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- look back upon the period here spoken of with a swelling feeling of
immeasurable superiority and pride, I am filled with a comical sadness
at the vanity of all human exaltation. For the cope-stone of to-day is
the corner-stone of tomorrow; and as St. Peter’s church was built in
great part of the ruins of old Rome, so in all our erections, however
imposing, we but form quarries and supply ignoble materials for the
grander domes of posterity.
And even as this old guide-book boasts of the, to us, insignificant
Liverpool of fifty years ago, the New York guidebooks are now vaunting
of the magnitude of a town, whose future inhabitants, multitudinous as
the pebbles on the beach, and girdled in with high walls and towers,
flanking endless avenues of opulence and taste, will regard all our
Broadways and Bowerys as but the paltry nucleus to their Nineveh. From
far up the Hudson, beyond Harlem River, where the young saplings are
now growing, that will overarch their lordly mansions with broad
boughs, centuries old; they may send forth explorers to penetrate into
the then obscure and smoky alleys of the Fifth Avenue and
Fourteenth-street; and going still farther south, may exhume the
present Doric Custom-house, and quote it as a proof that their high and
mighty metropolis enjoyed a Hellenic antiquity.
As I am extremely loth to omit giving a specimen of the dignified style
of this _“Picture of Liverpool,”_ so different from the brief, pert,
and unclerkly hand-books to Niagara and Buffalo of the present day, I
shall now insert the chapter of antiquarian researches; especially as
it is entertaining in itself, and affords much valuable, and perhaps
rare information, which the reader may need, concerning the famous
town, to which I made _my first voyage._ And I think that with regard
to a matter, concerning which I myself am wholly ignorant, it is far
better to quote my old friend verbatim, than to mince his substantial
baron-of-beef of information into a flimsy ragout of my own; and so,
pass it off as original. Yes, I will render unto my honored guide-book
its due.
But how can the printer’s art so dim and mellow down the pages into a
soft sunset yellow; and to the reader’s eye, shed over the type all the
pleasant associations which the original carries to me!
No! by my father’s sacred memory, and all sacred privacies of fond
family reminiscences, I will not! I will _not_ quote thee, old Morocco,
before the cold face of the marble-hearted world; for your antiquities
would only be skipped and dishonored by shallow-minded readers; and for
me, I should be charged with swelling out my volume by plagiarizing
from a guide-book-the most vulgar and ignominious of thefts!
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