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accompaniment to the scene, disposing the contemplative mind to calm and serious reflection. Man here, as almost every where else, seems to be the only object which prevents the philosopher and the Christian from crying out All is good!'

"The grinders are nearly the only inhabitants of the valley, and they do not reside in it. There is scarcely a dwelling-house throughout the whole length of it. They are a rough half-civilized class. Removed thus from the restrictions of society, and the observation of all authority, they associate only with each other. In summer, when the mountain streams, which feed their infant river, are almost dried up, they have not a supply of water to employ them half their time. As, however, it is uncertain when the uppermost dam will be sufficiently filled to enable the wheel to work, and to dismiss the fluid element to the expecting wheels below, they are under the necessity of being almost constantly upon or near the place, to take advantage of the supply when it does arrive. At those times groups of human beings may be seen, near every wheel, which, taken with the surrounding scenery, form such subjects as are well fitted for the pencil of a Salvator. Athletic figures, with brown paper turbans, the sleeves of their shirts rolled high up, exposing their brawny arms bare almost to their shoulders, their short jackets unbuttoned, and their shirt collars open, displaying their broad dark hairy chests; their short leathern aprons, their breeches'-knees unbuttoned, and their stockings slipped down about their ankles, the whole tinged with ochre-coloured dust, so as to leave the

different colours and materials faintly discoverable, form a figure, even when taken singly, sufficiently picturesque; when grouped, as they generally are, they become strikingly so. You there see them, some seated on the stone-raised turf-covered bench at the door, with their copious jug and their small pots, handing round the never-cloying English beer; others reared up against the large round grinding-stones supported by the walls of the building; others, again, seated on the same kind of stones lying upon and against each other on the ground, whilst some are stretched at their length dozing or contemplating on the verdant sloping bank of the mill dam; some are amusing themselves with athletic exercises, and others are devising or slyly engaged in executing some rude practical jokes. At times you may perceive, as an exception to the general habits, a solitary wandering ruminator with a book, but much oftener with a pipe." The original drawing which we present of such a grinding-wheel as is here described by a distinguished Sheffield artist, Mr. H. P. Parker, (cut 3) will give a new value to Mr. Roberts's vivid description.

Another day! The mist is gone from the hills. We have peeps of the light green woods and the dark distance from elevated spots of the smoky town. It is said that there is not a street in Sheffield from which the country may not be seen. This circumstance arises from the very peculiar position of the townan eminence surrounded on every side by bolder eminences. "The Don, the Sheaf, and the Porter

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66

SHEFFIELD.

In the valuable history of "Hallamshire" by the Rev. Joseph Hunter, we find it recorded that under a survey of the town of Sheffield, made in 1615, there was a population of 2,207 persons. Of these onethird, or 725 persons, are not able to live without the charity of their neighbours: these are all begging poor." There were 260 householders; of whom 100 are "householders which relieve others; these, though the best sort, are but poor artificers." The other 160 householders 'are not able to relieve others; these are such, though they beg not, as are not able to abide the storm of one fortnight's sickness, but would be thereby driven to beggary." The remaining 1,222 of the population of the town are "children and servants of the said householders; the greatest part of which are such as live on small wages, and are constrained to work sore to provide them necessaries." This is, indeed, a narrow foundation on which to build up, by the spread alone of manufacturing industry, a thriving community of 120,000 souls, such as now exists at Sheffield; with all the prodigious accumulation of capital, in the form of houses, factories, wheels, steamengines, materials for labour, and finished goods, which proclaim a commerce with all the world in the year 1847.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when this census of Sheffield was taken, the town and district was in the transition state from feudal domination to commercial enterprise. The small manufacturers had their grinding wheels on the Sheaf and the Don, which flowed close by the walls of the castle of the Talbots. On the adjacent hill, was the Park and the Manor, or Lodge, of the same great Earls of Shrewsbury. They were the lords of the district. They erected wheels on their streams, which the cutlers rented of them; they regulated the labour and the capital engaged in manufactures by the power of their courtsleet. They appear, even in the rudest times, to have occasionally endeavoured to do some good to the poor community clustered under their walls: they exacted moderate tolls; they gave alms, and built hospitals. Their tenants humbly watched their family fortunestheir births and their burials-their honours or their disgraces. But the greater number of their dependants had been for generations "begging poor," or "poor artificers," or "householders not able to abide the storm of one fortnight's sickness." From the time of Edward III., as we know from Chaucer, the "Sheffield whittle" found its way into the Southern and Eastern counties. But the makers of the whittle were necessarily kept poor by restraints and regulations within, and imperfect communication without. The furnaces and forges in which the mineral riches of Sheffield were rendered productive, were worked for the benefit of its great lords; and we may be sure that such proprietors neither understood their own interests nor the interests of those who laboured for them. All the valuable

land around was engrossed by the parks and chases of the mighty hunters. No substantial burgher could live beneath the blighting shade of the dominant castle. The historian of Hallamshire shows us, from a Court Roll of the Manor in 1590, that "the fellowship and company of cutlers and makers of knives" regulated their trade "by the assent of the Right Honourable George Earl of Shrewsbury." One example will suffice to show how these lordly regulators interfered with the natural progress of the labour of artificers. For eight-and-twenty days after the eighth of August in each year, no master, servant, or apprentice, could perform any work appertaining to the science or mystery of cutlers; nor, in the same way, from Christmas to the twenty-third of January. At these seasons they were to apply themselves to other labours. This interruption of their mechanical skill was, perhaps, little regarded at a time when Sheffield had the most imperfect commercial intercourse with the rest of England. The knives of the town, such as old Fuller describes, "for the use of the common people," one of which he saw purchased for a penny, were sometimes carried to distant fairs through almost impassable ways. But anything like activity of commerce was the slow growth of a century and a half. In the earlier times of the Norman lords, when the strong hand of the tyrant and the outlaw were equally ready to seize upon the accumulations of industry, it is difficult to imagine how the persevering skill and rude science which produced the "Sheffield whittle" could have had a beginning, or made any progress towards creating the "poor artificers" of 1615. One of Sheffield's living poets thus apostrophises the "changed scenes" of his native place :

Far other woes were yours in times of old,

When Locksley o'er the hills of Hallam chased
The wide-horn'd stag, or with his bowmen bold
Waged war on kinglings. Vassal robbers prowl'd,
And, tiger-like, skulk'd robber-lords for prey,
Where now groan wheel-worn streets, and labour bends
O'er thousand anvils. Bled the feudal fray,
Or raved the foray, where the cloud ascends
For ever; and from earth's remotest ends

Her merchants meet, where hamlets shriek'd in flames.
ELLIOTT.

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The Sheaf-bridge, or more properly Shear-bridge, was formerly a structure of wood which led direct to the Castle. The only vestige of this stronghold of the lords of Sheffield is an old half-timbered house, described as "The hawle at the Poundes," which tradition says was the laundry of the Castle. The demolition of the Castle itself was in a great measure accomplished under an order of the Commons in 1648. Time and neglect did the rest, till not a stone was left to connect the locality with its historical associations. Here were the halls where the great John Talbot and his valiant son held high revelry before they fell together at the fatal battle of Chatillon. Mr. Hunter gives an interesting local tradition connected with this "brave Talbot, the terror of the French :"-" It is said that

was amongst those who urged the necessity of Mary's death, and he was a witness of her execution.

With Mary of Scotland ends the interest of the Castle and Manor of Sheffield. The Castle was surrendered to the Parliamentary forces in 1644, after an obstinate resistance; and was dismantled four years after. The smithy and the warehouse gradually usurped the place of its towers and court-yards. The Manor-house fell into decay. The timber of the Park was cut down. The grinding-wheel was multiplied on the banks of the Sheaf and the Don, the Rivelin, and the Porter. A great town sprung up on every side of the hills that looked down upon the waters of Sheffield:

Beautiful rivers of the desert! ye

Bring food for labour from the foodless waste.
Pleased stops the wanderer on his way, to see
The frequent weir oppose your heedless haste.
Where toils the mill, by ancient woods embraced,
Hark, how the cold steel screams in hissing fire!
There draws the grinder his laborious breath;
There, coughing, at his deadly trade he bends.
The Village Patriarch.

the small army with which the carl landed at Bourdeaux, sure enough, and shall keep her forthcoming at your contained many men who were raised among his Majesty's commandment, either quick or dead." Ten tenantry at Sheffield and the neighbourhood; and years after she first came to Sheffield, we find Mary that these formed the body-guard of their aged and still suffering the miseries of close imprisonment. She valiant chief, and were so entirely cut off, that through- writes to the French ambassador, that she was without out the circuit of Hallamshire there was not a family fresh air, not allowed sufficient exercise, and meanly which had not a private grief originating in the disaster provided with diet. At length, on the 3rd of Septemof that fatal day, which filled the Castle of Sheffield ber, 1584, Mary was removed from Sheffield to Winwith the tones of loud lamentation." Other Talbots field. On the 8th of February, 1587, was enacted succeeded the first great Earl of Shrewsbury,-who the mournful tragedy of Fotheringay. Shrewsbury walked the usual round of servility in the court, and courage in the camp ;-and their memories would have been left to the local annalist, had not two of them been brought into connexion with personages that fill a large space in the historical canvass. Early in the reign of Henry VIII., George, the fourth Earl of Shrewsbury, built in his Park at Sheffield a splendid mansion, more convenient than his fortified castle. In the year 1530 Cardinal Wolsey was brought there a prisoner, by the Earl of Northumberland, and delivered into the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury. He remained at the Manor sixteen or eighteen days, bowed to the earth by sickness and bitter disappointment; and when he quitted Sheffield he found his final resting-place, within four days, at the Abbey of Leicester. Cavendish, Wolsey's gentleman of the chamber, has given a minute relation of the conduct of Wolsey during his residence at Sheffield-his protestations of innocence-his terror at the accusations that were impending over him-his pretended confidence in the king, under the secret conviction that he would be sacrificed by his crafty and cruel master. "The fair gallery" where Wolsey and Shrewsbury held their daily conferences "the goodly tower" where the fallen minister was lodged-have long since perished. A few ruins remain to show something of the extent of this edifice. Forty years after Wolsey had gone forth for his last journey, and "waxed so sick that he had almost fallen from his mule," there was brought to Sheffield another prisoner-Mary, Queen of Scots. When Elizabeth, in 1568, pounced upon the unhappy victim of contending factions, she appears to have made up her mind as to the course which she persevered in for more than eighteen years. To George, the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, she addressed herself as a fitting person to undertake the expensive, troublesome, and perilous guardianship of the Queen of Scotland. About Christmas, 1570, Mary was brought to the Castle of Sheffield. She had thirty persons in her train; and the Earl engaged forty of his tenantry, as an extraordinary watch, by day and night. Small indulgence was granted to the poor prisoner. In 1571, the Earl writes to Lord Burghley, "Truly I would be very loth that any liberty or exercise should be granted unto her or any of hers, out of these gates... .. I do suffer her to walk upon the leads here in open air, and in my large dining chamber, and also in this court-yard, so as both I myself, or my wife, be always in her company." In 1573 Shrewsbury wrote to Elizabeth, "I have her

The same powerful painter of his own scenery has, in
another poem, given us a view of Sheffield equally
striking and true:

The mighty arm of mist, that shakes the shore
Along the throng'd canal in ceaseless roar,
Urging the heavy forge, the clanking mill,
The rapid tilt, and screaming sparkling stone;
Is this the spot where stoop'd the ash-crown'd hill
To meet the vale, when bee-loved banks, o'ergrown
With broom and woodbine, heard the cushat lone
Coo for her absent love? Oh, ne'er again
Will Andrew pluck the freckled foxglove here!
How like a monster, with a league-long mane,
Or Titan's rocket, in its high career
Towers the dense smoke! The falcon, wheeling near,
Turns, and the angry crow seeks purer skies.
'Steam.' ELLIOTT.

This is poetry. This is the poetry which Sheffield
suggests. We cross the Derbyshire moors on a gloomy
morning of the early May. The snow lies on the
highest hill-tops. We gradually descend into the
valley of smoke which lies beneath us.
The whole
scene is murky. Thick, black, uprising clouds, by
man created, mix with the heaven-descending mists.
The streets lour frowningly upon us.
Amidst prison-
looking walls we hear the incessant noise of the tilt-
now with a quick stroke coming piercingly upon the
ear, tapping, as if it were some tiny toy moved by
children in sport-now" booming its sullen thunder,"
like a mighty ram of war battering against some de-
voted city gates. Row after row of small houses-
unadorned without, but clean within, each with its
clock and its sofa,-cach the sanctuary of some inde-

form three sides of a peninsulated area, upon which stands the greater part of the town. The apex of this area is the confluence of the Sheaf, and the Don; on each side of it, but more gently towards the Sheaf and the Porter than in the direction of the Don, the apex rises into a boldly swelling hill, the ridge of which passes through the centre and the western portions of the town, and beyond even its remotest suburbs. From the confluence of the Sheaf and the Porter rises a similarly beautiful hill. On the north side of the Don, the scenery is perhaps still more imposing; the steep declivity is clothed by the forest trees of the Old Park Wood, over which appears a portion of the pleasant village of Pitsmoor. The summits and sides of all these hills are, in the vicinity of the town, studded with neat and elegant villas-the residences of the gentry and the leading manufacturers and merchants. On the eastern side of the Sheaf, near its junction with the Don, the Park, covered with dwellings, rises like an amphitheatre above the rest of the town, to a ridge not inaptly termed Sky Edge, from which point, under favourable circumstances, almost the whole of Sheffield, and its surrounding villages for a considerable distance, may be discerned." (Dr. Holland.)

The eastern side of Sheffield, known as 'the Park,' was once the seat of the Manor' of the Earls of Shrewsbury, surrounded with noble woods, and looking down with a secluded grandeur upon the little busy town beneath. The hill has lost its old sylvan character. It is in parts bare, with clusters of small houses in the more accessible parts, and a few villas on the summits. On an eminence planted with trees is a monument to the memory of those who died of the fearful pestilence with which many parts of England were visited in 1832. The number smitten in Sheffield and here buried, was 339. It is called The Cholera Mount,' by Montgomery; who thus celebrates the plantations with which the monument is surrounded:

"With statelier honours still, in time's slow round,
Shall this sepulchral eminence be crown'd,
Where generations long to come shall hail
The growth of centuries waving in the gale,
A forest land-mark on the mountain head,
Standing betwixt the living and the dead."

But the western side of Sheffield is a suburb to which nothing that we have seen in the neighbourhood of large English towns can be compared in beauty. As we ascend for nearly two miles-and there are several roads-villa after villa, with spacious gardens and plantations, built in good taste, of the finest coloured stone, present themselves; not jealously shut in with sullen walls, but open to the highway, and commanding the fine prospect of the opposite hills, or of the more distant eminences mingling with the sky. The view of Sheffield from the Park embraces the greater part of the town. That from the western hill, at the pretty village of Crookes, is more confined, but contains all the elements of the picturesque. The engraving from Mr. Parker's spirited and faithful sketch (Cut, No. 1) will convey a better notion of the landscape beauties of the suburbs of Sheffield than any de

scription. The noble wooded hill immediately above the town, is called Wincobank. Around it winds the Don, before its union with the Sheaf. That portion of the town which the Sheaf waters, lies hidden in the valley to the right of the picture. Mr. Hunter has justly said, describing the peculiar situation of Sheffield, "It is in a country like this that we look for the beautiful in landscape. The grander and more august features of nature are to be sought in regions decidedly mountainous, where the artificial creations of man have not intruded to break the harmony of the scene. But the softer graces of landscape are chiefly to be found in a district uneven, but not mountainous, and may be contemplated with not less pleasure because among them may be found some of the works of human hands." James Montgomery whom Sheffield honours not more than the pure of heart admire, wherever English literature is known-has well described the effect produced upon a feeling mind by the association of man with the quiet beauties of natural scenery :— "He who retires, as I have often done, on a bright summer evening, into the depth of one of our Hallamshire woods, while he saunters along in the dream-like repose of a brown study, or leans against an old oak in the fine abstraction of severer thought, might imagine himself alone and in silence, merely because his eye and his ear were unobservant of motions and murmurs perceptible on every hand. But were he to pause at one of those cheerful openings, where, from a small patch of ground, beneath a hand-breadth of blue sky, in a little amphitheatre of trees, the great world seems hermetically excluded, he would soon find himself in the very midst of the joy and activity, the labour, fatigue, and anxiety of life. At first, the dazzling dance of insects in the sunshine, and their musical drone in the shade, might surprise him into a feeling of sympathetic delight; but the flitting forms and richer melody of birds would quickly charm away his attention, to hearken to the sweetest inarticulate tones in creation. If he were not startled from this entrancement by a shrew-mouse suddenly running across his foot, or the glittering undulations of a snake among the withered leaves across his pathway, his eye would be unconsciously drawn off, and carried out of the forest, by discovering green glimpses of adjacent fields, and shining tracks of the river-here, a spire of one of the churches; there, the tower of another; clusters of house-tops; steam-engine chimneys, like obelisks; and distant hills, cultivated or barren,-through the loop-holes of intermingling boughs and broken foliage around him. Presently, voices and sounds of all kinds would assail him, rising in Babylonish confusion from the populous valleys and village-crowned eminences; but gradually distinguished, if his ear nicely observed them, through their innumerable varieties, harmonious and dissonant, loud and low, mournful and lively-the rustling of winds among the leaves, the gush of waters down the Weir, the barking of dogs, the crowing of cocks, the cries of children, the chimes of the church clock, or the knoll of a death-bell—a gun, a drum, a

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