This adherence to the more hearty viands and customs of olden time, by the way, is an exponent of a feeling sustained with peculiar tenacity in that part of England. Cheshire and Lancashire are the stronghold of that race peculiar to this country, the _gentry_. In these counties the peerage is no authority for gentle birth. A title unsupported by centuries of honorable descent, is worse than nothing; and there is many a squire, living in his immemorial “Hall,” who would not exchange his name and pedigree for the title of ninety-nine in a hundred of the nobility of England. Here reigns _aristocracy_. Your Baron Rothschild, or your new-created lord from the Bank or the Temple, might build palaces in Cheshire, and live years in the midst of its proud gentry unvisited. They are the cold cheese, celery, and port, in comparison with the toasted cheese and spiced ale.
ENGLISH CORDIALITY AND HOSPITALITY, AND THE FEELINGS AWAKENED BY IT—LIVERPOOL, UNCOMFORTABLE COFFEE-HOUSE THERE—TRAVELLING AMERICANS—NEW YORK PACKETS—THE RAILWAY—MANCHESTER.
England would be a more pleasant country to travel in if one’s feelings took root with less facility. In the continental countries, the local ties are those of the mind and the senses. In England they are those of the affections. One wanders from Italy to Greece, and from Athens to Ephesus, and returns and departs again; and, as he gets on shipboard, or mounts his horse or his camel, it is with a sigh over some picture or statue left behind, some temple or waterfall—perhaps some cook or vintage. He makes his last visit to the Fount of Egeria, or the Venus of the Tribune—to the Caryatides of the Parthenon, or the Cascatelles of Tivoli—or pathetically calls for his last bottle of untransferable lachra christi, or his last _côtelettes provençales_. He has “five hundred friends” like other people, and has made the usual continental intimacies—but his valet-de-place takes charge of his adieus—(distributes his “p. p. c’s” for a penny each,) and he forgets and is forgotten by those he leaves behind, ere his passport is recorded at the gates. In all these countries, it is only as a resident or a native that you are treated with kindness or admitted to the penetralia of domestic life. You are a bird of passage, expected to contribute a feather to every nest, but welcomed to none. In England this same disqualification becomes a claim. The name of a stranger opens the private house, sets you the chair of honor, prepares your bed, and makes everything that contributes to your comfort or pleasure temporarily your own. And when you take your departure, your host has informed himself of your route, and provided you with letters to his friends, and you may go through the country from end to end, and experience everywhere the same confiding and liberal hospitality. Every foreigner who has come well-introduced to England, knows how unexaggerated is this picture.
