Forster took no further part in public affairs, but travelled to Italy, and died at Rome in 1738. Had he shown generalship at Preston equal to this of his flight, all might have gone well with the Pretender.
The rebellion of 1745 came nearer success than this of thirty years earlier, but we do not find Preston harbouring and encouraging the rebels of that time, to anything like the same extent. The gaiety of Preston was not, this time, for them. But what, after all, did that gaiety amount to? A great deal, perhaps, judged by the standard of the wild Highlanders, come but lately from their solitary glens; but very little, it would seem, reckoned from an English standpoint, if the business then done by the sole wine-merchant of the town may serve for comparison. It would appear that the merchant who supplied Manchester lived at Preston, as the resort of the gentry, and was rarely asked to supply more than a gallon of wine at a time: and that a time which did not commonly stint itself in drink.
It was a very small place in those days, and numbered little more than 6,000 inhabitants; but when the factory system was introduced into the cotton manufacture, it grew rapidly, and is now a great town of more than 113,000 people. Nothing else so vividly shows us how far removed we are from those days, in circumstances and spirit, than the simple juxtaposition of those eloquent figures, which speak far more eloquently than the most impassioned descriptive writing.
PRESTON: TOWN HALL, HARRIS PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND SESSIONS HOUSE
PRESTON TOWN HALL
There remains a certain stateliness in the streets and houses of Preston: an aristocratic “county town” environment that not all the expansion of industrialism has been able to engulf: an eighteenth-century appearance that calmly declines to be hustled out of existence. The refinements of life, in so far as they are reflected by many dainty tea-shops and restaurants, are not lacking at Preston; but let the stranger come into the town on a Saturday night, and he will see another phase of existence, for then the place is typical of all Lancashire towns on that supreme marketing occasion. The streets are thronged with the people of Preston and all the villages round about: it is a marketing and pleasuring saturnalia, wherein the brilliantly lighted shops, the barrows, and the shows compete for the custom of thousands of good-humoured mill-hands whose weekly wages are burning holes in their pockets.
Preston Town Hall was long pre-eminent among the town halls of Lancashire, and a source of peculiar pride to the townsfolk, but others have since eclipsed it. Designed by Sir Gilbert Scott, it looks like an instalment of St. Pancras station, in London, also designed by him, unaccountably mislaid in the provinces. Manchester, the biggest town, holding, bien entendu, all the tricks, has rightly gone Nap on town halls, and has won the game. Even in Preston its pre-eminence has since been challenged, for in the self-same square there stands the immense building of the Harris Institute and Public Library, designed in the Ionic order of architecture: a very severe Greek contrast with the gay Early English of the Town Hall. But there are even later competitors, the Sessions House and the Post Office, to challenge attention. Of these two, the first is in the present fashionable Eclectic Renaissance, while the Post Office is the product of the Office of Works, and of no style at all. The great square in which these various buildings stand is, therefore, nowadays very much an exhibition of architectural methods, incongruous and mutually destructive.
“TEETOTAL”