This not without its picturesque exaggerations, and the citizens of Manchester will hardly recognise themselves in that inky complexion, but it will serve as a traveller’s tale, and puts a keener edge on the unsharpened blade of truth. The blackest blackness of all, however, is that of the great Infirmary building, in Piccadilly, whose sable hue is own brother to darkest night. Only long years have brought it to this richness of tint. Art could not produce such a black; dull, light-absorbing as it is, the building looks like an etching against the sky, and its Doric architecture in this coating would probably astonish any ancient Greek who might be privileged to revisit the earth and see what modern times had made of ancient models. But the Infirmary, ill-placed in these days amidst the roar of the streets, is presently to be removed, and this, the finest site in the city, is to be the home of an Art Gallery and Public Library. There are statues on the broad pavement in front of the Infirmary, and very fine ones too. But the latest addition to their number, that of Queen Victoria, is not a success. Manchester people do not—and rightly they do not—like it. The bronze seated figure of the Queen is a poor copy by Onslow Ford of the well-known statue by Alfred Gilbert at Winchester, and is set in a great canopied chair-like throne that forms a ridiculous object, seen along the street, resembling a gigantic grandfather’s-chair. The figure is the very picture of senility. Was Onslow Ford, after all, a bitter satirist of the age and of the Empire? The horrible thing looks as though he had successfully striven to typify the decay that had set in during the last years of the Victorian Era: that glorious, world-moulding era of which the second Jubilee, in 1897, was really the monument and epitaph. Here you see the tired, aged face, the hands nervelessly holding orb and sceptre; and you cannot but think that this is really typical of that time. Given another ten years of Victorian recluse rule, with old-established abuses clustering around a long-occupied throne, cobwebbed methods hugged jealously, outrageous Prime Ministers, whether of the Old Man Eloquent type or the equally harmful man of the Blazing Indiscretions, and the slowly built Empire would swiftly have sped down the road to disintegration. A more fitting monument than this for modern Manchester, which lives in the present and for the future, would be a statue of the patriot King, under whose rule in the new century the nation and the Empire shall, please God, have a new birth. [Sidenote: _THE PROGRESS OF A PEOPLE_]