Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/57

Rh prudence of the country. The statistics he collected, and arguments and views he pressed upon the public mind as well as upon the Government, are a most valuable contribution to a movement now progressing in different countries for the better treatment of their actual and prospective criminals. Several other brothers have also distinguished themselves, some in the profession of their father, as conductors of high class schools for the education of gentlemen's sons, whilst others have been able assistants in the General Post Office in working out the postal system of Sir Rowland.

Although it redounds less to the credit of a town merely to give birth to great men than to make great men born elsewhere, still those born and raised to eminence in Birmingham present a goodly roll. We have noticed what one of these has done for his country and the world in the boon and blessing of free trade between heart and heart, mind and mind, through the Penny Post. We have called him the Political Economist of Human Nature. We now come to one of the great poets of that nature that surrounds, embosoms, sustains, and delights the human, and is to universal humanity what the physical being of man is to his mind. Such a poet was born in Birmingham, and his name was David Cox. He looked with the loving rapture of a poet's eye into the face of Nature, and then he dipped his pencil