I went to the Town Hall, according to the programme, at eleven o'clock.
There was already a large number of people (invited guests, members of
the Historical Society, and other local associations) assembled in the
great hall-room, and one of these was delivering an address to Mr. Browne
as I entered. Approaching the outer edge of the circle, I was met and
cordially greeted by Monckton Milnes, whom I like, and who always reminds
me of Longfellow, though his physical man is more massive. While we were
talking together, a young man approached him with a pretty little
expression of surprise and pleasure at seeing him there. He had a
slightly affected or made-up manner, and was rather a comely person. Mr.
Milnes introduced him to me as Lord ------. Hereupon, of course, I
observed him more closely; and I must say that I was not long in
discovering a gentle dignity and half-imperceptible reserve in his
manner; but still my first impression was quite as real as my second one.
He occupies, I suppose, the foremost position among the young men of
England, and has the fairest prospects of a high course before him;
nevertheless, he did not impress me as possessing the native qualities
that could entitle him to a high public career. He has adopted public
life as his hereditary profession, and makes the very utmost of all his
abilities, cultivating himself to a determined end, knowing that he shall
have every advantage towards attaining his object. His natural
disadvantages must have been, in some respects, unusually great; his
voice, for instance, is not strong, and appeared to me to have a more
positive defect than mere weakness. Doubtless he has struggled manfully
against this defect; and it made me feel a certain sympathy, and, indeed,
a friendliness, for which he would not at all have thanked me, had he
known it. I felt, in his person, what a burden it is upon human
shoulders, the necessity of keeping up the fame and historical importance
of an illustrious house; at least, when the heir to its honors has
sufficient intellect and sensibility to feel the claim that his country
and his ancestors and his posterity all have upon him. Lord ------ is
fully capable of feeling these claims; but I would not care, methinks, to
take his position, unless I could have considerably more than his
strength.
In a little while we formed ourselves into a procession, four in a row,
and set forth from the Town Hall, through James Street, Lord Street, Lime
Street, all the way through a line of policemen and a throng of people;
and all the windows were alive with heads, and I never before was so
conscious of a great mass of humanity, though perhaps I may often have
seen as great a crowd. But a procession is the best point of view from
which to see the crowd that collects together. The day, too, was very
fine, even sunshiny, and the streets dry,--a blessing which cannot be
overestimated; for we should have been in a strange trim for the banquet,
had we been compelled to wade through the ordinary mud of Liverpool. The
procession itself could not have been a very striking object. In
America, it would have had a hundred picturesque and perhaps ludicrous
features,--the symbols of the different trades, banners with strange
devices, flower-shows, children, volunteer soldiers, cavalcades, and
every suitable and unsuitable contrivance; but we were merely a trail of
ordinary-looking individuals, in great-coats, and with precautionary
umbrellas. The only characteristic or professional costume, as far as I
noticed, was that of the Bishop of Chester, in his flat cap and
black-silk gown; and that of Sir Henry Smith, the General of the
District, in full uniform, with a star and half a dozen medals on his
breast. Mr. Browne himself, the hero of the day, was the plainest and
simplest man of all,--an exceedingly unpretending gentleman in black;
small, white-haired, pale, quiet, and respectable. I rather wondered why
he chose to be the centre of all this ceremony; for he did not seem
either particularly to enjoy it, or to be at all incommoded by it, as a
more nervous and susceptible man might have been.
The site of the projected edifice is on one of the streets bordering on
St. George's Hall; and when we came within the enclosure, the
corner-stone, a large square of red freestone, was already suspended
over its destined place. It has a brass plate let into it, with an
inscription, which will perhaps not be seen again till the present
English type has grown as antique as black-letter is now. Two or three
photographs were now taken of the site, the corner-stone, Mr. Browne, the
distinguished guests, and the crowd at large; then ensued a prayer from
the Bishop of Chester, and speeches from Mr. Holme, Mr. Browne, Lord
------, Sir John Pakington, Sir Henry Smith, and as many others as there
was time for. Lord ------ acquitted himself very creditably, though
brought out unexpectedly, and with evident reluctance. I am convinced
that men, liable to be called on to address the public, keep a constant
supply of commonplaces in their minds, which, with little variation, can
be adapted to one subject about as well as to another; and thus they are
always ready to do well enough, though seldom to do particularly well.
From the scene of the corner-stone, we went to St. George's Hall, where a
drawing-room and dressing-room had been prepared for the principal
guests. Before the banquet, I had some conversation with Sir James Kay
Shuttleworth, who had known Miss Bronte very intimately, and bore
testimony to the wonderful fidelity of Mrs. Gaskell's life of her. He
seemed to have had an affectionate regard for her, and said that her
marriage promised to have been productive of great happiness; her husband
being not a remarkable man, but with the merit of an exceeding love for
her.
Mr. Browne now took me up into the gallery, which by this time was full
of ladies; and thence we had a fine view of the noble hall, with the
tables laid, in readiness for the banquet. I cannot conceive of anything
finer than this hall: it needs nothing but painted windows to make it
perfect, and those I hope it may have one day or another.
At two o'clock we sat down to the banquet, which hardly justified that
name, being only a cold collation, though sufficiently splendid in its
way. In truth, it would have been impossible to provide a hot dinner for
nine hundred people in a place remote from kitchens. The principal table
extended lengthwise of the hall, and was a little elevated above the
other tables, which stretched across, about twenty in all. Before each
guest, besides the bill of fare, was laid a programme of the expected
toasts, among which appeared my own name, to be proposed by Mr. Monckton
Milnes. These things do not trouble me quite as much as they used,
though still it sufficed to prevent much of the enjoyment which I might
have had if I could have felt myself merely a spectator. My left-hand
neighbor was Colonel Campbell of the Artillery; my right-hand one was Mr.
Picton, of the Library Committee; and I found them both companionable
men, especially the Colonel, who had served in China and in the Crimea,
and owned that he hated the French. We did not make a very long business
of the eatables, and then came the usual toasts of ceremony, and
afterwards those more peculiar to the occasion, one of the first of which
was "The House of Stanley," to which Lord ------ responded. It was a
noble subject, giving scope for as much eloquence as any man could have
brought to bear upon it, and capable of being so wrought out as to
develop and illustrate any sort of conservative or liberal tendencies
which the speaker might entertain. There could not be a richer
opportunity for reconciling and making friends betwixt the old system of
society and the new; but Lord ------ did not seem to make anything of it.
I remember nothing that he said excepting his statement that the family
had been five hundred years connected with the town of Liverpool. I wish
I could have responded to "The House of Stanley," and his Lordship could
have spoken in my behalf. None of the speeches were remarkably good; the
Bishop of Chester's perhaps the best, though he is but a little man in
aspect, not at all filling up one's idea of a bishop, and the rest were
on an indistinguishable level, though, being all practised speakers, they
were less hum-y and ha-y than English orators ordinarily are.
I was really tired to death before my own turn came, sitting all that
time, as it were, on the scaffold, with the rope round my neck. At last
Monckton Milnes was called up and made a speech, of which, to my dismay,
I could hardly hear a single word, owing to his being at a considerable
distance, on the other side of the chairman, and flinging his voice,
which is a bass one, across the hall, instead of adown it, in my
direction. I could not distinguish one word of any allusions to my
works, nor even when he came to the toast, did I hear the terms in which
he put it, nor whether I was toasted on my own basis, or as representing
American literature, or as Consul of the United States. At all events,
there was a vast deal of clamor; and uprose peers and bishop, general,
mayor, knights and gentlemen, everybody in the hall greeting me with all
the honors. I had uprisen, too, to commence my speech; but had to sit
down again till matters grew more quiet, and then I got up, and proceeded
to deliver myself with as much composure as I ever felt at my own
fireside. It is very strange, this self-possession and clear-sightedness
which I have experienced when standing before an audience, showing me my
way through all the difficulties resulting from my not having heard
Monckton Milnes's speech; and on since reading the latter, I do not see
how I could have answered it better. My speech certainly was better
cheered than any other; especially one passage, where I made a colossus
of Mr. Browne, at which the audience grew so tumultuous in their applause
that they drowned my figure of speech before it was half out of my mouth.
After rising from table, Lord ------ and I talked about our respective
oratorical performances; and he appeared to have a perception that he is
not naturally gifted in this respect. I like Lord ------, and wish that
it were possible that we might know one another better. If a nobleman
has any true friend out of his own class, it ought to be a republican.
Nothing further of interest happened at the banquet, and the next morning
came out the newspapers with the reports of my speech, attributing to me
a variety of forms of ragged nonsense, which, poor speaker as I am, I was
quite incapable of uttering.
May 10th.--The winter is over, but as yet we scarcely have what ought to
be called spring; nothing but cold east-winds, accompanied with sunshine,
however, as east-winds generally are in this country. All milder winds
seem to bring rain. The grass has been green for a month,--indeed, it
has never been entirely brown,--and now the trees and hedges are
beginning to be in foliage. Weeks ago the daisies bloomed, even in the
sandy grass-plot bordering on the promenade beneath our front windows;
and in the progress of the daisy, and towards its consummation, I saw the
propriety of Burns's epithet, "wee, modest, crimson-nipped flower,"--its
little white petals in the bud being fringed all round with crimson,
which fades into pure white when the flower blooms. At the beginning of
this month I saw fruit-trees in blossom, stretched out flat against stone
walls, reminding me of a dead bird nailed against the side of a barn.
But it has been a backward and dreary spring; and I think Southport, in
the course of it, has lost its advantage over the rest of the Liverpool
neighborhood in point of milder atmosphere. The east-wind feels even
rawer here than in the city.
Nevertheless, the columns, of the Southport Visitor begin to be well
replenished with the names of guests, and the town is assuming its aspect
of summer life. To say the truth, except where cultivation has done its
utmost, there is very little difference between winter and summer in the
mere material aspect of Southport; there being nothing but a waste of
sand intermixed with plashy pools to seaward, and a desert of
sand-hillocks on the land side. But now the brown, weather-hardened
donkey-women haunt people that stray along the reaches, and delicate
persons face the cold, rasping, ill-tempered blast on the promenade, and
children dig in the sands; and, for want of something better, it seems to
be determined that this shall be considered spring.
Southport is as stupid a place as I ever lived in; and I cannot but
bewail our ill fortune to have been compelled to spend so many months on
these barren sands, when almost every other square yard of England
contains something that would have been historically or poetically
interesting. Our life here has been a blank. There was, indeed, a
shipwreck, a month or two ago, when a large ship came ashore within a
mile from our windows; the larger portion of the crew landing safely on
the hither sands, while six or seven betook themselves to the boat, and
were lost in attempting to gain the shore, on the other side of the
Ribble. After a lapse of several weeks, two or three of their drowned
bodies were found floating in this vicinity, and brought to Southport for
burial; so that it really is not at all improbable that Milton's Lycidas
floated hereabouts, in the rise and lapse of the tides, and that his
bones may still be whitening among the sands.
In the same gale that wrecked the above-mentioned vessel, a portion of a
ship's mast was driven ashore, after evidently having been a very long
time in and under water; for it was covered with great barnacles, and
torn sea-weed, insomuch that there was scarcely a bare place along its
whole length; clusters of sea-anemones were sticking to it, and I know
not what strange marine productions besides. J----- at once recognized
the sea-anemones, knowing them by his much reading of Gosse's Aquarium;
and though they must now have been two or three days high and dry out of
water, he made an extempore aquarium out of a bowl, and put in above a
dozen of these strange creatures. In a little while they bloomed out
wonderfully, and even seemed to produce young anemones; but, from some
fault in his management, they afterwards grew sickly and died. S-----
thinks that the old storm-shattered mast, so studded with the growth of
the ocean depths, is a relic of the Spanish Armada which strewed its
wrecks along all the shores of England; but I hardly think it would have
taken three hundred years to produce this crop of barnacles and
sea-anemones. A single summer might probably have done it.
Yesterday we all of us except R----- went to Liverpool to see the
performances of an American circus company. I had previously been, a day
or two before, with J-----, and had been happy to perceive that the fact
of its being an American establishment really induced some slight
swelling of the heart within me. It is ridiculous enough, to be sure,
but I like to find myself not wholly destitute of this noble weakness,
patriotism. As for the circus, I never was fond of that species of
entertainment, nor do I find in this one the flash and glitter and whirl
which I remember in other American exhibitions.
[Here follow the visits to Lincoln and Boston, printed in Our Old Home.
--ED.]
May 27th.--We left Boston by railway at noon, and arrived in PETERBOROUGH
in about an hour and a quarter, and have put up at the Railway Hotel.
After dinner we walked into the town to see