beautiful color of the south and west; but in Manchester the
average faces were intelligent and the figures good.


III

With such a journal as the Manchester _Guardian_ still
keeping its high rank among English newspapers, there cannot be
question of the journalistic sort of thinking in the place. Of
the sort that comes to its effect in literature, such as, say,
Mrs. Gaskell's novels, there may also still be as much as ever;
and I will not hazard my safe ignorance in a perilous conjecture.
I can only say that of the Unitarianism which eventuated in that
literature, I heard it had largely turned to episcopacy, as
Unitarianism has in our own Boston. I must not forget that one of
our religions, now a dying faith, was invented in Manchester by
Ann Lee, who brought, through the usual persecutions, Shakerism
to such spiritual importance as it has now lost in these States.
Only those who have known the Shakers, with their good lives and
gentle ways, can regret with me the decline of the celibate
communism which their foundress imagined in her marital relations
with the Lancashire blacksmith she left behind her.

I am reminded (or perhaps instructed) by Mr. Hope Moncrieff in
Black's excellent _Guide to Manchester_ that before Mrs.
Gaskell's celebrity the fitful fame of De Quincey shed a backward
gleam upon his native place, which can still show the house where
he was probably born and the grammar-school he certainly ran away
from. In my forgetfulness, or my ignorance, that Manchester was
the mother of this tricksy master-spirit of English prose, who