CHAPTER III.

Quit York for Manchester.-A Character.-Quaker Lady.-Peculiar Feature in the Husbandry of the Cloth District.-Leeds.-Simplicity manifested in the Geologic Framework of English Scenery.-The Denuding Agencies almost invariably the sole Architects of the Landscape.Manchester; characteristic Peculiarities; the Irwell; Collegiate Church; light and elegant Proportions of the Building; its grotesque Sculptures; these indicative of the Scepticism of the Age in which they were produced. St Bartholomew's Day.-Sermon on Saints' Days.-Timothy's Grandmother.-The Puseyite a High Churchman become earnest.-Passengers of a Sunday Evening Train.-Sabbath Amusements not very conducive to Happiness.-The Economic Value of the Sabbath ill understood by the Utilitarian.-Testimony of History on the point.

ON the following morning I quitted York for Manchester, taking Leeds in my way. I had seen two of the ecclesiastical cities of Old England, and I was now desirous to visit two of the great trading towns of the modern country, so famous for supplying with its manufactures half the economic wants of the world. At the first stage from York we were joined by a young-lady passenger, of forty or thereabouts, evidently a character. She was very gaudily dressed, and very tightly laced, and had a bloom of red in her cheeks that seemed to have been just a little assisted by art, and a bloom of red in her nose that seemed not to have been assisted by art at all. Alarmingly frank and portentously talkative, she at once

threw herself for protection and guidance on "the gentlemen." She had to get down at one of the intermediate stages, she said; and were she to be so unlucky as to pass it, she would not know what to do,-she would be at her wit's end; but she trusted she would not be permitted to pass it: she threw herself upon the generosity of the gentlemen,-she always did, indeed; and she trusted the generous gentlemen would inform her, when she came to her stage, that it was time for her to get out. I had rarely seen, except in old playbooks, written when our dramatists of the French school were drawing ladies'-maids of the time of Charles, a character of the kind quite so stage-like in its aspect; and in a quiet way was enjoying the exhibition. And the passenger who sat fronting me in the carriage,—an elderly lady of the Society of Friends, was, I found, enjoying it quite as much and as quietly as myself. A countenance of much transparency, that had been once very pretty, exhibited at every droll turn in the dialogue the appropriate expression. Remarking to a gentleman beside me that good names were surely rather a scant commodity in England, seeing they had not a few towns and rivers, which, like many of the American ones, seemed to exist in duplicate and triplicate,-they had three Newcastles, and four Stratfords, and at least two river Ouses,-I asked him how I could travel most directly by railway to Cowper's Ouse. He did not know, he said; he had never heard of a river Ouse except the Yorkshire one, which I had just seen. The Quaker lady supplied me with the information I wanted, by pointing out the best route to Olney; and the circumstance led to a conversation which only terminated at our arrival at Leeds. I found her possessed, like many of the Society of Friends, whom Howitt so well describes, of literary taste, conversational ability, and extensive information; and we expa

We discussed English

tiated together over a wide range. poets and poetry; compared notes regarding our critical formulas and canons, and found them wonderfully alike; beat over the Scottish Church question, and some dozen or so other questions besides; and at parting, she invited me to visit her at her house in Bedfordshire, within half a day's journey of Olney. She was at present residing with a friend, she said; but she would be at home in less than a fortnight; and there was much in her neighbourhood which, she was sure, it would give me pleasure to see. I was unable ultimately to avail myself of her kindness; but in the hope that these chapters may yet meet her eye, I must be permitted to reiterate my sincere thanks for her frank and hospitable invitation. The frankness struck me at the time as characteristically English; while the hospitality associated well with all I had previously known of the Society of Friends.

I marked, in passing on to Leeds, a new feature in the husbandry of the district,-whole fields of teazles, in flower at the time, waving gray in the breeze. They indicated that I was approaching the great centre of the cloth-trade in England. The larger heads of this plant, bristling over with their numerous minute hooks, are employed as a kind of brushes or combs for raising the nap of the finer broad cloths; and it seems a curious enough circumstance, that in this mechanical age, so famous for the ingenuity and niceness of its machines, no effort of the mechanician has as yet enabled him to supersede, or even to rival, this delicate machine of nature's making. I failed to acquaint myself very intimately with Leeds,—the rain had again returned, after a brief interval of somewhat less than two days; and I saw, under cover of my old friend the umbrella, but the outsides of the two famous Cloth Halls of the place, where there are more woollen stuffs bought and sold than in any other dozen

C

buildings in the world; and its long uphill-street of shops, with phlegmatic Queen Anne looking grimly adown the slope, from her niche of dingy sandstone. On the following morning, which was wet and stormy as ever, I took the railway train for Manchester, which I reached a little after mid-day.

In passing through Northumberland, I had quitted the hilly district when I quitted the Mountain Limestone and Millstone Grit; and now, in travelling on to Manchester, I had, I found, again got into a mountainous, semi-pastoral country. There were deep green valleys, traversed by lively tumbling streams, that opened on either hand among the hills; and the course of the railway train was, for a time, one of great vicissitude,— now elevated high on an embankment,—now burrowing deep in a tunnel. It is, the traveller finds, the same Millstone Grit and Mountain Limestone which form the hilly regions of Northumberland, that give here their hills and valleys to Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire; and that, passing on to Derby, in the general south-western range of the English formations, compose the Peak, so famous for its many caves and chasms, with all the picturesque groupes of eminences that surround it. There are few things which so strike the Scotch geologist who visits England for the first time, as the simplicity with which he finds he can resolve the varying landscape into its geologic elements. The case is different in Scotland, where he has to deal, in almost every locality, with both the denuding and the Plutonic agents, and where, as in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, many independent centres of internal action, grouped closely together, connect the composition of single prospects with numerous and very varied catastrophes. But in most English landscapes one has to deal with the denuding agents alone. In passing along an open sea-coast, on which strata of the Secondary or Paleozoic formations have

been laid bare, one finds that the degree of prominence exhibited by the bars and ridges of rock exposed to the waves corresponds always with their degree of tenacity and hardness. A bed of soft shale or clay we find represented by a hollow trough; the surf has worn it down till it can no longer be seen, and a strip of smooth gravel rests over it; a stratum of sandstone, of the average solidity, rises over the hollow like a mole, for the waves have failed to wear the sandstone down; while a band of limestone or chert we find rising still higher, because still better suited, from its great tenacity, to resist the attrition of the denuding agents. And such, on a great scale, is the principle of what one may term the geologic framework of English landscape. The softer formations of the country we find represented, like the shale-beds on the shore, by wide flat valleys or extensive plains; the harder, by chains of hills of greater or lesser altitude, according to the degree of solidity possessed by the composing material. A few insulated districts of country, such as part of North Wales, Westmoreland, and Cornwall, where the Plutonic agencies have been active, we find coming under the more complex law of Scottish landscape; but in all the rest,-save where here and there a minute trappean patch imparts its inequalities to the surface, as in the Dudley coal-field,-soft or hard, solid or incoherent, determines the question of high or low, bold or tame. Here, for instance, is a common map of England, on which the eminences are marked, but not the geologic formations. These, however, we may almost trace by the chains of hills, or from the want of them. This hilly region, for instance, which extends from the northern borders of Northumberland to Derby, represents the Millstone Grit and Mountain Limestone,-solid deposits of indurated sandstone and crystalline lime, that stand up amid the landscape like the harder strata on the