Great Britain -- Description and travel; Railroad travel -- Great Britain; Railroads -- Great Britain
In Bold Street is the Palatine, a miniature copy of the Clubs of Pall Mall:
at the doors and windows may be seen, in the intervals of business, a number
of young gentlemen trying very hard to look as if they had nothing to do but
dress fine and amuse themselves. But so far from being the idle fellows they
would be thought, the majority are hardworking merchants and pains-taking
attornies, who bet a little, play a little, dote upon a lord, and fancy that
by being excessively supercilious in the rococo style of that poor heathen
bankrupt Brummel, they are performing to perfection the character of men of
fashion. This, the normal state of young Liverpool, at a certain period the
butterfly becomes a grub, a money grub, and abandoning brilliant cravats,
primrose gloves, and tight shiny boots, subsides into the respectable heavy
father of genteel comedy, becomes a churchwarden, a patron of charities, a
capitalist, and a highly respectable member of society. The Manchester man
is abrupt, because his whole soul is in the money-making business of the day;
the Liverpool gentleman's icy manners are part of his costume. The "cordial
dodge," which has superseded Brummel's listless style in the really
fashionable world, not having yet found its way down by the express train to
the great mart of cotton-wool.
'Change hours, which are twice a-day, morning and afternoon, afford a series
of picturesque groups quite different to those of any other town, which
should be kept in mind when visiting Manchester.
But perhaps the pleasantest thing in Liverpool is a promenade on one of the
piers, or rather quays (for they run along and do not project into the river)
when the tide is coming in, the wind fair for the Mersey, and fleets of
merchantmen are driving up with full-bellied sails to take their anchorage
ground before going into dock. An examination of the Docks, with the curious
Dock arrangements of the Railway Companies, and the Sailor's Home, of which
Prince Albert laid the first stone in 1846, will take a day. The Cheshire
side of the Mersey forms a suburb of Liverpool, to which steamers are plying
every ten minutes from the villages of Rock Ferry, Tranmere, Birkenhead,
Monk's Ferry, Seacombe, Liskeard, Egremont, and New Brighton. The best idea
of the extent of the Liverpool Docks may be obtained from the Seacombe Hotel,
an old-fashioned tavern, with a bowling green, where turtle soup, cold punch,
and claret are to be had of good quality at moderate charges.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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