youth, my romantic imagination had drawn of a stage coach; where the most uncommon adventures were to happen, and where some forlorn damsel, flying for the sake of love, was to be met and comforted by some interesting personage-such as not unlikely I then imagined myself; but this is but the stage coach of a novelist or a poet; an English one at present (so much are commerce and romance at variance) gives us laughing, not crying heroines, who care as little for refinement as they do for Epictetus, and sedate male passengers (grave and sober men), who talk about the price of stocks, and the comforts of a good dinner, and care a great deal more about a leg of lamb, or breast of veal, than either taper limbs or panting bosoms, were they even aided by "the lightning of the eye, the clustering tresses, the white and rounded arms of Miss Owenson's choicest heroine herself."

The company on the outside, as is usual in Liverpool coaches, consisted of a number of seamen, who drank, sung, and quarrelled during the whole of the journey; I do not suppose there ever was a more noisy coach, since coaches were first invented; a mill was the temple of silence in comparison. One of them, an old Irishman, had been in the navy upwards of twenty years, and was then returning with a pension of sixteen pounds a year to his wife, who kept a small shop in Liverpool; he had three guineas, and a seven-shillingpiece, which he showed with great exultation, and seemed to consider an inexhaustible mine. With the generosity natural to his profession and country, he insisted upon treating every one, both in and on the coach: and by way of doing the honours of it the better, and setting his company a good example, he got so

drunk, that in crawling round the top in pursuit of his brandy bottle, he tumbled off, and narrowly escaped being killed. He was very much stunned with the fall: the first use he made of his tongue, was to inquire after the unlucky bottle which had caused his overthrow: and, on the Scotchman's telling him he should rather return thanks to Heaven for his deliverance, he poured forth a volley of execrations at his ill luck in returning (after so long an absence) to his wife, with a face covered with scars. He was hoisted (not without some difficulty) on the top of the coach; and as he continued very outrageous at the thoughts of his lost beauty, as well as brandy bottle, the coachman thought it prudent to secure him with a large chain to the roof, where he sat grinning in terrific majesty. When he got sober he was released, and I could not help being struck with the courage he displayed in a very dangerous situation in which we were placed, by the partial overturning of the coach-the company inside scrambled out as well as they could, the outside passengers jumped off, and he only remained. While the coachman was engaged in getting up the fallen horse, he managed the reins with admirable coolness, and succeeded in extricating the coach from a situation, in which the slightest error would have overturned it and himself along with it.

We arrived about five o'clock on Wednesday evening, having been forty-seven hours on the road; the coach stops at the Talbot Inn, in Water Street: a house which, however well it may be adapted to the man of business, is rather too noisy for a studious man, and too slow in its attendance for a hungry one. After a fatiguing journey, we naturally look forward to the

comforts of a good dinner; I had regaled myself with the thoughts of it for the last twenty miles-it was lucky I had so well feasted in imagination, as I was doomed to experience the reverse in reality: the dinner was bad, and the wine worse; the fish was too little, and a mutton chop was too much, done; the mustard was sour, and had I tasted the vinegar, I dare say I should have found it sweet: besides all this I was obliged to wait a couple of hours for it, because the whole house, mistress, servants and all, were engaged in preparing a dinner for a great gentleman. I was curious to know who this great personage was, who thus caused me to fast without any religious merit: he was no less a person than a great Birmingham gunsmith, and, as the waiter told me, worth upwards of fifty thousand pounds-wealth being the only standard by which a man is estimated here: seeing me, however, look rather disconsolate, he admitted, with great candour, I had some reason to complain, but requested I would suspend my opinion till the next day at four o'clock, when, at the travellers' ordinary, I should get a dinner (to use his own words) fit for a prince, and wine-worthy, no doubt the Birmingham gunsmith himself; my opinion, however, was already formed-I did not choose to sleep in a mill, or to eat in a caravansera, I therefore removed the next day to the Crown, in RedCross Street, where I now am, and find myself much more comfortable.

As I am fond of the theatre, I asked the chambermaid at the Talbot, immediately on my arrival, if Mr. Young was performing there? she answered No; but after hesitating a moment, said the drunken man was: I had no difficulty in understanding who she meant,

and had this night a very rich, though not a spirited feast, in his performance of Shylock: his excellence in that part, however, is too well known to require any comment of mine. I was very much pleased with the appearance of the house, and with the performers in general. The Liverpool actors were very respectable, and besides Mr. Cooke and Mr. Simmons, there were some female performers from London: Miss Bolton was highly interesting in Jessica, and sung several songs with great taste and feeling: Mrs. H. Johnston played Portia with great propriety, though I should suppose it a part to which she is not much accustomed. The part in which she pleased me the least was that in which she laboured the most, I mean in the last scene of the last act, where Portia torments Bassanio for having given away her ring. Indeed I have remarked, that in the expression of humour, this lady almost always fails; a circumstance the more extraordinary, if it be true, as I have heard reported by those who know her, that the character of her own disposition is gaiety; this is a proof, among many others, how little connexion there is between the real and artificial character of a performer, and should serve to check an opinion, too prevalent (which, for the sake of my friend Cooke, I trust is unjust) that to portray successfully a villain, one must be a villain himself. Mr. Young, in whose disposition the milder virtues predominate, is most generally admired in parts of energy and force: though I have good reasons for believing he conceives his strength is in the pathetic; but in this instance (no uncommon thing with the greatest men) he has mistaken his own character; his Beverley, though a good, is an inferior performance to many of his others; his

element is the sublime, the gloomy and terrific, the gigantic that appals, the sorrow that rends, but does not soften the heart; in the struggle of contending passions, the horror of remorse, the agony of guilt, and phrensy of despair, this actor stands unrivalled; nor can any age or country, in my opinion, boast of a superior performance to his Sir Edward Mortimer, in the Iron Chest; a piece rejected and neglected as a feeble and spiritless composition, till he embodied himself with it, giving light to darkness, order to chaos, converting a dry and sterile sketch into a rich and finished picture, and giving to the lofty, but indistinct conceptions, the grand but half-formed ideas of the poet,

"A local habitation and a name."

I sat during the play in the pit, but afterwards went to the upper boxes, where I witnessed a scene fully as farcical as any that could be performed on the stage.It seems it is essential in this theatre, to keep the clean and unclean, the modest and immodest parts of the female sex, as much apart as possible: whether the virtuous are improved by this deviation from the London mode, I shall not take on me to determine, but I am sure the other description are injured by it; as they displayed an immodesty and indelicacy that was disgusting: a parent might have brought his children there for the same reason that made the Spartans make their Helotes drunk before theirs.-If, as Mr. Burke (with more attention to good-breeding than morality) remarks, the great sting of vice is its grossness, the Cyprians of Liverpool are the most envenomed creatures alive. I was accosted by several : whether I am to attribute it to any thing particularly