Liverpool society, like that of every other place, has always been divided into sets; how formed, by what mysterious line separated into divisions and sub-divisions, and sections, and cliques and coteries, we can no more tell than we can explain the causes at work to produce the eddies of the tide. There they are, and we must take them as we find them. It is so, always was so, and ever will be so. But, in enumerating the old stagers of half-a-century ago, more or less, we have passed them in review “promiscuously, as it were,” without undertaking the invidious task of cataloguing the particular set to which they individually belonged. Generally speaking, however, they may be placed under three heads: the fashionable set, the wealthy and commercial set, and the Corporation set. But many of those who have been named belonged to all of these sets. There was, moreover, a literary set; but it was numerically very small. Its three principal ornaments were Dr. Currie, Dr. Shepherd and Mr. Roscoe. The latter, who became so world famous at once, and so deservedly, was a remarkable and striking instance of the proverbially small estimation in which prophets are generally held in their own country. It is true that, by a momentary enthusiasm, he was sent to parliament to represent his native town. But it was transient and evanescent, and as speedily burnt out as a fire of stubble. Liverpool never appreciated Roscoe as the rest of the world appreciated him, nor does it now appreciate him as the rest of the world appreciates him, in spite of its feeble talk about his immortal memory, and its weak and mocking attempts to support Roscoe clubs. In any other place, his name would have been what Shakespeare’s is to Stratford, “a household word,” familiar in the mouth of age, manhood and childhood. But it is not so here, and with him. He has a small and decreasing circle of friends, who remember him when alive, and still treasure every word of wisdom which they ever heard from his lips. He has a somewhat wider circle of admirers, who read his works, and find a giant’s hand impressed upon them all. And there are others who profess to read and admire, because they have learned that no badge of ignorance would be thought greater in the literary world than a confession that they have not studied the writings of Roscoe.