Lime is a great enemy to good bricks, as small portions escape both rollers and pug-mill, and being converted into quicklime by burning, it slacks and bursts bricks subject to rains and frosts. Compare the sound, and hard durable bricks made here with those made near London, into which Cockneys knock their nails without troubling themselves to look for a joint, and say whether, with less freights, they might not be made to supersede the rubbish passing under the name of London bricks, which are soft, damp, and perishable, and some of which, like others of inferior quality, will hold from a pint to a quart of water. Stone, as shewn by the new Houses of Parliament, will not withstand the action of the corroding acid to be found in a London atmosphere; but good hard Shropshire bricks will, and for public buildings, to say nothing of ordinary domestic structures, they are invaluable. The Staffordshire blue bricks which of late years have come into such general use, particularly in buildings connected with railways, are made from a clay containing a large proportion of peroxide of iron, a clay which produces a red, a buff, or a blue brick according to the process of firing and the degree of heat it undergoes in the kiln; but it will in no case stand a terra-cotta heat, in consequence of the iron acting as a flux. But the great centres of the art of brick making are on the banks of the Severn. Clay and clay workers are to be found at Lilleshall, Lightmoor, Horsehay, and the Woodlands, where, as at Broseley, clays are found on the surface. Here, on the valley side the surface is honeycombed by burrowings after clay and coal. One of the most important beds of clay for making ordinary bricks and tiles is one 17 feet in thickness, worked in many places by shallow shafts, and levels driven into the hill sides, which when abandoned cause the surface to collapse, and the ground to crack, as if by an earthquake. A very pretty church, built a century since on the brow of the hill overlooking some of the brickfields, is now a complete wreck, in consequence of these burrowings after clay. The chancel is falling away from the body of the building, the walls are torn from the roof to the foundation, and the windows have fallen from their places, leaving the oak pews and handsome marble monuments a prey to the elements. Clays and coals are being pared away from around it as a mouse would pare a cheese. Of course the bishop cautions and threatens, but as long as his lordship declines to go into the mines these sappers and miners are safe; and to them must succumb not only the church, but the graveyard— “Where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.”