Seven English Cities | Page 5

may trust yourself
implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not trust the
head porter who tells you to take the London and Northwestern, for
then you will have to change four times on the way and at every
junction personally see that your baggage is unladen and started anew
to its destination.
* * * * *

SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER
I will suppose the reader not to be going to Oxford, but, in compliance
with the scheme of this paper, to Manchester, where there is perhaps no
other reason for his going. He will there, for one thing, find the
supreme type of the railroad hotel which in England so promptly
shelters and so kindly soothes the fluttered exile. At Manchester, even
more than at Liverpool, we are imagined in the immense railroad
station hotel, which is indeed perhaps superorganized and
over-convenienced after an American ideal: one does not, for instance,
desire a striking, or even a ticking, clock in the transom above one's
bedroom door; but the like type of hotel is to be found at every great
railroad centre or terminal in England, and it is never to be found quite
bad, though of course it is sometimes better and sometimes worse. It is
hard to know if it is more hotel or more station; perhaps it is a mixture
of each which defies analysis; but in its well- studied composition you
pass, as it were, from your car to your room, as from one chamber to
another. This is putting the fact poetically; but, prosaically, the
intervening steps are few at the most; and when you have entered your
room your train has ceased to be. The simple miracle would be
impossible in America, where our trains, when not shrieking at the tops
of their whistles, are backing and filling with a wild clangor of their
bells, and making a bedlam of their stations; but in England they
"Come like shadows, so depart,"

and make no sound within the vast caravansary where the enchanted
traveller has changed from them into a world of dreams.
I
These hotels are, next to the cathedrals, perhaps the greatest wonder of
England, and in Manchester the railway hotel is in some ways more
wonderful than the cathedral, which is not so much planned on our
native methods. Yet this has the merit, if it is a merit, of antedating our
Discovery by nearly a century, and pre- historically it is indefinitely
older. My sole recorded impression of it is that I found it smelling
strongly of coal- gas, such as comes up the register when your furnace
is mismanaged; but that is not strange in such a manufacturing centre;
and it would be paltering with the truth not to own a general sense of
the beauty and grandeur in it which no English cathedral is without.
The morning was fitly dim and chill, and one could move about in the
vague all the more comfortably for the absence of that appeal of
thronging monuments which harasses and bewilders the visitor in other
cathedrals; one could really give one's self up to serious emotion, and
not be sordidly and rapaciously concerned with objects of interest.
Manchester has been an episcopal see only some fifty years; before that
the cathedral was simply T' Owd Church, and in this character it is still
venerable, and is none the less so because of the statue of Oliver
Cromwell which holds the chief place in the open square before it. Call
it an incongruity, if you will, but that enemy of episcopacy is at least
not accused of stabling his horses in The Old Church at Manchester, or
despoiling it of its sacred images and stained glass, and he merits a
monument there if anywhere.
[Illustration: MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL]
With the constantly passing trams which traverse the square, he is
undoubtedly more significant of modern Manchester than the
episcopacy is, and perhaps of that older Manchester which held for him
against the king, and that yet older Manchester of John Bradford, the
first martyr of the Reformation to suffer death at the stake in Smithfield.
Of the still yet older, far older Manchester, which trafficked with the
Greeks of Marseilles, and later passed under the yoke of Agricola and
was a Roman military station, and got the name of Maen-ceaster from
the Saxons, and was duly bedevilled by the Danes and mishandled by
the Normans, there may be traces in the temperament of the modern

town which would escape even the scrutiny of the hurried American.
Such a compatriot was indeed much more bent upon getting a pair of
cotton socks, like those his own continent wears almost universally in
summer, but a series of exhaustive visits to all the leading