rock, which are truly, in the old eighteenth-century literary sense, horrid. Here, as several times before and after, I had to admire at that ignorance of mine in which I had supposed the British continent to be made up of a mild loveliness alone. It has often a bold and rugged beauty which may challenge comparison with our much less accessible grandeurs. It takes days for us to go to the Grand Cañon, or the Yellowstone, or the Yosemite, but one can reach the farthest natural wonder in England by a morning train from London. This handiness of the picturesque and the marvellous is in keeping with the scheme of English life, which is so conveniently arranged that you have scarcely to make an effort for comfort in it. One excepts, of course, the matter of in-door warmth; but out-doors you can always be happy, if you have an umbrella.

I could not praise too much the meteorological delightfulness of that fortnight in Great Malvern, when we had the place so much to ourselves, except for the incursionary trippers, who were, after all, so transient. What contributed greatly to our pleasure was the perfect repair in which the whole place was kept. Apparently the source of its prosperity and certainly its repute, was at the lowest ebb; but the vigilant municipality did not suffer the smallest blight of neglect to rest upon it; the streets were kept with the scruple which is universal in England and which in the retrospect makes our slattern towns and ruffian cities look so shameful; and all was maintained in a preparedness in which no sudden onset of invalids could surprise a weak point. The private premises were penetrated by the same spirit of neatness, and the succession of villas and cottages everywhere showed behind their laurel and holly hedges paths so trim and cleanly that if Adversity haunted their doors

she could approach their spotless thresholds without wetting her feet or staining her skirts. It is gratuitous, of course, to suppose the inhabitants all dependent upon hydropathy for their prosperity, but it was certainly upon hydropathy that Malvern increased to her fifteen thousand; and the agreeable anomaly remains.

If ever the tide of sickness sets back there-and somehow I wish it might-the cultivated sufferer will find an environment so beautiful that it will console him even for not getting well. Nothing can surpass the picturesqueness of those up and down hill streets of Malvern, or the easy variety of the walks and drives about it, up the hills, and down the valleys, and over the plains. If the sufferer is too delicate for much exercise, there is the prettiest public garden in which to smoke or sew, with a peaceful pond in it, and land and water growths which I did interrogate too closely for their botanical names, but which looked friendly if not familiar. Above all, if the sufferer is cultivated and of a taste for antique beauty, there is the Priory Church, which to a cultivated sufferer from our Priory Churchless land will have an endless charm.

At least, I found myself, who am not a great sufferer, nor so very cultivated, and with a passion for antiquity much sated by various travel in many lands, going again and again to the Priory Church in Malvern, and spending hours of pensive pleasure among the forgetting graves without, and the vaguely remembering monuments within. But not among these alone, for some of the most modern of the sculptures are the most beautiful and touching. In a church which dates easily from Early Norman times and not difficultly from Saxon days, a tomb of the Elizabethan century may be called modern, and I specially commend to the visitor that of

the Knotesford family to which the Priory passed after the dissolution of the monasteries. The good "Esquire, servant to King Henry the Eight," lies beside his wife, and at their sides kneel four of their daughters, with the fifth, who raised the monument to them, at her father's head. Nothing can mark the simple piety and filial sweetness of the whole group, which is of portraits in the realistic spirit of the time; but there is a softer, a sublimer exaltation in that ideal woman's figure, on a monument of our day, rising from her couch to hail her Saviour with "Even so, come, Lord Jesus." This work, in the spirit of Chantry, is in the spirit of all ages; and yet has my reader heard of Robert Hollins of Birmingham? If he has not, it will have for him the pathos which attaches to so much art bearing to the beholder no claim of the mind that conceived or the hand that wrought; and the Priory Church of Malvern is rich in such work of every older date. If the reader has a great deal of leisure, he will wish to study the fifteenthcentury tiles which record so many sacred and profane histories, and the quaintly carven stalls with the grotesques of their underseats, and doubtless to do what he can with the stained-windows which survive, in almost unrivalled beauty, the devastation through malice and conscience, of so many others in England. A hundred, or for all I know, a thousand reverend and imperative details will keep him and recall him, day after day, and doubtless he will begin to feel a veneration for the zeal and piety which has restored at immense cost this and so many other temples in every part of the country. You cannot have beauty and the cleanliness next to holiness, you cannot even have antiquity, without paying for it, and the English have been willing to pay. That is why Malvern is still so fair and neat, and why

if her Hydropathy should fail at last to attract a single sufferer, her Priory Church may continue to entreat the foot of the Pilgrim in good health. If the monastery, of which the Priory Gateway is a sole relic, was, as seems probable, really once the home of Langland, the author of "Piers Ploughman's Vision," he could visit no shrine more worthy the reverence of any lover of his kind, any friend of the poor.

XII

SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER AND

HEREFORD

E made Worcester what amends we could for re

WH

fusing to stop the night in her picturesque old inn, so powerfully smelling of stable, by going an afternoon from Malvern to see her fabric of the Royal Worcester ware which some people may think she is named for. Really, however, she was called Wygraster, Wyrcester Wearcester, Wureter, and Hooster, long before porcelain was heard of. In times quite prehistoric the Cornuvíí dwelt there in dug-outs, or huts, of "wottle-and-dab," the dab being probably the clay now used in the Royal Worcester ware. In a more advanced period, she was plundered and burned by the Danes, and had a mint of her own nearly a thousand years before we paid her our second visit. But this detail, of which, with many others, we were ignorant, could not keep us from going to the works, and spending a long, exhausting, and edifying afternoon amidst the potteries, ateliers and ovens. The worst of such things is you are so genuinely interested that you think you ought to be much more so, and you put on such an intensity of curiosity and express such a transport of gratitude for each new fact that you come away gasping. I for my part, was prostrated at the very outset by something that I dare say everybody else knows namely, that to have a