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]

It will be suspected from these reminiscences that I have been
studying a page of fine print in Baedeker, and I will not deceive
the reader. It is true; but it is also true that I had some
wonder, altogether my own, that so great a city should make so
small an appeal to the imagination. In this it outdoes almost any
metropolis of our own. Even in journalism, an intensely modern
product, it does not excel; Manchester has its able and well-
written _Guardian_, but what has Liverpool? Glasgow has its
Glasgow School of Painting, but again what has Liverpool? It is
said that not above a million of its people live in it; all the
rest, who can, escape to Chester, where they perhaps vainly hope
to escape the Americans. There, intrenched in charming villas
behind myrtle hedges, they measurably do so; but Americans are
very penetrating, and I would not be sure that the thickest and
highest hedge was invulnerable to them. As it is, they probably
constitute the best society of Liverpool, which the natives have
abandoned to them, though they do not constitute it permanently,
but consecutively. Every Cunarder, every White Star, pours out
upon a city abandoned by its own good society a flood of
cultivated Americans, who eddy into its hotels, and then rush out