the transatlantic voyage, so instantly have itself carried from
Liverpool to any point where trains will convey it? Liverpool is
most worthy to be seen and known, and no one who looks up from
the bacon and eggs of his first hotel breakfast after landing,
and finds himself confronted by the coal-smoked Greek
architecture of St. George's Hall, can deny that it is of a
singularly noble presence. The city has moments of failing in the
promise of this classic edifice, but every now and then it
reverts to it, and reminds the traveller that he is in a great
modern metropolis of commerce by many other noble edifices.


I

Liverpool does not remind him of this so much as the good and
true Baedeker professes, in the dockside run on the overhead
railway (as the place unambitiously calls its elevated road); but
then, as I noted in my account of Southampton, docks have a fancy
of taking themselves in, and eluding the tourist eye, and even
when they "flank the Mersey for a distance of 6-7 M." they do not
respond to American curiosity so frankly as could be wished. They
are like other English things in that, however, and it must be
said for them that when apparent they are sometimes unimpressive.
From my own note-book, indeed, I find that I pretended to think
them "wonderful and almost endless," and so I dare say they are.
But they formed only a very perfunctory interest of our day at
Liverpool, where we had come to meet, not to take, a steamer.

Our run from London, in the heart of June, was very quick and
pleasant, through a neat country and many tidy towns. In the