Seven English Cities | Page 8

our way through the momently
thickening groups on the floor, and in the guidance of a member of the
exchange found a favorable point of observation in the gallery. From
this the vast space below showed first a moving surface of hats, with
few silk toppers among them, but a multitude of panamas and other
straws. The marketing was not carried on with anything like the wild,

rangy movement of our Stock Exchange, and the floor sent up no such
hell-roaring (there is no other phrase for it) tumult as rises from the
mad but not malign demons of that most dramatic representation of
perdition. The merchants, alike staid, whether old or young,
congregated in groups which, dealing in a common type of goods, kept
the same places till, toward three o'clock, they were lost in the mass
which covered the floor. Even then there was no uproar, no rush or
push, no sharp cries or frenzied shouting; but from the crowd, which
was largely made up of elderly men, there rose a sort of surd, rich hum,
deepening ever, and never breaking into a shriek of torment or derision.
It was not histrionic, and yet for its commercial importance it was one
of the most moving spectacles which could offer itself to the eye in the
whole world.
[Illustration: THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL]
I cannot pretend to have profited by my visit to that immensely
valuable deposit of books, bought from the Spencer family at Althorp,
and dedicated as the Rylands library to the memory of a citizen of
Manchester. Books in a library, except you have time and free access to
them, are as baffling as so many bottles in a wine-cellar, which are not
opened for you, and which if they were would equally go to your head
without final advantage. I find, therefore, that my sole note upon the
Rylands Library is the very honest one that it smelt, like the cathedral,
of coal-gas. The absence of this gas was the least merit of the beautiful
old Chetham College, with its library dating from the seventeenth
century, and claiming to have been the first free library in England, and
doubtless the world. In the cloistered picturesqueness of the place, its
mediaeval memorials, and its ancient peace, I found myself again in
those dear Middle Ages which are nowhere quite wanting in England,
and against which I rubbed off all smirch of the modernity I had come
to Manchester for.
* * * * *

IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD
If I had waited a little till I had got into the beautiful Derbyshire
country which lies, or rather rolls, between Manchester and Sheffield, I
could as easily have got rid of my epoch in the smiling agricultural
landscape. I do not know just the measure of the Black Country in

England, or where Sheffield begins to be perhaps the blackest spot in it;
but I am sure that nothing not surgically clean could be whiter than the
roads that, almost as soon as we were free of Manchester, began to
climb the green, thickly wooded hills, and dip into the grassy and leafy
valleys. In the very heart of the loveliness we found Sheffield most
nobly posed against a lurid sunset, and clouding the sky, which can
never be certain of being blue, with the smoke of a thousand towering
chimneys. From whatever point you have it, the sight is most
prodigious, but no doubt the subjective sense of the great ducal
mansions and estates which neighbor the mirky metropolis of steel and
iron has its part in heightening the dramatic effect.
I
The English, with their love of brevity and simplicity, call these proud
seats the Dukeries, but our affair was not with them, and I shall not be
able to follow the footmen or butlers or housekeepers who would so
obligingly show them to the reader in my company. I had a fine
consciousness of passing some of them on my way into the town, and
when there of being, however, incongruously, in the midst of them.
Worksop, more properly than Sheffield, is the plebeian heart of these
aristocratic homes, or sojourns, which no better advised traveller, or
less hurried, will fail to see. But I was in Sheffield to see the capital of
the Black Country in its most characteristic aspects, and I thought it
felicitously in keeping, after I had dined (less well than I could have
wished, at the railway hotel which scarcely kept the promise made for it
by other like hotels) that I should be tempted beyond my strength to go
and see that colored opera which we had lately sent, after its signal
success with us, to an even greater prosperity in England. In Dahomey
is a musical drama not pitched in