bearing the brand of Evans, of Melton Mowbray,
than I ever did before. The famous Stilton cheese is another
speciality of this quiet and interesting town, or of its immediate
neighborhood. So, putting the two articles of luxury and
consumption together, it is rather ahead of Banbury with its cakes.

On Monday, August 11th, I resumed my walk northward, and passed
through a very highly cultivated and interesting section. About the
middle of the afternoon, I reached Broughton Hill, and looked off
upon the most beautiful and magnificent landscape I have yet seen in
England. It was the Belvoir Vale; and it would be worth a hundred
miles' walk to see it, if that was the only way to reach it. It lay
in a half-moon shape, the base line measuring apparently about
twenty miles in length. As I sat upon the high wall of this valley,
that overlooks it on the south, I felt that I was looking upon the
most highly-finished piece of pre-Raphaelite artistry that could be
found in the world,--the artistry of the plough, glorious and
beautiful with the unconscious and involuntary pictures which
patient human labor paints upon the canvas of Nature. Never did I
see the like before. If Turner had the shaping of the ground
entirely for an artistic purpose, it could not have been more
happily formed for a display of agricultural pictures. What might
be called the _physical_ vista made the most perfect hemiorama I
ever looked upon. The long, high, wooded ridge, including Broughton
Hill, _eclipsed_, as it were, just half the disk of a circle twenty
miles in diameter, leaving the other half in all the glow and glory
that Nature and that great blind painter, Agricultural Industry,
could give to it. The valley with its foot against this mountainous
ridge, put out its right arm and enfolded to its bosom a little,
beautiful world of its own of about fifty miles girth. In this
embrace were included hundreds of softly-rounded hills, with their
intervening valleys, villages, hamlets, church spires and towers,
plantations, groves, copses and hedge-row trees, grouped by sheer
accident as picturesquely as Turner himself could have arranged
them. The elevation of the ridge on which I sat softened down all
these distant hills, so that they looked only like little undulating
risings by which the valley gently ascended to the blue rim of the
horizon on the north.

It was an excellent standpoint on which to balance Nature and Human
Industry; to e