a most abusive letter to Sir James Graham,
in which he charged him with such a string of political crimes as must
have astonished the knight of Netherby, winding up the abuse by asking
how he dared to solicit an honest man for his vote and by what right he
had taken so unwarrantable a liberty.

CHAPTER X.

In the last chapter of my "Recollections" I spoke of the man--Joseph
Williamson; the present will be of his "excavations." In various parts
of the world we find, on and under the surface, divers works of human
hands that excite the wonder of the ignorant, the notice of the
intelligent, and the speculation of the learned. Things are presented to
our view, in a variety of forms, which must have been the result of great
labour and cost, and which appear utterly useless and inapplicable to any
ostensibly known purpose. Respecting many of these mysterious records of
a past age, page after page has been written to prove, and even disprove,
the supposed intent of their constructors; and it cannot but be admitted
that after perusing many an erudite disquisition, we are sometimes as
well-informed, and as near arriving at a conclusion as to the original
purpose for which the object under discussion was intended, as when our
attention was first engaged in it. In some instances, those who have
discovered uses for the strange remnants of, to us, a dark age, have
exceeded in ingenuity the projectors of those relics.

Could we draw aside the thick veil that hides the future from us, we
might perhaps behold our great seaport swelling into a metropolis, in
size and importance, its suburbs creeping out to an undreamt-of distance
from its centre; or we might, reversing the picture, behold Liverpool by
some unthought-of calamity--some fatal, unforeseen mischance, some
concatenation of calamities--dwindled down to its former insignificance:
its docks shipless, its warehouses in ruins, its streets moss-grown, and
in its decay like some bye-gone cities of the east, that once sent out
their vessels laden with "cloth of blue, and red barbaric gold." Under
which of these two fates will Liverpool find its lot some centuries
hence?--which of these two pictures will it then present? Be it one or
the other, the strange undertakings of Joseph Williamson will perhaps,
some centuries from now, be brought again to light, and excite as much
marvel and inquiry as any mysterious building of old, the purpose of
which we do not understand,