Fortunate in situation, Shrewsbury is enthroned upon twin hills almost surrounded by the Severn. As one of the warders of the Welsh border, it was stoutly fortified, and enough of the old wall remains to make a pleasant promenade. On the only land approach, an isthmus barely three hundred yards broad, stands the square red keep of the castle. The slender spire of St. Mary's is a landmark far and wide. St. Alkmund's, with a sister spire, has a tradition that reaches back to Æthelfreda, daughter of Alfred the Great. Old St. Chad's, a noble church in the days of Henry III, has swayed and sunk into a fragment that serves as chapel for the cemetery where some of the first Salopian families take their select repose. The towered Abbey Church is of venerable dignity, with battered monuments of cross-legged knight and chaliced priest, and a meek, bruised, broken effigy supposed to represent that fiery founder of the abbey, first Earl of Shrewsbury and builder of the castle, Roger de Montgomery, second in command at Hastings to William the Conqueror. [Illustration: THE SEVERN BELOW THE QUARRY, SHREWSBURY] The first known name of Shrewsbury was The Delight, and by that name it may well be remembered of those who have wandered through Wyle Cop and Butchers' Row, past the Raven tavern where Farquhar wrote "The Recruiting Officer" and the old half-timbered house where Richmond, soon to be Henry VII, lodged on his way to Bosworth Field. There are steep streets that, as the proverb has it, go "uphill and against the heart," but carven gables and armorial bearings and mediæval barge-boards tempt one on. There are wild and fierce associations, as that of the Butter Market, where at the High Cross poor Prince David of Wales--who must have had nine lives--after being dragged through the town at a horse's tail, was "hanged, burned and quartered," but in the main it is a city of gracious memories. Its Grammar School, an Edward VI foundation, which in the seventeenth century boasted four masters, six hundred scholars, and a "hansome library," counts on its roll of alumni Charles Darwin, the most famous native of Shrewsbury, the poet Faber, Philip Sidney and his _fidus Achates_, Fulke Greville, whose tomb in St. Mary's Church at Warwick bears the inscription that he was "Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Counsellour to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney." It was in 1564, that starry year in English literary annals, that the two lads entered the school. Sidney's father was then Lord President of Wales--one of the best she ever had--and resident at Ludlow Castle, from whose splendid halls Sir Henry and Lady Mary wrote most wise and tender letters to their "little Philip." He must have profited by these, for in after years Fulke Greville extolled him as the paragon of schoolboys: