For a short distance the road now descends, and near the bottom a bank rises abruptly on the right, crowned with a plantation of oak and larch—the “sylvan shade”—beneath which reposes the “breathless clay” of the eccentric poet, wit, and player—Samuel Johnson—known by his generation as “Lord Flame,” of whom we may have something to say anon. A few yards further on is the new hall, or “New Buildings,” as it is sometimes called, a plain brick house, the south wing only of which has been completed, built in Queen Anne’s reign by that Lord Mohun who brought the noted Cheshire will case to a sanguinary end, when he and his adversary, the Duke of Hamilton, fell together in a duel in Hyde Park, Nov. 15, 1712. At this point the view of Gawsworth opens upon us, presenting one of the fairest pictures of quiet rural beauty that Cheshire possesses. There is a dreamy old-world character about the place, a sweet fragrance of the olden time, and a peaceful tranquillity of the present; and the ancient church, the picturesque half-timbered rectory, and the stately old hall, with the broad grass-bordered road, the wide-spreading sycamores, and the old-fashioned fish ponds, in the weed-grown depths of which every object, with the overarching sky and the white clouds sailing therein are given back with distinct vividness, impart an air of venerable and undisturbed respectability. The place belongs so entirely to the past, and there seems such a remoteness between the hoar antiquity of a scene so thoroughly old English and the busy world from which we have just emerged, that we almost hesitate to advance. [Illustration: GAWSWORTH CROSS.] There is no village, so to speak, the church, the parsonage, and the two halls, with a cottage or two adjoining the church steps, being all the buildings we can see; there is not even that usual and supposed to be indispensable adjunct of an old English country village, the village inn, the nearest hostelry being the Harrington Arms, an old coaching house on the London road, a quarter of a mile or more away. The church, a grey and venerable pile, with a remarkably well proportioned tower, which exhibits some good architectural details of the perpendicular period, stands in its graveyard, a little to the south of a broad grass-grown road, upon a gentle eminence encompassed by a grey stone fence that looks as ancient as the building itself. Tall trees overshadow it—larch and fir—that rear their lofty spines from near the water’s edge, and, yielding to the northern blasts, bend in graceful curves towards the ancient fane. You can mount the steps and pass through the little wicket into the quiet “God’s-acre,” and surely a spot more suggestive of calm and serious thought is rarely witnessed. Move slowly through the tall grass and round the green graves where The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,