No. 131. EDINBURGH, SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 1847. REMINISCENCES OF A TOUR TO ENGLAND.-No. I. BY THE REV. GEORGE GILFILLAN. We are not about to throw down before the public what Dr Clarke calls a 'cart-load of recollections.' We do not mean to empty out all the minutiae of our journal; to print, like some travellers, our lodging-house bills, our private opinions upon beds and bedding, or to bestow on them all the tediousness of our travels by land and sea. We have no hair-breadth escapes to recount; we were too late for the crash at Wolverton, we saw no antres vast nor deserts idle, we fell in with no new fossil or mineral, we discovered no mute inglorious Milton, nor did we even find any new idol to be added to our Gallery'-already thought by many too large-of heroes. But we did not travel precisely in the fashion of a fowl in a basket, or of an Orkney ox brought up to the shambles of London. We used our eyes. We were fortunate enough to see many beautiful scenes, to meet with some distinguished persons, and to traverse a very considerable breadth of merry England'-a country which was quite new, and seemed in its novelty A banner bright that was unfurl'd Before us suddenly.' The first spot of English ground on which we touched was the shore of Liverpool, and in the course of three weeks' sojourn we managed to see much of it and its neighbourhood, and to form certain tolerably distinct and decided impressions about both. Coming from Scotland, we were, of course, immediately struck with the points of dissimilarity between Liverpool and our great Scottish cities. Its vast windmills, carrying on their endless mimic warfare with the air; its tall black horses, with long sweeping tails, reminding you of that described by John, whose rider had a pair of balances in his hand,' hurrying hearses along the streets; its funerals, attended by women as well as men; its spired churches, so visibly and ostentatiously established;' its boys, beggars, raggamuffins, policemen, and porters-all speaking out their glee, or wants, or wickedness, or coarse conceptions, or brutal fun, in English, in an accent and language we had been accustomed to associate with gentility and refinement -all contributed to throw a strange and foreign air about the place. The presence, too, of a great emporium was proclaimed perpetually, in its warehouses and stores, in its gigantic docks, in its teeming quays, in its multitudinous vessels, and in the strangers, principally from America, who crowd its streets, and make it, as even its inhabitants say, a 'half Yankee city.' It might move a Jonah or a Paul to see a city so wholly given to the wor PRICE 14d. ship of Mammon-the least erected spirit from heaven that fell,' and to whose honour this town is little else than a mighty shrine, for true, heartfelt, and unwearied homage. Liverpool, sooth to say, is little of a literary or intellectual town. Antiquities it has few or none; it derives little grandeur from the past, little lustre from the genius of the present, and the only future to which it distinctly points is that of multiplied gain, and not of accelerated spiritual progress. Still, as a hive of busy humanity, as the link connecting us with that vast old world beyond the deep,' and as the love and mistress of the hoary Atlantic, it has around it far from a vulgar glory; and if earth, which proudly wears the parthenon as the best gem upon her zone,' can hardly be called proud, she is not entirely ashamed of this modern Tyre, this 'mart of nations,' and haven of ships. We propose to conduct our readers to some of the more prominent places we saw, and then to some of the more remarkable persons whom we met or heard in or about Liverpool. 6 6 We are bound first to say something of the Mechanics' Institution. This institution is certainly one of the redeeming features in the city. It is under excellent management, and seems in a very flourishing condition. Its numerous schools are under the care of able teachers of both sexes. Dr Hodgson, formerly editor of the Fife Herald,' and well known in Scotland as a lecturer on phrenology, is the president of the institute. He still frequently lectures on his favourite topic and others, and, generally, his energy and zeal are the moving spring of the establishment. He is ably seconded by Mr Thomas Hogg, the secretary, who is also a Scotchman. Lectures are delivered in the Institution hall twice a-week, during part of autumn, all winter, and on till the middle of summer. Of these we saw and heard enough to be satisfied, in the first place, that they do not to any considerable degree reach the class for which they are professedly designed-they are attended more by the middle classes than by mechanics; and, secondly, to confirm us in an opinion we expressed long ago, that lecturing, as a source of intellectual advantage, is mightily overrated, and that, as a medium of communication between the higher minds of the age and the community, it is worthless, and ought forthwith to be abandoned by these to the glib declaimers, the impudent quacks, the needy literateurs, and-save the mark!-the ladies who are driving in it so brisk and profitable a trade. The reading even of a list of lecturers for a season in any public institution is enough to prove the thing a hollow * Since our visit to Liverpool Dr Hodgson has received an invi. tation to another sphere of labour. farce. Short courses on morals, metaphysics, economics, dietetics, anatomy, astronomy, literature, music, &c., delivered by a motley batch of professors, literateurs, maids, matrons, preachers, poets, realities and shams, to the same bewildered, stupified audience of clerks, ladies, half-pay officers, idle and industrious apprentices, ignorant and well informed, constitute the history of a lecture session both here and in England. We need not mention the mortification of the lecturer at finding his best passages falling powerless, his worst hits applauded; encountering now the stare of stupid wonder, and now the silence of supreme indifference, and feeling at the close that he has degraded himself, his genius, his science, or his art, in vain. Thomas Carlyle has repeatedly told us, that the awkward position he found himself occupying-half a prophet and half a play-actor-between the tens who came really to hear him as a declarer of truth, and the hundreds who came to see him as a curiosity, to wonder or to sneer, drove him sometimes almost frantic. Lecture-rooms, indeed, furnish admirable centres of attraction for the frivolous, who would wish a little touch of literature to deepen to a proper degree the rouge of their affectation; for small incipient critics, resembling those specimens of the rising generation in Punch,' who agree, that as for that ere Shakspeare, he has been greatly overrated;' for young men and maidens, carrying on active flirtations, and warming the nest-egg of matrimony; for cigarred and ringletted puppies, looking in on their way to a rout or the theatre, measuring the lecturer and scanning the ladies with their quizzing-glass, and with cool sneer turning away-besides being proper stages for the exhibition of every kind and variety of speaking wind-bag,' where there is no fear of any Phineas rising to pierce them; but as arenas of intellectual power, as platforms for the electric influence of genius, as halls of genuine science, as rooms in the august temple of truth-they are naught. We saw, besides, most of the usual sights of Liverpool. Nelson's Monument struck us, as it does most people, as the grossest piece of affectation in stone we had ever seen; and affectation in sculpture, like affectation in the pulpit, is particularly offensive. It insults the severe and naked majesty of the art, and changes that pure and terrible tool, the chisel, into the toy of an ambitious child. As fitly almost conceive of the tongue of the lightning becoming a flatterer of greatness or the instrument of conceited conception as the point of the chisel! The Town-hall is a splendid edifice, and our fancy fired as it conceived the immense lustre suspended from its ceiling lighted up, and pouring a richer day upon the guests who are favoured at times to feast below it. In the Park we had a delicious walk on one of the last evenings of May, and the cool and silent water, the rich grassy fields, the strips of shrubbery and wood, the cheerful faces of the company, composed a scene from which the red, rayless sun seemed slowly and reluctantly to retire. Another very pleasant night was passed at the Zoological Gardens. These, though not equal, it is said, to the gardens in London, interested us much, who had never seen any similar sight before. We admired the sweet winding walks, did not inquire too severely into the pretensions of the gaily dressed throngs of ladies and gentlemen we met, paid due devoirs to the wolves, bears, lions, leopards, eagles, owls, &c., which were doing their best for the amusement of the company, and were particularly struck with the elephant-the largest we have yet seen, and which amazed us precisely as a Cockney is amazed at the first sight of a mountain. It seemed some huge dream of nightmare stalking across the view. We felt disposed to rub our eyes and then to go forward and test by touch its objective reality, till lo! the dream began to move and move towards us, and soon its crushing contact might have taught us that it was no mere vision. And then he looked like a half-animated mass, made not of the fiery dust, whence the tiger and lion are taken, but of the dough of nature; his eye seemed scarce awake, and his principal life concentrated in that 'serpent between his eyes'-the restless trunk, which moved as if impatient of confinement to such a lumpish frame. We were transported to the days And of Pyrrhus, and could easily figure the Roman soldier trembling through his mail at the sight of the tall towered monster, as though an Apennine were in motion. After asking at its keeper if they kept a Pegasus in these gardens, and being solemnly assured that they did not, we proceeded to the great show of the night-the fireworks; and there certainly we found a very pretty caricature of Pandemonium. We stood, as it were, in the midst of a whole world of tickled flame-of laughing gas, and wild was the mirth of the exploding rockets, the dancing lights, the showering shivering sparkles, and fantastic and fairy the forms that seemed self-assumed by the tipsy element; and great the glee of the crowd, delighted to see the object of their terror nodding and doing them courtesies, and becoming so tame, tractable, and amusing, as to brighten every eye, set off every fair face, convulse every chest with laughing wonder, without singeing one hair or burning one finger. And behind us, meanwhile, the evening star and Jupiter were shining. Was it in mild reproach at us for so admiring the aspiring cinders that were flashing into everlasting darkness all around? Be patient, we thought, ye bright tremblers; shine on in your courses, and, like great poets momentarily eclipsed by shallow rhymsters, say we bide our time.' Nor was that time long to come. The lights speedily paled, the mimic conflagrations burned out, the palace of the king of France sank like a dream, the last rocket came hissing down, and then again, not unnoticed even by that frivolous multitude, appeared, in their calm immortality, the 'street lamps in the city of God.' And yet the thought arose, are there not beings who, from their high vantage ground, see in those steadfast seeming stars only a flight of larger rockets, and in those heavens burning themselves out, the true and only general confla gration already begun? Pondering this speculation, we returned, pensive but much pleased, from that evening's entertainment. Next day we heard the painful tidings that a star had fallen'-that Chalmers was no more. yet we use the word painful more in deference to popular parlance than as expressive of our feelings. We have long ceased grieving, in the common sense, for the death of any one, especially for one who has done his work and entered on his rest. We have been long convinced that the greater part of the grief expressed for public men is hollow hypocrisy, although not so altogether with the admiration and praise then elicited. Death uniformly casts a glare about the merits of the departed, and this new and vivid appreciation is confounded with sorrow. The greater, indeed, a man is, the more he has achieved, the more fully he has filled his sphere, the less occasion is there for tears. The proper expression for the proper feeling at the death of a man like Chalmers is in the words which came immediately to our thoughts, and we believe to othersMy father, my father! the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof!' which was more, as first uttered by Elisha, the cry of recognition and admiration than of grief. It were mere pretence, therefore, to say that we grieved for Chalmers. We have felt more at the fall of an aged leaf, at the breaking of a hoary wave upon the shore, at the close of a summer's day-at any loss which seemed irreparable. But our minds, in rapid yet lingering review, went over the history of his life and the character of his mind, as of one living and in no wise lost. What was his meaning, and whence his power? were questions which now came upon us with strange urgency; and we felt that the following words exactly expressed our idea, and constituted the epitaph we should inscribe on his tombstone: Not a great theologian, though possessed of vivid ideas on theology-not a man of science, though widely acquainted with many branches of science-not a philosopher, though possessing much of the spirit of philosophynot a man of genius, for such a subtle idealising faculty as that of Jeremy Taylor, for instance, or of any great poet, was awanting in him; but one whose high talent and energy inflamed through the force of their own motion, and burst out into the conflagrations of eloquence-a Christian orator of the highest class-one in whom emotive sympathy with the spirit of the age, with the Scottish In the course of our sojourn in Liverpool we paid a visit to some of the more interesting spots in its neighbourhood. We crossed the Mersey to Birkenhead, and drove through its very beautiful park. This is a place begun to be built perhaps in a style too ambitious. In most towns the elegant and showy quarters are reared last; but here it is as if the New Town of Edinburgh had been erected before the Old-we have spacious though unfinished squares, elegant streets standing unsupported in a great measure by plain and solid buildings-we have the officers without the army; and although its inhabitants boast that by and by men will address their letters, not to Birkenhead by Liverpool, but to Liverpool by Birkenhead, yet we beg leave to demur, and to predict, that Birkenhead, no more than Babylon, will be built in a day. people, with the poor around him, with all that was ing so recently written on her merits, we could not choose lovely, and excellent, and of good report, was the ruling but stop and see the spot where she had spent two or three element-but for which all his varied powers and attain-years of her life. Her house stands at the west end, and ments would have only rendered him another Brougham, somewhat apart from the village, and is marked and a younger and less agile brother of that prince of smat- shaded by some large trees. A decent-looking elderly terers, but the possession of which made him the man of a Englishwoman gave us a very cordial reception. She country and of an age-made him gain great victories, and showed us the room where Mrs Hemans was wont to lead great hosts, and acquire for himself the most enviable write her poetry. It has now become a snug comfortable of immortalities.' kitchen, and, had time and tide permitted, we should have liked to have verified our conviction that the steaks now produced in it were quite as good in their way as the songs that had been. The spot is quiet and cool, but hardly retired enough for the purposes of a poetess. The hoarse sough of the city is too audible. To this place Mrs Hemans was allured by her intimacy with the family of Henry Park, Esq., then resident at Wavertree Lodge, and with Mrs Laurence of Wavertree Hall. Here she wrote her Songs of the Affections.' She left it in the spring of 1831 for Dublin, whence she was never destined to return. It is much visited, we were told, by Americans, who vent on Mrs Hemans a peculiar portion of their cheap entusymusy. We ourselves felt, or deemed we felt, no common glow,' as we fancied the form of the dove-like poetess standing before the window, through which an On the bright and burning afternoon of a holiday in the afternoon sun, split by the trees into a thousand glorious town, in company with a gentleman, to whose unceasing fragments, was streaming in; or hurried, on the soft warm attention and kindness we owed much of the pleasure we wind of her gentle afflatus, into the inner apartments to derived in Liverpool, we sailed up the river to Eastham. record the thoughts or feelings which those intense atoms This is a favourite resort of the Liverpoolians on holidays. of brightness awakened in her mind. Why did not this We liked the scene for its intensely English character. accomplished, gifted, and flattered lady add to all her acThere was, close to the shore, an elegant inn; all its win-complishments and gifts the common accomplishment in dows open, and all its rooms crowded with pleasant par- her sex of happiness? Was she decked so splendidly as a ties. Beside it were tea-gardens, looking so temptingly victim? Did some superior power, as cruel as cunning, cool amid the heat of the day, and all fluttering with the amuse himself with first forming the consummate crystal gay dresses and lively motions of the citizens. Behind, goblet and then striking through it the one fatal flaw? through woods, you reached a wide rich common, com- Surely no! Or was there, as we heard some Liverpoolians manding an extensive prospect of the interior of the hint (probably from mistake or the usual desire to detract country and of the river, from Liverpool to Runcorn. A from home-merit), some defect of temper, some touch of female school, turned loose on the green to enjoy them- what she would carefully have excluded from the Reselves, added a peculiar interest to the scene. A mile or cords of Woman?' We cannot tell. Alas, too often genius, two inwards lies the village of Eastham. On our way to especially female genius, is but the beauty of the hectic it we met numerous donkey parties in high glee, whose cheek! The face is flushed, the eye is shining with a light merry shouts of laughter might have made old Giant lovelier than the light of the evening star, while the heart Despair smile, even when his fits were on him. Eastham within is breaking. Genius, if anything, is a consuming we found a very fair specimen of the southern village. fire; and let all who have regard for woman pray it to We entered a little house in it, and had a tolerable tea for keep far far from the female breast. Conceive the sensinot above twice what it was worth. We then leaped the bility of woman added to the sensibility of genius, and dyke of the churchyard, and delighted ourselves with peer- then conceive both embittered by circumstances, and you ing into the windows of the church-a plain old edifice- have under that noble brow and that beautiful bosom a with examining a large yew-tree literally mouldering be- hell within a hell. On the other side of Wavertree we saw fore our eyes, and with studying the march of intellect and a church, where we fancied, and with considerable probathe state of British Literature' in the epitaphs on the bility, that Mrs Hemans must have worshipped and imbibed tombstones. One or two we must really copy verbatim et her best consolation. And good it was for her that while literatim: poetry to her had its stings as well as its sweets, religion was apparently a source of unmixed enjoyment. To Cowper and to many others it is a beautiful and holy avenger, ready to devour its votary, as much a source of dread as of desire; Mrs Hemans lies down on her faith as on the lap of a mother, with reverent yet fearless love. Cowper's powerful but diseased intellect saw, and his nervous shrinking temperament felt, and did exceedingly fear and quake, on account of the tremendous difficulties and darkness con 'Here underneath this stone doth lie a girl and a boy Another was as follows: Thou are goue, sweet child, from this world of care, We could have wished you longer here, To share with us the family kiss.' (!!!) A third, which we found afterwards in the churchyard of nected with the theme. Mrs Hemans's more sanguine Hale, we may annex here- 'Life is an inn where all must bait The waiter's time, the landlord's fate; We have paid our shot and so must you.' Another day we drove to the village of Hale, a village which lies to the east of Liverpool. On our way we halted at Wavertree, once the abode of Mrs Hemans. Having all along had a deep interest in this beautiful writer, and hav vision saw nothing in it but light and gladness. Arrived at Hale, we said at once this answers at last to our full idea of a sweet English village. The wood and gardenembosomed cottages, the old church, the adjacent park of Hale Hall, the parsonage with its vine of 300 years old luxuriantly shading the west side, the children selling their little bunches of flowers along the streets, the inn with the huge Childe of Hale standing as the sign, formed a fine whole, which yet to break into its separate parts we found only to increase the interest. We first inquired the history of the giant on the sign-post. He was born in 1578, and buried in Hale churchyard in 1623. We found his gravestone about the centre of the south side, like one of the tables of the fiery law,' so large it seemed beside the meaner stones around it. This personage is recorded and Manchester, we repaired to Picks Hill, situated near to have been 9 feet 3 inches in height, his hand 17 inches the Sutton Works, which lie between these two cities, and long. He was taken to court in the time of King James I., which are under the admirable management of Charles where he wrestled with the king's wrestler and put out Rawlins, Esq., well known as the secretary to the Liverhis thumb. He returned by Brazennose College, then full pool branch of the Anti-Corn-Law League. This was a of Lancashire students, where his picture was taken, and delightful day. After breakfasting at Sutton, and spendis now to be seen in the college library. About eighty ing a few pleasant hours in chit-chat on the green sward years ago his body was taken up, and the bones were for before the mansion, we made for the hill. It was a day of a time preserved in Hale Hall, but have since been re-in- great heat, and seemed designed to modify the contemptuterred in the churchyard. The thigh bone or os femores ous feeling with which we were perpetually tempted to reached from the hip of a common man to his foot. He exclaim, What things they call hills in England! what could stand upright only in the centre of the cottage where nine-pins! what turned-up work-baskets! and to make us he lived; and so they have set up his figure in the open thankful that we were not that day on Ben Lomond or air, where the people of Hale admire him as their only Stuick-na-chroan. Arrived, the view was extensive and hero,' give him such sort of worship as they can, i. e. imposing. Measureless lawns, pasturages, and parks; under his auspices drink their ale, till sometimes, we sup- trees planted so thick that they looked like a continuous pose, they deem themselves larger than he. By the way, forest; churches, spires, castles, villas, villages, and here as we are speaking of bodies being raised, why should we and there a town; a vast veil of smoke to the west indinot in this way more frequently verify or correct the cating Liverpool; the Mersey on the south; the stormy statements of history? Why is Mary Queen of Scots not hills of Wales' shadowing and subliming the landscape on thus called up, to say which of her pictures is the most the south-west; a calm, grey, warm, but sunless sky correct, and what sort of organs of amativeness, secretive- mildly enclosing the whole; such was the prospect, and, of ness, and destructiveness her skull possessed? And why course, we admired it. But where were the frequent rivers, does a stupid piece of doggrel verse, which Shakspeare can the gleaming lakes, the chains of mountains contending only have perpetrated when drunk, prevent men having a for supremacy, or the dark forests of Caledonia? We were peep at what remains of his glorious brain? Had we the struck, as everybody is, with the flatness, but still more opportunity, we should willingly front and brave the poor the smallness of English scenery. It seemed that of a and powerless curse which that doggrel imprecates upon Lilliputian land. You could not lose yourself in any part the man that moves his bones.' of it. And so artificial, withal, a tailor might almost have shaped those petty fields and miniature woods. You cry out for but one cataract to scatter disturbance from his roaring tongue over that still monotony. And for the hills, you are disposed to kick them out of your road like the husks in a pine-wood, and to conclude that there are no such presumptuous puppies as those English swells. Nevertheless, Picks Hill was on that day a pleasant place. Beautiful were the veal pasties, brisk the brown stout, inimitable the rhubarb tarts, past speaking of the sherry cobblers, vast the appetites, and vaster the mirth of the party. Wordsworth speaks of forty feeding like one; here one fed like forty, and to the poppling of the ginger-beer and lemonade corks, puns, thick, fast, furious, and generally sublimely bad, formed a stormy reply. And to disturb mirth an English landscape is the least adapted in the world. It has nothing solemn in it, at least till evening shadows it with religious hues belonging rather to the sky than the earth. But on a Scottish hill, here a forest blackens before you like a frown, and there a speck of snow speaks of winter, and there again a great glen of desolation casts up a gloom over your soul; and, hark, a lonely waterfall sings its sad monotone; and, hark again, the cry of the muirfowl or the bleat of the sheep are in your ears, and make you sigh in concert. No such looks or sounds interrupted our joyous and innocent entertainment, till at last the closing eye of evening warned us to return homewards. From the churchyard we entered the church, the tower of which is a fine old structure, and commands a wide prospect of the village and park of Hale, of the Mersey and its rich and winding shores, and of a large cantle' of inland country, level, sprinkled with woodland waving now in the gentle breeze and anon kissed into repose by the gushing sunshine. In the living green and glory of an English afternoon landscape, it formed one of those satisfying, eye-filling, heart-filling views from which you have to drag yourself away. We repaired next to Hale Hall, where the most interesting object is the 'Sabal Blackburnia,' or Blackburne palm, said to be the largest of the kind in Europe. We could not, we must say, as Hazlitt has it, 'get up a sensation about it,' though, of course, it seemed very grand, and stately, and foreign, and conscious of its own superiority to the beggarly shrubs of the north. Hale, we understood, answers admirably to its name, being famed for its salubrity and the longevity of its inhabitants. In the registry of deaths for the township (containing by the last census a population of 645 persons) not one death occurs between April 26, 1843, and January 30, 1844, a period of more than nine months. It is altogether such a place as would suit the learned friend of Joe Miller, who exclaimed, 'If I knew of a place where the people didn't die, I would go there and end my days.' In the cool of the evening we returned to Liverpool, highly gratified with Hale. We passed on our way back the cottage where resides Mrs Sandbach, grand-daughter of Roscoe. She is herself an elegant poetess, and, still more, a profound sympathiser with poetry and all that is beautiful. We possessed a note of introduction to her, but owing to her absence at her estate in Wales could not avail ourselves of the advantage. We found her grandfather's name highly reverenced in Liverpool. He was precisely the man whom a commercial town delights to read as it runs its rapid way, and to honour after he has departed from it. It could appreciate him, and dire was its wrath when De Quincey, some years ago, in a manner more plain than pleasant, set himself to bleed down the atrophy of his reputation. We would like him, though for nothing else than for the fine spirits who have sprung from him, and as the author of the elegy on Burns, the best written since 'Heaven dropp'd its pitying veil, To hide the poet's ardent eyes.' On another occasion, along with a pleasant pic-nic party, including some of the principal literateurs of Liverpool Our last trip about Liverpool was to Lord Derby's aviary, reported to be the finest in Britain. It is at Knowsley Park, a seat lying a few miles to the northeast of Liverpool. The park itself is not remarkable, but the aviary (if we may use that beggarly and threadbare phrase) beggars description. It is a living Selby's Ornithology!' And would we had the pen which wrote in Maga' an article on that book-a pen surely dropped from an eagle's wing-to describe what we saw; to describe the eagles, their burning eyes shining more brightly in the western sun, whose beams fell in through the bars of their captivity as if taunting them with a memory of their ancient rocks and airy heritages beyond the Atlantic, where he was going down; the vultures, whose beaks seemed whetted on the scythe of death, and whose wings rested like the furled flags of destruction; the condor, at once a demon and a dandy, with black wide wing that once swept Cotopaxi, and a ruff round his neck pure as driven snow; the cranes, dreams of beauty, so tall, so graceful, so creamy in colour, in form and moving as express and admirable as high-bred ladies; the owls, so |