When you land on the platform, if you can afford it, go to the Adelphi Hotel, where the accommodation is first-rate, but the charges about the same as in Bond Street or St. James’s Street, London.

There are others to suit all purses, and plenty of dining-houses on the London system, so that it is not absolutely necessary to submit to the dear and often indifferent dinners which are the rule in the coffee-rooms of most English hotels.

Liverpool has no antiquities of any mark; the public buildings and works worth seeing are few but important, although a page might be filled with the names of Institutions of various kinds.

By far the most interesting, original, and important, are those connected with the commerce of the town.  That is to say, the docks and the gigantic arrangements at the railways for goods’ traffic.  St. George’s Hall, a splendid building in the Corinthian style, containing the Law Courts and a hall for public meetings, as a sort of supplement to the Town-hall, meets the view immediately on leaving the railway station.  The Mechanics’ Institution in Mount Street, one of the finest establishments of the kind in the kingdom, provides an excellent education for the young, and for adults, at a very cheap rate.

A Collegiate Institution, opened in 1843, for affording a first-class education on the plan of the Durham and Marlborough Colleges, at a less expense than at Oxford or Cambridge, is to be found at Everton in a handsome Elizabethan building.

The Town-hall, with its auxiliary buildings, encloses the Exchange on three sides.  The vestibule contains a statue of George Canning by Chantrey:  in the centre of the Exchange stands a monument to Nelson, which we cannot admire.  On the occasion of an invitation to dinner from the Mayor, or of a grand ball, it is worth while to penetrate beyond the vestibule, otherwise the walk through tolerably handsome rooms is scarcely worth the trouble, although it costs nothing.

The immense News-rooms of the Exchange, under one of the Arcades, are open to every respectable stranger introduced,—­we may almost say without introduction.  There are several other News-rooms with libraries attached.  The Lyceum in Bold Street, and the Athenaeum in Church Street, which was founded by purchases from the library of William Roscoe, contain a number of valuable works of reference.

The Royal Institution of Science and Literature, founded by William Roscoe in 1814, by the subscription of shareholders, contains a museum of natural history of considerable value, some curious pictures, a set of casts from the AEgina and Phigaleian marbles, and a collection of philosophical instruments, with a laboratory and a theatre in which lectures are occasionally delivered.  This Institution is not flourishing.  It was lately offered to the Corporation as a free gift by the proprietors, on condition that the museum, etc., were to be open free to the town.  The offer was declined by a small majority.