day, and in that before him, was numbered even on the tombstone of a writer or statesman as one of the first graces of human intellect.
But near this monument to the poet is another which is really a fuller testimony to his worth and its appreciation. It is the largest and most elaborately sculptured tablet in the church, erected to the memory of a Maj. Halliday, who once occupied Shenstone's mansion, and made it the central and culminating merit of his life, as inscribed in his long epitaph, that he kept the poet's grounds as a sacred trust and as he left them. He seemed to have felt himself honoured by the charge, as if it were a national trust confided to his keeping.
The sun was looking its last half hour upon the scene as we reached the Leasowes, and ascended the winding walks over stream and pool and under overarching trees, which the artistic poet laid out with so much genius and taste more than a hundred years ago. Our imagination was stimulated naturally to picturesque conception, and if the grounds were not all we could have fancied, we were confident they were that and more in the poet's day. It was evident that men had occupied them who could not honestly have written on their monuments what Maj. Halliday's epitaph stated to the reader in Halesowen Church. Grounds which had been lawns of exquisite surface and verdure had been found more profitable for
