Seven English Cities eBook

In the evening there were not so many lovers at the religious meetings before the classic edifice opposite the hotel, where the devotions were transacted with the help of a brass-band; but there were many youths smoking short pipes, and flitting from one preacher to another, in the half-dozen groups.  Some preachers were nonconformist, but there was one perspiring Anglican priest who labored earnestly with his hearers, and who had more of his aspirates in the right place.  Many of his hearers were in the rags which seem a favorite wear in Liverpool, and I hope his words did their poor hearts good.

Slightly apart from the several congregations, I found myself with a fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me in an accent so unlike my own American that I ventured to answer him in Italian.  He was indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos Ayres and was presently thinking of New York; and we had some friendly discourse together concerning the English.  His ideas of them were often so parallel with my own that I hardly know how to say he thought them an improvident people.  I owned that they spent much more on state, or station, than the Americans; but we neither had any censure for them otherwise.  He was of that philosophic mind which one is rather apt to encounter in the Latin races, and I could well wish for his further acquaintance.  His talk rapt me to far other and earlier scenes, and I seemed to be conversing with him under a Venetian heaven, among objects of art more convincing than the equestrian statue 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,