Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/421

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and its Green Border-Land.
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value received, the Kenilworthies owe one to the celebrated Scotch writer. One might reasonably, estimate that his book has been worth £10,000 a year to them for the last quarter of a century or more. There are observatories, barometer and anemometer stations around the coasts of England, where rain-falls and wind-blows, tide-risings and star-showers are registered. There are other observation-stations where the self-registering offices of human fames and reputations are kept, and where these are measured spontaneously. Go to Stratford and look at the inner walls of Shakespeare's house and the record kept there, and count the names from the four quarters of the globe written there in homage of the great bard; go to Abbotsford, and consult the day-book of that great memory; go to Olney, and see what manner and multitude of names cover and recover the little garden summer-house in which Cowper wrote, and you will have this self-registration of human genius and its appreciation. So at Kenilworth, the visiters' day-book at the hotel will show how many come from both hemispheres and all their continents to see the scene of Sir Walter Scott's romance.

I was favoured with a bright day on the sunny edge of autumn for my visit, when the very sky imparts a radiance to the ivied ruins of old castles and abbeys. Kenilworth shows its successive