The ingenious and persevering artist who constructed that grand model of Liverpool, which we all remember in the Exhibition of 1851, and which is now in the Derby Museum of the city of the Liver, did very wisely in making the Docks the most prominent feature in his model, and treating the thoroughfares of the town merely as secondary adjuncts. For the Docks are in reality Liverpool, even as the poet has said that love is of man’s life a part, but woman’s whole existence. Our interest in the Queen of the Mersey commences at Birkenhead, and ends at Bramley Moore Dock, on the other side. I say Bramley Moore Dock, because that was the last constructed when I was in Liverpool. Some dozens more may have been built since I was there. Docks are like jealousy, and grow continually by what they feed on. We can ill afford to surrender so noble a public building as St. George’s Hall, so thronged and interesting a thoroughfare as Dale Street; yet it must be confessed that the attention of the visitor to Liverpool is concentrated and absorbed by the unrivalled and magnificent docks. So he who visits Venice, ardent lover of art and architecture as he may be, gives on his first sojourn but a cursory glance at the churches and palaces; he is fascinated and engrossed by the canals and the gondolas. So the stranger in Petersburg and Moscow has at first but scant attention to bestow on the superb monuments, the picturesque costumes; his senses are riveted upon the golden domes of Tzaaks and the Kremlin. Liverpool is one huge dock; and from the landing-stage to West Derby island, everything is of the docks and docky. The only wonder seems to be that the ships do not sail up the streets, and discharge their cargoes at the doors of the merchants’ counting-houses. But in London, in the suburbs, in the West-end, in the heart of the city oft-times, what do we know or care about the docks? There are scores of members of the Stock Exchange, I will be bound, who never entered the dock gates, and those few who have paid a visit to Dock London, may merely have gone there with a tasting-order for wine. When we consider that in certain aristocratic circles it is reckoned to be rather a breach of etiquette than otherwise to know anything about the manners and customs of the dwellers on the other side of Temple Bar, even as the by-gone snob-cynic of fashion and literature professed entire ignorance as to the locality of Russell Square, and wanted to know “where you changed horses” in a journey to Bloomsbury—unless, indeed, my Lord Duke or my Lady Marchioness happen to be a partner in a great brewing and banking firm, under which circumstances he or she may roll down in her chariot to the city to glance over the quarterly balance sheet of profit; when we consider that this world of a town has cities upon cities within its bosom, that in the course of a long life may never be visited; when we think of Bermondsey,