A reference to one other of the connecting ways: thin sabre wounds of light drawn across the dense body of offices—to such a one as Leather Lane, for instance, slipping stealthily from Tithebarn Street to Dale Street, a sun-bright tremor of traffic, dainty and diminished as an image in a lens, flickering delicately across its outlet....
An impression of some such typical grouping of the mobile and the architectural as one gets, say, at the top of one of the three parallel ways—Chapel Street, Water Street, James Street—which run down from the centre towards the River: a crawling steep of men, cars, carriages, and drays; the flags and signs of a horde of shipping offices accompanying its descent; slow masts and a couple of great funnels moving seriously beyond. Or of such another grouping as one finds being repeated, over and over again, at the base of the brown stone curtain that falls from St. Nicholas’ Churchyard to the street below: a troop of sandwichmen, their beat ended, piling their placards against the wall; a couple of ramping Clydesdales—head-chains glinting, feet asplay for purchase—taking the Chapel Street hill; an aproned carter swinking at their heads; a white-flecked mound of cotton-bales lurching stolidly at their heels; high over all, sailing equably against the blue, the fretted top-gallant of the Church....
A memorandum of one of the older (not the old—there are none) scraps of the City, pushed a little to one side, antiquated before they are antique: of that jolly little pot-bellied barber’s shop at the foot of Mount Pleasant (Mr. Hay has [described that], too), and of how the slick new mass of the juxtaposed University Club crushes it into insignificance—a ready-made metaphor; or of that delightful Georgian residence in Wolstenholme Square, not far from Bold Street, with lorries clattering about its mild old cobbles, and a trio of extremely dirty tinsmiths bullying a carter from the top of its dignified stairway....
THE LITTLE SHOP, MOUNT PLEASANT.
An appreciation of that tumultuary roofscape one surveys from the steps of the Art Gallery, a thing to be seen against the afterglow, a clean-verged, leaping monochrome of mauve on chrysoprase....
And there you have the main letters in the alphabet of masonry which Liverpool uses to write out some part of her confessions.
§ 4.
Now, it may be observed that I have made no reference whatever to some of the most conspicuous majuscules in that alphabet. I have said nothing, for instance, about the Municipal Offices, nor of the Town Hall, nor of the Sailors’ Home, nor of the new Cotton Exchange, nor of the old Custom House, nor of a dozen other much-photographed architectural plums. This is not laxity, nor a sudden dearth of adjectives, nor a disgust with the business of scene-painting. There is, as they say, a reason; and if I disclose that reason, the confessions which those dropped capitals bestud may tend to grow more legible. Such disclosure might serve, at all events, to suggest a co-ordinating theory, to provide a kind of zoetrope into which those detached impressions and Mr. Hay’s pictures may equally be fitted, and which, judiciously twirled, may induce them all to swim into a single animate and breathing image.