LETTER XVII.
ENGLISH CORDIALITY AND HOSPITALITY, AND THE FEELINGS AWAKENED BY IT—LIVERPOOL, UNCOMFORTABLE COFFEE-HOUSE THERE—TRAVELLING AMERICANS—NEW YORK PACKETS—THE RAILWAY—MANCHESTER.
England would be a more pleasant country to travel in if one’s feelings took root with less facility. In the continental countries, the local ties are those of the mind and the senses. In England they are those of the affections. One wanders from Italy to Greece, and from Athens to Ephesus, and returns and departs again; and, as he gets on shipboard, or mounts his horse or his camel, it is with a sigh over some picture or statue left behind, some temple or waterfall—perhaps some cook or vintage. He makes his last visit to the Fount of Egeria, or the Venus of the Tribune—to the Caryatides of the Parthenon, or the Cascatelles of Tivoli—or pathetically calls for his last bottle of untransferable lachra christi, or his last côtelettes provençales. He has “five hundred friends” like other people, and has made the usual continental intimacies—but his valet-de-place takes charge of his adieus—(distributes his “p. p. c’s” for a penny each,) and he forgets and is forgotten by those he leaves behind, ere his passport is recorded at the gates. In all these countries, it is only as a resident or a native that you are treated with kindness or admitted to the penetralia of domestic life. You are a bird of passage, expected to contribute a feather to every nest, but welcomed to none. In England this same disqualification becomes a claim. The name of a stranger opens the private house, sets you the chair of honor, prepares your bed, and makes everything that contributes to your comfort or pleasure temporarily your own. And when you take your departure, your host has informed himself of your route, and provided you with letters to his friends, and you may go through the country from end to end, and experience everywhere the same confiding and liberal hospitality. Every foreigner who has come well-introduced to England, knows how unexaggerated is this picture.
I was put upon the road again by my kind friend, and with a strong west wind coming off the Atlantic, drove along within sound of the waves, on the road to Liverpool. It was a mild wind, and came with a welcome—for it was freighted with thoughts of home. Goethe says, we are never separated from our friends as long as the streams run down from them to us. Certain it is, that distance seems less that is measured by waters and winds. America seemed near, with the ocean at my feet and only its waste paths between. I sent my heart over (against wind and tide) with a blessing and a prayer.
There are good inns, I believe, at Liverpool, but the coach put me down at the dirtiest and worst specimen of a public house that I have encountered in England. As I was to stay but a night, I overcame the prejudice of the first coup d’œil, and made the best of a dinner in the coffee room. It was crowded with people, principally merchants, I presumed, and the dinner hour having barely passed, most of them were sitting over their wine or toddy at the small tables, discussing prices or reading the newspapers. Near me were two young men, whose faces I thought familiar to me, and with a second look I resolved them into two of my countrymen, who, I found out presently by their conversation, were eating their first dinner in England. They were gentlemanlike young men, of good education, and I pleased myself with looking about and imagining the comparison they would draw, with their own country fresh in their recollection, between it and this. I could not help feeling how erroneous in this case would be a first impression. The gloomy coffee room, the hurried and uncivil waiters, the atrocious cookery, the bad air, greasy tables, filthy carpet, and unsocial company—and this one of the most popular and crowded inns of the first commercial town in England! My neighbors themselves, too, afforded me some little speculation. They were a fair specimen of the young men of our country, and after several years’ exclusive conversance with other nations, I was curious to compare an untravelled American with the Europeans around me. I was struck with the exceeding ambitiousness of their style of conversation. Dr. Pangloss himself would have given them a degree. They called nothing by its week-day name, and avoided with singular pertinacity exactly that upon which the modern English are as pertinaciously bent—a concise homeliness of phraseology. They were dressed much better than the people about them, (who were apparently in the same sphere of life,) and had on the whole a superior air—owing possibly to the custom prevalent in America of giving young men a university education before they enter into trade. Like myself, too, they had not yet learned the English accomplishment of total unconsciousness in the presence of others. When not conversing they did not study profoundly the grain of the mahogany, nor gaze with solemn earnestness into the bottom of their wine-glasses, nor peruse with the absorbed fixedness of Belshazzar, the figures on the wall. They looked about them with undisguised curiosity, ordered a great deal more wine than they wanted (very American, that!) and were totally without the self-complacent, self-amused, sober-felicity air which John Bull assumes after his cheese in a coffee room.
I did not introduce myself to my countrymen, for an American is the last person in the world with whom one should depart from the ordinary rules of society. Having no fixed rank either in their own or a foreign country, they construe all uncommon civility into either a freedom, or a desire to patronise—and the last is the unpardonable sin. They called after a while for a “mint julep,” (unknown in England,) for slippers, (rather an unusual call also—gentlemen usually wearing their own,) and seemed very much surprised on asking for candles, at being ushered to bed by the chambermaid.
I passed the next morning in walking about Liverpool. It is singularly like New York in its general air, and quite like it in the character of its population. I presume I must have met many of my countrymen, for there were some who passed me in the street whom I could have sworn to. In a walk to the American consul’s, (to whose polite kindness I, as well as all my compatriots, have been very much indebted,) I was lucky enough to see a New York packet drive into the harbor under full sail—as gallant a sight as you would wish to see. It was blowing rather stiffly, and she ran up to her anchorage like a bird, and taking in her canvass with the speed of a man-of-war, was lying in a few moments with her head to the tide, as neat and as tranquil as if she had slept for the last month at her moorings. I could feel in the air that came ashore from her, that I had letters on board.
Anxious to get on to Cheshire, where, as they say of the mails, I had been due some days, and very anxious to get rid of the perfume of beer, beefsteaks, and bad soup, with which I had become impregnated at the inn, I got embarked in an omnibus at noon, and was taken to the railway. I was just in time, and down we dived into the long tunnel, emerging from the darkness at a pace that made my hair sensibly tighten and hold on with apprehension. Thirty miles in the hour is pleasant going when one is a little accustomed to it. It gives one such a contempt for time and distance! The whizzing past of the return trains, going in the other direction with the same velocity, making you recoil in one second, and a mile off the next—was the only thing which, after a few minutes, I did not take to very kindly. There were near a hundred passengers, most of them precisely the class of English which we see in our country—the fags of Manchester and Birmingham—a class, I dare say, honest and worthy, but much more to my taste in their own country than mine.
I must confess to a want of curiosity respecting spinning-jennies. Half an hour of Manchester contented me, yet in that half hour I was cheated to the amount of four and-six-pence—unless the experience was worth the money. Under a sovereign I think it not worth while to lose one’s temper, and I contented myself with telling the man (he was a coach proprietor) as I paid him the second time for the same thing in the course of twenty minutes, that the time and trouble he must have had in bronzing his face to that degree of impudence gave him some title to the money. I saw some pretty scenery between Manchester and my destination, and having calculated my time very accurately, I was set down at the gates of —— Hall, as the dressing bell for dinner came over the park upon the wind. I found another English welcome, passed three weeks amid the pleasures of English country life, departed as before with regrets, and without much more incident or adventure reached London on the first of November, and established myself for the winter.