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