inhabitants to the Queen, it is described as “Her Majesty’s poor decayed town of Liverpool.” Its poverty may be understood from the fact, that when Charles I. levied his iniquitous and despotic tax of ship money, this town was rated at £26 only, while Bristol was rated at £1,000. In the civil war Liverpool was alternately held by the Parliamentarians, taken by Prince Rupert, and retaken by the Parliament. In the reign of William III., that monarch, with part of his train, embarked at this port for Ireland, previously to the battle of the Boyne; and regiments and privateer vessels were here equipped against the Pretender and the French. Times and manners are somewhat changed here since 1617, when one of the orders of the common-council demanded, “that every council-man shall come to council _clean-shaved_, and in his long clothes.” Slander and gossip were very severely punished by the civic dignitaries, it being a law, “that if any man speak ill of the mayor, he shall lose his freedom.” The most important feature in the history of this place, is the extraordinary rapidity with which it has risen into a degree of splendour and importance, without example in the history of any commercial country. Among the causes which have produced its elevation to a rank but partially inferior to the metropolis, are, its situation on the shore of a noble river, which expands into a wide estuary; its proximity to the Irish coast; its central position with respect to the United Kingdom; its intimate connexion with the principal manufacturing districts, and with every part of the kingdom, by numerous rivers, canals, and railroads, and the persevering industry and enterprising spirit of its inhabitants. Without the romance, we may see among them the reality of the merchant-nobles of Genoa and Venice; and the grandeur which pervades the modern buildings of our English port may scarcely be outvied in stateliness, and certainly not in fitness and utility, by any palace-city of the past. As we passed along the busy quays of these crowded docks, and thought of the wealth conveyed by the winged couriers of the ocean there congregated, the following gorgeous lines in Marlow’s Jew of Malta, occurred to us: perhaps the expectant owners of argosies bound hitherward, deal not quite so largely as the poet’s Croesus, in jewelled treasures; but we cannot very honestly change amethysts into tobacco, nor bags of fiery opals into bales of cotton wool; the circumstances of the case may therefore be allowed to vary a little, without our transposing the terms:—