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SKETCHES,

&c.

CHAP. I.

Departure from London-Stage-coach reflections-Irish passenger-Arrival at Liverpool-Theatre-Cooke-Young-Indecency of a certain part of the audience.

Liverpool, August, 1810.

EXHAUSTED with sickness I left London, in the hope of finding in distant and rural scenes some relief from pain, and some alleviation of suffering: whether I shall have my expectations realized, or whether a work undertaken under such circumstances can afford much amusement to the reader, is, I fear, a problematical business.-Books of travels have multiplied in proportion as the countries where travellers could resort to have diminished; and have left nothing new either to see or to say. In former times, when the desire of change, or the love of amusement, influenced a person to travel, he had the whole continent of Europe to resort to; where, amidst the festive scenes of Paris, or the romantic scenery of Switzerland, on the top of Vesuvius, or amidst the ruins of the Capitol, on the Rhone, the Tiber, or the Brenta; names endeared to the imagination, not only by the grand ideas annexed

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to them, but by fond association with the days in which these ideas were first acquired, he might find a remedy for a "mind diseased," and sick of the world as it is, riot in an imaginary one, the glittering offspring of his own fancy; but thanks to the ambition of the great ones of the earth, who have kept the world in a pretty constant state of warfare for the last twenty years, and may, perhaps, for twenty years to come, the British tourist has now a narrower range. Spider-like, he must spin his web out of the materials of the British empire only-with bird-eye prospects of Cadiz and Lisbon, as long as we are permitted to occupy them. There is no evil, however, without its good: one advantage attending this is, that it brings Englishmen better acquainted with their own country; every nook and corner of which have been so often described, that they are now as well known as Hyde-Park Corner. Should a similar knowledge of Ireland ever come to be generally diffused, it would be attended with infinite advantages to that ill-fated country; as many of the evils under which it has so long laboured may be traced to the ignorance in which Englishmen have lived of its true character; with which, until lately, they were almost as much unacquainted as with Thibet or Japan. Most happy should I feel myself, could my feeble production remove one abuse, correct one error, or soften one prejudice, that keeps asunder two nations whose interests are so inseparable, and which, united by God and nature, it will never, I trust, be in the power of man to cut asunder.

I left London at six o'clock on Monday evening, the 29th of July, in the heavy coach, for Liverpool, from which place I knew I could have a speedy con

veyance to Dublin. Nothing remarkable happened during our journey; for it would be almost as wearisome to the reader, as it was at the time to myself, to recount all the jolts and hardships of an overloaded coach during a journey of upwards of two hundred miles. My fellow-travellers were mighty commonplace people; they had neither sense to instruct, beauty to charm, nor wit to enliven. Our principal speakers were a smart Liverpool milliner, a little addicted to Methodism, and, I suspect, more than a little addicted to love; and a Greenock shop-keeper who had been in London for the first time, and left it with a firm conviction of its inferiority to the part of the world of which he was a native. The streets, he said, were nothing to those of Glasgow; the London porter was not to be compared with Bell's beer, one bottle of which (this was the highest panegyric he could bestow on it) would make a man drunk at any time brick-kilns we passed gave him an opportunity of remarking that the bricks about Glasgow were of a much better colour. The vice of London, particularly its ill observance of Sunday, which they termed the Sabbath, called forth severe animadversions from him and the fair Methodist. I verily believe they considered it another Gomorrah, devoted to immediate destruction; and as I endeavoured to soften the asperity of their censures, and besides, took a wishful look of it from Highgate Hill, I presume they found in me the pillar of salt, necessary to complete the picture. Sick of their unmeaning conversation, I took refuge in sullen silence; though I could not forbear sighing as I surveyed the little group around me, and contrasted the present scene with the picture which, in early

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