ee his three largest shareholders. (Oh,
these bloated dons!) That three members of "the society of _ti_total
abstinence" drank, at the beautiful O'Killingham's cottage, twenty pints
of porter (White-bread), two flagons of whisky, and three of claret, may
meet with less incredulity, though the assortment of liquor is barbarous
and the quantity is certainly large. But let us turn from this nonsense
to the remarkable Manchester article.

[Sidenote: The "Manchester" article.]

It was not for some thirty years later than Mery's visit that I myself
knew, and for some time lived in, the new-made "city," as it became, to
the horror of Mr. Bright, just before Mery saw it. But though there must
have been many changes in those thirty years, they were nothing to those
which have taken place in the fifty that have passed subsequently. And I
can recognise the Manchester I knew in Mery's sketch. This may seem to
be at first an exceedingly moderate compliment--in fact something close
to an insult. But it is nothing of the kind. It is true that there is
considerable _naivete_ in a sentence of his own: "En general les
nationaux sont fort ignorants sur les phenomenes de leur pays; il faut
s'adresser aux etrangers pour en obtenir la solution." And it is also
true that our "nationals," at that time and since, have been
excessively ignorant of phenomena which the French tourists of Louis
Philippe's reign discovered here, and surprised, not to say diverted, at
the solutions thereof preferred by these obliging strangers. That Mery
had something of the Michiels[298] in him, what has been said above
should show. But in some strange way Manchester--foggiest and rainiest
of all our industrial hells,[299] except Sheffield--seems to have made
his brain clear and his sight dry, even in drawing a sort of
half-Rembrandt, half-Callot picture. He takes, it is true, some time in
freeing himself from that obsession by one of our _not_-prettiest
institutions, "street-walking," which has always beset the French.[300]
But he does get clear, and makes a striking picture of the great
thoroughfares of Market Street and Piccadilly; of the view--a wonderful
one certainly, and then not interfered with by railway viaducts--from
and of the Cathedral; and of the extraordinary utilisation of the scanty
"naval" capabilities of Irk and Irwell and Medlock. But, as has been
said, such things are at best but accidents of the novel.

[Sidenote: Karr.]

If not much is fou