On succeeding to his inheritance Sir Urian appears to have settled down to the discharge of his duties as a country gentleman, and to have applied himself to the further improvement of his patrimony, which he managed with so much thrift and care that before the close of the century he was able to make an addition to the family estates by the purchase of the lands and hall of Foxwist, in Butley township, from William Duncalf, whose ancestors had been resident there for more than three centuries, and in 1603 he built the Milne House, which long afterwards continued to be used as the dower house of the family. In 1613, the year following that in which Cecil died and the notorious Carr, a raw Scotch lad, was made Prime Minister, he was entrusted with the shrievalty of the county, and in local affairs he appears to have taken an active part, his bold and clearly defined autograph being of frequent occurrence in the parochial records. He was a man of some culture, had had the advantage of a university education, having matriculated at Oxford, and in his private life he would seem to have had a sweet fancy, turning to literature in the absence of action, for in the inventory of his effects, taken after his death, it is mentioned that there were in his closet at Prestbury “his bookes valued at xvjli.” He affected the society of men of letters: Dee, the “Wizard Warden” of Manchester, in his “Diary,” under date April 22nd, 1597, records that he was visited at his residence in the College by Sir Urian Legh and his brother (Edward Legh, probably, for the other brothers, Thomas and Ralph, were at the time in Ireland engaged in the suppression of O’Neill’s rebellion), a Mr. Brown, and Mr. George Booth, of Dunham, then Sheriff of Cheshire. [Illustration] On the 6th of September, 1586, ten years before the affair at Cadiz, Sir Urian Legh was united in marriage to Mary, one of the daughters of Sir Edmund Trafford, of Trafford, Knight, that “hunter out and unkeneler of those slie and subtil foxes Iesuites and semenarei Priests.” The guests who graced the ceremony by their presence must have formed a goodly company, for William Massie, the rector of Wilmslow, who preached a sermon on the occasion, speaks of it as being delivered “before the right honourable the most noble Earle of Derby, and the right reuerend father in God the B(ishop) of Chester with diuerse Knightes and Esquires of great worship at the solemne marriage of your (Sir Edmund Trafford’s) daughter, a modest and vertuous Gentlewoman, married to a young gentleman of great worship and good education.” Sir Urian Legh died at Adlington on the 2nd June, 1627, and two days afterwards, as the registers show, he was buried at Prestbury.