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NOTES OF A READER

IMPROVEMENT OF LANCASHIRE.

The west of England has considerably the advantage over the eastern side of the island.  One way or another nature did much more for it.  It is true, that the eastern side was civilized much earlier; yet human ingenuity and industry have of late years been much more successfully employed in turning the gifts of nature to the best possible account.  Ireland and America are customers, for whom, though they were long in coming, it was worth while to wait.  After all, Lancashire is the most remarkable and characteristic feature in the comparison.  From being among the most backward parts of England, this county has worked its way into the front rank.  The contrast between its condition up to the middle of the last century, and the astonishing spectacle which it exhibits at present, belongs to the transformation which a hundred years create in a newly settled country like America, far more than to the gradual improvements and changes of an old English county.

It would be curious to analyze the concurrent causes, and marshal the successive steps, by which Lancashire has advanced;—­not only succeeding in appropriating to itself a leading interest in the creative inventions of Watt and Arkwright, but connecting its name in honourable alliance with literature and science.  The very circumstances from which a contrary presumption would originally have been drawn, have (singularly enough) principally contributed to its extraordinary progress.  Lancashire owes the canals, by which the commercial thoroughfare of that end of England has been turned from the Humber to the Mersey, to the enterprise of a Peer.  It owes the docks, which have about them almost a Roman presentiment of future greatness, to the spirit of a Corporation.  It owes the taste and accomplishments, by which the character of its wealth has been raised above the drudgery and fanaticism of money-getting, almost entirely to the zeal of a few Dissenters.  The name of Governor Clinton is not so pre-eminently united with the canal policy of America, as is the name of the Duke of Bridgewater with the canals of England.  He staked his last shilling on the chance of thus cutting out an inland north-west passage to the Atlantic.  The corporation of Liverpool, by an enlightened application of their vast resources, have accelerated, consolidated, and secured the realization, of every expectation and contingency which fortune threw in their way.  They have hastened, not to say, anticipated, events.  There can be as little doubt of the effect which the light radiating from the assemblage of Priestley, Wakefield, Aikin, &c. at Warrington; from the presence of Percival, Henry, Ferriar, and Dalton, at Manchester; and from that of Roscoe and Currie at Liverpool, spread over their circle.  The literary attainments and cultivation of the manufacturers and merchants of Lancashire, as a body, seem otherwise likely long to have lagged behind their general powers of understanding, and their real station in society.—­Edinburgh Review.