anchester, her majesty paid a visit to that great city.
On no occasion, even in the metropolis, was so vast a multitude of
persons collected to see the queen; and, probably, on no occasion was
she ever welcomed in a provincial city with so prodigal an expenditure
and splendid a display of loyalty. Manchester and Salford were
both traversed in their great principal thoroughfares by the royal
procession, attended with military pomp, and many persons of very great
eminence in the nation were in her suite. The profuse expenditure,
displayed in flags and decorations, attracted the notice of the royal
lady so much, that she expressed her regret that the citizens of
Manchester should have gone to so great an expense on her account.
A large public pleasure-ground in Salford, set apart by public
subscriptions for the recreation of the people, and designated Peel
Park, in honour of the free-trade champion, lay in the route taken by
the royal _cortege_. In that park one of the most extraordinary fights
was presented to her majesty ever witnessed by a monarch--eighty
thousand Sunday-school children, of all religious denominations, were
assembled to see their queen. The bringing together of such a mass
of young persons, and the arrangements for placing them in a proper
position to see and to be seen, was a work of anxiety and toil of which
those only can form a conception who took part in it. Much of the credit
of the occasion was due to the late Robert Needham, Esq., solicitor, of
Manchester, who, with extraordinary toil, from the effects of which he
never recovered, arranged and carried out the vast work. The writer
of this history was present on the occasion, and can never forget the
spectacle, which partook of the sublime and the affecting. Together with
the vast host of children, dressed in holiday array, and with the fair
and open countenances for which the children of Saxon Lancashire are
remarkable, there were their teachers and ministers, and in the rear a
vast multitude consisting of the parents and friends of these children,
and of the religious congregations whose zeal and liberality provided
instruction for their juvenile charge. There were fourteen tiers of
galleries around the chief carriage-way of the park. These tiers were so
arranged that the _cortege_, passing along the road, could see at once
the whole array, and the children from every tier see the queen and her
attendants. As her majesty entered the park, the who