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Liverpool to Manchester.—­There are two ways from Liverpool to Manchester, one by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, through Bolton, which has a station behind the Exchange, and one by the old route, through Newton.  The line by the new one has Bolton upon its course, and renders the Aintree Racecourse half as near Manchester as Liverpool.

For choice take a Tuesday or Saturday, and travel up by the early Cotton Brokers’ Express to Manchester, so as to see one more phase of the English commercial character.  The Brokers are a jovial set and hospitable, as keen as Yankees and as industrious.  There is a marked difference between them and the Spinners, but they are of no particular country.  Liverpool, like Manchester, although not to the same degree, is colonised by strangers.  Both Irishmen and Scotchmen are to be found among the most respectable and successful, and a considerable number of Americans are settled there as merchants and shipping agents; indeed it is half American in its character.

In this year of 1851, to describe the Liverpool and Manchester Railway would be absurd; acres of print, in all civilized languages, and yards of picture-illustration, have been devoted to it.  At Newton Station you see below you a race-course of great antiquity, and what was once a huge hotel, built to supply a room large enough for the Mother Partingtons of Lancashire to meet and prepare their mops for sweeping back the Atlantic tide of public opinion.  There they met, and dined and drank and shouted, and unanimously agreed that it was foolish legislation which transferred the right of representation from the village of Newton to the great city of Manchester; after which they went home, and wisely submitted to the summons which found its speaking-trumpets at Manchester.  Fortunately for this country, a minority knows how to submit to a majority, and the Conservative Hall, by a sort of accidental satire on its original uses, has been turned into a printing office.

A little farther on is Chat-Moss, a quaking bog, which the opponents of the first railway proved, to the satisfaction of many intelligent persons, to be an impassable obstacle to the construction of any solid road.  We fly across it now reading or writing, scarcely taking the trouble to look out of the window.  But if we do, we may see reclamation and cultivation, in the shape of root-crops and plantations, extending over the wet waste.

William Roscoe was one of the first to attempt to reclaim this Moss; and it is worthy of note, that it was among the literary and scientific friends of Roscoe that George Stephenson’s idea of a railroad from Liverpool to Manchester, through Chat-Moss, found its warmest supporters, at a time when support was much needed; for the shares were hawked, and even distributed among friends who were guaranteed against loss, in order to make up a fitting parliamentary subscription to what has proved one of the most successful speculations in public works, of this century.