Misce.
Presented at any chemist’s, this results, strange to say, in a preparation not to be distinguished from what is sold on week-days across the public bars as “whiskey and soda.”
It is along the Great Western Road, and in the park at Kelvingrove, that Sunday finds Glasgow at its best: for there you are in the residential districts, and the finest feathers are then assumed for church-parade. It is the picturesque made more picturesque by the stately group of the University buildings, erected between 1866 and 1870.
GEORGE SQUARE
Glasgow having the reputation of being the “best-governed city in Great Britain,” it behoves the stranger, if not to pry into its great tramways, gas and water and electric-lighting undertakings, and the like municipal activities, at least to see the civic centre of the place. This is George Square. A citizen of Glasgow—I think he was a Lord Provost, or at the very least of it a bailie—has written a history of George Square, from whose pages you may learn how (like Britain arising at Heaven’s command from the azure main) George Square came into being from some pitiful malebolge, at the august will of the city council. It is a story touched to great issues, and if it does not make my heart beat to a quicker rate, that is my own insufficiency.
To a Londoner, who cannot help his vice of comparison, George Square is another, and a smaller, Trafalgar Square. To aid the resemblance and confirm the smallness of the scale, here is a column in the centre. Sir Walter Scott, and not Nelson, it is who in effigy occupies the summit. The thing looks as though, with a little judicious watering and careful culture, it might some day grow to be a Nelson column. All around are other statues: equestrian effigies of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert; and Colin Campbell, Thomas Campbell, Peel, Livingstone, Sir John Moore, Burns, and others on foot. One side of the Square is occupied by the “City Chambers”: what in England we would term the Town Hall. This is a great pile designed by William Young, architect of the new War Office building in London; and in the same classic renaissance style, with the same old pepper-castor pavilions at either end: the usual small ones (for cayenne) in the middle, and the inevitable pediment and indispensable tower. The cost was £540,000, the building was open in 1888, and this, the third or fourth Glasgow Town Hall, each one in succession larger than its forebear, is already too small. So also is the inconvenient General Post Office building, near by, opened in 1876.
In connection with the bronze Valhalla of heroes in George Square, it may be noted that Glasgow is, in general, great in statues and memorials. Probably the most majestic statue of Wellington in existence is that in front of the Exchange, an equestrian effigy by Marochetti. Nelson, on the other hand, is commemorated by a tall obelisk on Glasgow Green.
Footnote.
[1] Meat and hire.
THE END