early death formed, but a few years after, the subject of the monody so well known and so much admired in the days of our greatgrandmothers:

"The beauteous bride,

To whose fair memory flowed the tenderest tear
That ever trembled o'er the female bier."

It is not in every nobleman's park one can have the opportunity of comparing such a picture as that in the "Seasons" with such an original. I quote, with the description, the preliminary lines, so vividly suggestive of the short-lived happiness of Lyttleton :

"Perhaps thy loved Lucinda shares thy walk,

With soul to thine attuned. Then Nature all
Wears to the lover's eye a look of love;
And all the tumult of a guilty world,
Toss'd by the generous passions, sinks away;
The tender heart is animated peace;

And, as it pours its copious treasures forth
In various converse, softening every theme,
You, frequent pausing, turn, and from her eyes,—
Where meekened sense, and amiable grace,
And lively sweetness dwell,-enraptured drink
That nameless spirit of ethereal joy,—
Unutterable happiness!—which love
Alone bestows, and on a favoured few.

Meantime you gain the height from whose fair brow
The bursting prospect spreads immense around,
And, snatched o'er hill and dale, and wood and lawn,
And verdant field, and darkening heath between,

And villages embosomed soft in trees,

And spiry towns by surging columns marked

Of household smoke, your eye excursive roams,

Wide stretching from the Hall, in whose kind haunt

The Hospitable Genius lingers still,

To where the broken landscape, by degrees

Ascending, roughens into rigid hills,

O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds
That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise."

As I called up the passage on the spot where, as a yet unformed conception, it had first arisen in the mind of the writer, I felt the full force of the contrast presented by the two pictures which it exhibits,—the picture of a high but evanescent human happiness, whose sun had set in the grave nearly a century ago; and the picture of the enduring landscape, unaltered in a single feature since Lyttleton and his lady had last gazed on it from the hill-top. "Alas!" exclaimed the contemplative Mirza, "man is but a shadow, and life a dream." A natural enough reflection, surely,-greatly more so, I am afraid, than the solace sought by the poet Beattie under its depressing influence, in a resembling evanescence and instability in all nature and in all history.

"Art, empire, earth itself, to change are doomed:
Earthquakes have raised to heaven the humble vale,
And gulfs the mountain's mighty mass entombed,

And where the Atlantic rolls, wide continents have bloomed.

All very true,— -none the less so, certainly, from the circumstance of its being truth in advance of the age in which the poet wrote; but it is equally and still more emphatically true, that the instability of a mountain or continent is a thing to be contrasted, not compared, with the instability of the light clouds, that, when the winds are up, float over it, and fling athwart the landscape their breadth of fitful shadow. And, alas! what is human life? "even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." There need be no lack of mementos to remind one, as I was this day reminded by the passage in Thomson, what a transitory shadow man is, compared with the old earth which he inhabits, and how fleeting his pleasures, contrasted with the stable features of the scenes amid which for a few brief seasons he enjoys them.

The landscape from the hill-top could not have been seen to greater advantage, had I waited for months to pick out their

best day. The far Welsh mountains, though lessened in the distance to a mere azure ripple, that but barely roughened the line of the horizon, were as distinctly defined in the clear atmosphere as the green luxuriant leafage in the foreground, which harmonized so exquisitely with their blue. The line extended from far beyond the Shropshire Wrekin on the right, to far beyond the Worcestershire Malverns on the left. Immediately at the foot of the eminence stands the mansionhouse of Hagely,-—the "Hall," where the "hospitable genius lingers still;"-a large, solid-looking, but somewhat sombre edifice, built of the New Red Sandstone on which it rests, and which too much reminds one, from its peculiar tint, of the prevailing red brick of the district. There was a gay party of cricket-players on the lawn. In front, Lord Lyttleton, a finelooking young man, stripped of coat and waistcoat, with his bright white shirt puffed out at his waistband, was sending the ball far beyond bound, amid an eager party, consisting chiefly, as the gardener informed me, of tenants and tenants' sons; and the cheering sounds of shout and laughter came merrily up the hill. Beyond the house rises a noble screen of wood, composed of some of the tallest and finest trees in England. Here and there the picturesque cottages of the neighbouring village peep through; and then, on and away to the far horizon, there spreads out a close-wrought net-work of fenced fields, that, as it recedes from the eye, seems to close its meshes, as if drawn awry by the hand, till at length the openings can be no longer seen, and the hedge-rows lie piled on each other in one bosky mass. The geologic framework of the scene is various, and each distinct portion bears its own marked characteristics. In the foreground we have the undulating trap, so suited to remind one, by the picturesque abruptnesses of its outlines, of those somewhat fantastic back