ective still. Since that date there have been twenty local
statutes and orders relating to the borough of Birmingham, from the
Birmingham Improvement Act, 1851, to the Provisional Order Confirmation
Act, passed in 1882, the twenty containing a thousand or more sections.
All this, however, has recently been altered, the powers that are now
having (through the Town Clerk, Mr. Orford Smith) rolled all the old
Acts into one, eliminating useless and obsolete clauses, and inserting
others necessitated by our high state of advanced civilisation. The new
Act, which is known as the Birmingham Corporation Consolidation Act,
came into force January 1, 1884, and all who desire to master our local
governing laws easily and completely had better procure a copy of the
book containing it, with notes of all the included statutes, compiled by
the Town Clerk, and published by Messrs. Cornish, New Street.

~Local Epitaphs.~--Baskerville, when young, was a stone cutter, and it
was known that there was a gravestone in Handsworth churchyard and
another in Edgbaston churchyard which were cut by him. The latter was
accidentally broken many years back, but was moved and kept as a
curiosity until it mysteriously vanished while some repairs were being
done at the church. It is believed that Baskerville wrote as well as
carved the inscription which commemorated the death of Edward Richards
who was an idiot, and died Sept. 21st, 1728, and that it ran thus:--

"If innocents are the fav'rites of heaven,
And God but little asks where little's given,
My great Creator has for me in store
Eternal joys--What wise man can ask more?"

The gravestone at Handsworth was "under the chancel window," sixty years
ago, overgrown with moss and weeds, but inscription and stone have long
since gone. Baskerville's own epitaph, on the Mausoleum in his grounds
at Easy Hill, has often been quoted:--

'Stranger,
Beneath this cone, in unconsecrated ground,
A friend to the liberties of mankind directed his body to be inurned.
May the example contribute to emancipate thy mind
From the idle fears of Superstition,
And the wicked Act of Priesthood!

Almost as historical as the above, is the inscription on the tombstone
erected over Mary Ashford, at Sutton Coldfield:--

As a Warning to Female Virtue,
And a humble Monument of Female Chastity,
This Stone marks the Grave
of
MARY ASHFORD,
Who, in the 20th year of her age,
Havin