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Rh edifices on the low banks of the streams merely to save them ten minutes' walk with their hooks and nets. Nor could it be said that there was any necessity for hiding their abbeys and cathedrals for fear of any violence from the populations of the districts; for not only the whole civil power of the realm was in their hands, but they were regarded as half-divine beings by the peasantry and higher ranks.

But structures of wider reputation than the cathedral have been founded and erected in Lichfield. It has given physical or intellectual birth to men of a stature of mind that has overlooked the tallest of the three cathedral spires, and cast a luminous shadow over two hemispheres. Can any other town so small in England boast, like this flat-footed little city, of giving birth, first shaping, or residence to four such men as Johnson, Addison, Garrick, and Ashmole? Samuel Johnson!—a nation that could build fifty cathedrals in ten years would need a century for building such another man as he was to the world of mind and thought. Here, as you stand by his monument in the market-place, with several of the most touching incidents of his life carved in the stone, you feel yourself standing in the disk of a living and immortal reputation—more than a reputation; more than the illuminated shadow of a great memory. It is a sensible and