I was delighted to encounter at my friend’s table one or two of the old English peculiarities, gone out nearer the metropolis. Toasted cheese and spiced ale—“familiar creatures” in common life—were here served up with all the circumstance that attended them when they were not disdained as the allowance of maids of honor. On the disappearance of the pastry, a massive silver dish, chased with the ornate elegance of ancient plate, holding coals beneath, and protected by a hinged cover, was set before the lady of the house. At the other extremity of the table stood a “peg tankard” of the same fashion, in the same massive metal, with two handles, and of an almost fabulous capacity. Cold cheese and port were at a discount. The celery, albeit both modish and popular, was neglected. The crested cover erected itself on its hinge, and displayed a flat surface, covered thinly with blistering cheese, with a soupçon of brown in its complexion, quivering and delicate, and of a most stimulating odor. A little was served to each guest, and commended as it deserved, and then the flagon’s head was lifted in its turn by the staid butler, and the master of the house drank first. It went around with the sun, not disdained by the ladies’ lips in passing, and came to me, something lightened of its load. As a stranger I was advised of the law before lifting it to my head. Within, from the rim to the bottom, extended a line of silver pegs, supposed to contain, in the depth from one to the other, a fair draught for each bibber. The flagon must not be taken from the lips, and the penalty of drinking deeper than the first peg below the surface, was to drink to the second—a task for the friar of Copmanhurst. As the visible measure was of course lost when the tankard was dipped, it required some practice or a cool judgment not to exceed the draught. Raising it with my two hands, I measured the distance with my eye, and watched till the floating argosy of toast should swim beyond the reach of my nose. The spicy odor ascended gratefully to the brain. The cloves and cinnamon clung in a dark circle to the edges. I drank without drawing breath, and complacently passed the flagon. As the sea of all settled to a calm, my next neighbor silently returned the tankard. I had exceeded the draught. There was a general cry of “drink! drink!” and sounding my remaining capacity with the plummet of a long breath, I laid my hands once more on the vessel, and should have paid the penalty or perished in the attempt, but for the grace shown me as a foreigner, at the intercession of that sex distinguished for its mercy.
This adherence to the more hearty viands and customs of olden time, by the way, is an exponent of a feeling sustained with peculiar tenacity in that part of England. Cheshire and Lancashire are the stronghold of that race peculiar to this country, the gentry. In these counties the peerage is no authority for gentle birth. A title unsupported by centuries of honorable descent, is worse than nothing; and there is many a squire, living in his immemorial “Hall,” who would not exchange his name and pedigree for the title of ninety-nine in a hundred of the nobility of England. Here reigns aristocracy. Your Baron Rothschild, or your new-created lord from the Bank or the Temple, might build palaces in Cheshire, and live years in the midst of its proud gentry unvisited. They are the cold cheese, celery, and port, in comparison with the toasted cheese and spiced ale.
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.