The Unitarian sect in
Liverpool have, as a body, great wealth and respectability.
Yesterday I walked with my wife and children to the brow of a hill,
overlooking Birkenhead and Tranmere, and commanding a fine view of the
river, and Liverpool beyond. All round about new and neat residences for
city people are springing up, with fine names,--Eldon Terrace, Rose
Cottage, Belvoir Villa, etc., etc., with little patches of ornamented
garden or lawn in front, and heaps of curious rock-work, with which the
English are ridiculously fond of adorning their front yards. I rather
think the middling classes--meaning shopkeepers, and other
respectabilities of that level--are better lodged here than in America;
and, what I did not expect, the houses are a great deal newer than in our
new country! Of course, this can only be the case in places
circumstanced like Liverpool and its suburbs. But, scattered among these
modern villas, there are old stone cottages of the rudest structure, and
doubtless hundreds of years old, with thatched roofs, into which the
grass has rooted itself, and now looks verdant. These cottages are in
themselves as ugly as possible, resembling a large kind of pigsty; but
often, by dint of the verdure on their thatch and the shrubbery
clustering about them, they look picturesque.
The old-fashioned flowers in the gardens of New England--blue-bells,
crocuses, primroses, foxglove, and many others--appear to be wild flowers
here on English soil.
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