instructed people pressed outwards beyond the narrow bounds of their country, and rose into offices of trust and importance in all the nations of the world. There were no Societies for

the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in those days. But the Sabbath was kept holy: it was a day from which every dissipating frivolity was excluded by a stern sense of duty. The popular mind, with weight imparted to it by its religious earnestness, and direction by the pulpit addresses of the day, expatiated on matters of grave import, of which the tendency was to concentrate and strengthen, not scatter and weaken, the faculties; and the secular cogitations of the week came to bear, in consequence, a Sabbath-day stamp of depth and solidity. The one day in the seven struck the tone for the other six. Our modern apostles of popular instruction rear up no such men among the masses as were developed under the Sabbatarian system in Scotland. Their aptest pupils prove but the loquacious gabbers of their respective workshops, shallow superficialists, that bear on the surface of their minds a thin diffusion of ill-remembered facts and crude theories; and rarely indeed do we see them rising in the scale of society: they become Socialists by hundreds, and Chartists by thousands, and get no higher. The disseminator of mere useful knowledge takes aim at the popular ignorance; but his inept and unscientific gunnery does not include in its calculations the parabolic curve of man's spiritual nature; and so, aiming direct at the mark, he aims too low, and the charge falls short.

CHAPTER IV.

Quit Manchester for Wolverhampton. - Scenery of the New Red Sandstone; apparent Repetition of Pattern. The frequent Marshes of England; curiously represented in the National Literature; Influence on the National Superstitions. - Wolverhampton. - Peculiar Aspect of the Dudley Coal-field; striking Passage in its History. The Rise of Birmingham into a great Manufacturing Town an Effect of the Development of its Mineral Treasures. - Upper Ludlow Deposit; Aymestry Limestone; both Deposits of peculiar Interest to the Scotch Geologist. -The Lingula Lewisii and Terebratula Wilsoni. General Resemblance of the Silurian Fossils to those of the Mountain Limestone. First-born of the Vertebrata yet known. - Order of Creation. — The Wren's Nest. - Fossils of the Wenlock Limestone; in a State of beautiful Keeping. — Anecdote. — Asaphus Caudatus ; common, it would seem, to both the Silurian and Carboniferous Rocks. - Limestone Miners. Noble Gallery excavated in the Hill.

I QUITTED Manchester by the morning train, and travelled through a flat New Red Sandstone district, on the Birmingham Railway, for about eighty miles. One finds quite the sort of country here for travelling over by steam. If one misses seeing a bit of landscape, as the carriages hurry through, and the objects in the foreground look dim and indistinct, and all in motion, as if seen through water, it is sure to be repeated in the course of a few miles, and again and again repeated. I was reminded, as we hurried along, and the flat country opened and spread out on either side, of webs of carpet stuff nailed down to pieces of boarding, and presenting, at regular distances, returns of the same rich pattern. Red detached houses stand up amid the green fields; little bits of brick villages lie grouped beside cross roads; irregular patches of wood occupy nooks

and corners; lines of poplars rise tall and taper amid straggling cottages; and then, having once passed houses, villages, and woods, we seem as if we had to pass them again and again; the red detached houses return, the bits of villages, the woody nooks and corners, the lines of taper poplars amid the cottages; and thus the repetitions of the pattern run on and on.

In a country so level as England there must be many a swampy hollow furnished with no outlet to its waters. The bogs and marshes of the midland and southern counties formed of old the natural strongholds, in which the people, in times of extremity, sheltered from the invader. Alfred's main refuge, when all others failed him, was a bog of Somersetshire. When passing this morning along frequent fields of osiers and widespread marshes, bristling with thickets of bulrushes and reeds, I was led to think of what had never before occurred to me, the considerable amount of imagery and description which the poets of England have transferred from scenery of this character into the national literature. There is in English verse much whispering of osiers beside silent streams, and much waving of sedges over quiet waters. Shakspeare has his exquisite pictures of slow-gliding currents,

'Making sweet music with the enamelled stones,
And giving gentle kisses to each sedge

They overtake in their lone pilgrimage.”

And Milton, too, of water-nymphs

"Sitting by rushy fringed bank,

Where grows the willow and the osier dank;

"Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting

The loose train of their amber-dropping hair

or of "sighing sent," by the "parting genius,"

"From haunted spring and dale,

Edged with poplar pale."

We find occasional glimpses of the same dank scenery in Collins, Cowper, and Crabbe; and very frequent ones, in our own times, in the graphic descriptions of Alfred Tennyson and Thomas Hood.

"One willow o'er the river wept,

And shook the wave as the wind did sigh ;
Above in the wind sported the swallow,
Chasing itself at its own wild will ;

And far through the marish green, and still,

The tangled water-courses slept,

Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.”

Not less striking is at least one of the pictures drawn by

Hood:

"The coot was swimming in the reedy pool,
Beside the water-hen, so soon affrighted;
And in the weedy moat, the heron, fond
Of solitude, alighted;

The moping heron, motionless and stiff,
That on a stone as silently and stilly
Stood, an apparent sentinel, as if
To guard the water-lily."

The watery flats of the country have had also their influence on the popular superstitions. The delusive tapers that spring up a-nights from stagnant bogs and fens must have been of frequent appearance in the more marshy districts of England; and we accordingly find, that of all the national goblins, the goblin of the wandering night-fire, whether recognized as Jack-of-the-Lantern or Will-of-the-Wisp, was one of the best

known.

"She was pinched and pulled, she said,

And he by friar's lantern led.”

Or, as the exquisite poet who produced this couplet more elaborately describes the apparition in his "Paradise Lost,"

"A wandering fire,

Compact of unctuous vapor, which the night

Kindles through agitation to a flame,

Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends,

Hovering and blazing with delusive light,

Leading the amazed night-wanderer from his way

Through bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool,
There swallowed up and lost, from succor far.”

Scarce inferior to even the description of Milton is that of
Collins:

"Ah, homely swains! your homeward steps ne'er lose ;
Let not dank Will mislead you on the heath :
Dancing in mirky night, o'er fen and lake,

He glows, to draw you downward to your death,
In his bewitched, low, marshy willow-brake.

What though, far off from some dark dell espied,
His glimmering mazes cheer the excursive sight?
Yet turn, ye wanderers, turn your steps aside,
Nor trust the guidance of that faithless light;

For watchful, lurking, 'mid the unrustling reed,

At these mirk hours, the wily monster lies,

And listens oft to hear the passing steed,

And frequent round him rolls his sullen eyes,

If chance his savage wrath may some weak wretch surprise.”

One soon wearies of the monotony of railway travelling, — of hurrying through a country, stage after stage, without incident or advantage; and so I felt quite glad enough, when the train stopped at Wolverhampton, to find myself once more at freedom and afoot. There will be an end, surely, to all works of travels, when the railway system of the world shall be com