Seven English Cities | Page 3

not mean to blame it, for it was no louder or harder than the hearts
of other big towns, and it had some alleviation from the many young
couples who were out together half-holidaying in the unusually
pleasant Saturday weather. I wish their complexions had been better,
but you cannot have South-of-England color if you live as far north as
Liverpool, and all the world knows what the American color is. The
young couples abounded in the Gallery of Fine Arts, where they
frankly looked at one another instead of the pictures. The pictures
might have been better, but then they might have been worse (there
being examples of Filippo Lippi, Memmi, Holbein, and, above all, the
_Dante's Dream_ of Rossetti); and in any case those couples could
come and see them when they were old men and women; but now they
had one another in a moment of half-holiday which could not last
forever.
In the evening there were not so many lovers at the religious meetings
before the classic edifice opposite the hotel, where the devotions were
transacted with the help of a brass-band; but there were many youths
smoking short pipes, and flitting from one preacher to another, in the
half-dozen groups. Some preachers were nonconformist, but there was
one perspiring Anglican priest who labored earnestly with his hearers,
and who had more of his aspirates in the right place. Many of his

hearers were in the rags which seem a favorite wear in Liverpool, and I
hope his words did their poor hearts good.
Slightly apart from the several congregations, I found myself with a
fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me in an
accent so unlike my own American that I ventured to answer him in
Italian. He was indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos
Ayres and was presently thinking of New York; and we had some
friendly discourse together concerning the English. His ideas of them
were often so parallel with my own that I hardly know how to say he
thought them an improvident people. I owned that they spent much
more on state, or station, than the Americans; but we neither had any
censure for them otherwise. He was of that philosophic mind which one
is rather apt to encounter in the Latin races, and I could well wish for
his further acquaintance. His talk rapt me to far other and earlier scenes,
and I seemed to be conversing with him under a Venetian heaven,
among objects of art more convincing than the equestrian statue of the
late Queen, who had no special motive I could think of for being shown
to her rightly loving subjects on horseback. We parted with the
expressed hope of seeing each other again, and if this should meet his
eye and he can recall the pale young man, with the dark full beard, who
chatted with him between the pillars of the Piazzetta, forty years before
our actual encounter I would be glad of his address.
IV
How strange are the uses of travel! There was a time when the mention
of Liverpool would have conjured up for me nothing but the thought of
Hawthorne, who spent divers dull consular years there, and has left a
record of them which I had read, with the wish that it were cheerfuler.
Yet, now, here on the ground his feet might have trod, and in the very
smoke he breathed, I did not once think of him. I thought as little of
that poor Felicia Hemans, whose poetry filled my school-reading years
with the roar of the wintry sea breaking from the waveless Plymouth
Bay on the stern and rock-bound coast where the Pilgrim Fathers
landed on a bowlder measuring eight by ten feet, now fenced in against
the predatory hammers and chisels of reverent visitors. I knew that
Gladstone was born at Liverpool, but not Mrs. Oliphant, and the only
literary shade I could summon from a past vague enough to my
ignorance was William Roscoe, whose _Life of Leo X._, in the Bohn

Library, had been too much for my young zeal when my zeal was still
young. My other memories of Liverpool have been acquired since my
visit, and I now recur fondly to the picturesque times when King John
founded a castle there, to the prouder times when Sir Francis Bacon
represented it in Parliament; or again to the brave days when it resisted
Prince Rupert for three weeks, and the inglorious epoch when the new
city (it was then only some four or five hundred years old) began to
flourish on the trade in slaves with the colonies of the Spanish Main,
and on the conjoint and congenial traffic in rum, sugar, and tobacco.
[Illustration: THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL]
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