Stafford for Shrewsbury, and
immediately after crossing into Shropshire, is a small market town and
borough, with a corporation, which can be traced back to Henry III. The
church, of the fifteenth century, with an interior of great beauty, has been
frightfully disfigured by aisles built of bricks in a common builders' style
of architecture.

This corporation offers an example which might be with advantage followed by
greater men holding the same office; they have but a small income, and they
apply it to keeping in order cisterns and conduits which supply the town with
water.

There is a free grammar school founded by one William Adams in 1756, which
has a library attached to the school and five scholarships. The best, of 80
pounds a year, to Christchurch, Oxford.

* * * * *

WELLINGTON stands at the base of the Wrekin, is the centre of the
Shropshireman's toast and the chief town of the coal and iron district, and
is the point where the line from Wolverhampton makes a junction, affording
the nearest road from Birmingham to Shrewsbury. It was here that Charles I.,
on his march from Wellington to Shrewsbury, assembled his troops, and, in
order to allay the growing disaffection among them, declared that he would
"support the reformed religion, govern by law, uphold the privileges of
parliament, and preserve the liberty of the subject."

From Wellington you may proceed by omnibus to Coalbrookdale, where the first
iron bridge was built over the Severn, where the Darbys and Dickensons have
carried on iron works for more than a century, where coal was first applied
profitably to smelting iron, and where the fine iron castings of Berlin have
been rivalled, and successful attempts have been made to introduce the
principles of the fine arts into domestic manufactures. The firm are members
of the Society of Friends. Fortunately their tenets do not prevent them from
selling us coal-scuttles of beautiful design, although their wives and
daughters are bound, according to the conservative principles of their sect,
to wear bonnets of an unvarying and hideous coal-scuttle shape.

* * * * *

SHREWSBURY, 10 miles from Wellington, is, in more respects than one, an
interesting town, situated partly on a precipitous peninsula formed by the
swift clear waters of the Severn, united to the opposite side by bridges, in
one of which the huge undershot waterwheels of a corn mill are for ever
turning. A stranger without letters of int