manufacturers is also agreeable enough. At
the workshops where he went to examine the
first rifle he had ever beheld, "and many other
pieces of peculiar construction I was a stranger
to," he found the master of the concern under
contract to supply Government with six
hundred rifles for use against the Americans;
yet "in principle an anti-ministerialist, as is
the whole town." This has a relish of
independence that tastes well after Exeter; and
he records conversations with Quakers and
other residents, whom he declares to be not
only "sensible," but "warm Americans, as
most of the middling classes are through
the kingdom, as far as my experience reaches."
And so already the mind of our loyalist friend,
purged by the "euphrasy and rue" of its English
experience, finds itself so far divested of those
violent partialities and likings which had
compelled his exile, that he is now quite able,
as he describes himself when entertained by
"that friendly stranger Mr. Cornelius Fry of
Bristol," to pass his time not at all disagreeably
in listening to people "talking treason,
and justifying American independence."

He returned by way of Tewkesbury to
Bristol, which he reached after a nine hours'
drive; but it was not till the following year
he took up a brief abode there, having first,
without success, pursued and completed his
search through the northern towns. He tried
Lichfield, Derby, Sheffield, Wakefield, Leeds,
Huddersfield, and Halifax, taking a post-
chaise at the latter, and passing through
Rochdale to Manchester. The various trades
and manufactures interest and occupy him
chiefly in these various towns, and in many
instances they are skilfully described; but he
makes a general complaint against all the
inhabitants that they show a jealousy and
suspicion of strangers, and that acquaintance
with one manufacturer proved always enough
effectually to debar him from intercourse with
a second in the same business; while the difficulty
he everywhere experienced in getting
admitted to see their works (often quite
impracticable, "express prohibition being issued by the
masters") appears to have reached its height
in Manchester, and to have turned his wrath
especially against that thriving and bustling
community. He characterises the disposition
and manners of this Manchester people as, by
their own showing, inhospitable and boorish;
says further, that they are remarkable for
coarseness of feature, and a quite unintelligible
dialect; and, of their dress, that it
"savours not much of the London mode in
general," What surprised him greatly, moreover,
was to find the extraordinary prevalence
of Jacobite opinions in the town. His landlady
was a Jacobite; he heard Jacobite doctrines
everywhere openly professed; and,
happening to be there on the twenty-ninth of
May, he saw hoisted over numbers of doors
at the most respectable houses, large oak
boughs to express hopes for another Stuart
restoration. Still, amid all that he thus
thought ungenial and strange, he perceived
also such intimations of energetic movement
and self-satisfied activity, that the place
seemed actually changing and enlarging before
his very eyes. He saw (what nowhere else he
saw), "great additions of buildings and streets
daily making"; in contact everywhere with
the old, narrow, irregularly built streets, he
saw noble houses in process of erection; and
when, a few months later, the disastrous news
of Burgoyne's surrender fell like a thunder-
clap on England, Mr. Curwen puts it down
in his journal, without an expression of
surprise, that Manchester was the town that first
started up from the blow, offered to raise a
thousand men at its own expense to be ready
in two months for service in America, and
thus lighted up that spirit to which Liverpool
next gave eager response, and which in a
very few weeks was seen "spreading like a
flame from north to south."

Of Liverpool, the commercial character
and fame had raised higher expectation than
of its neighbour, and the disappointment
seems to have been extreme. The docks he
admired immensely, thinking them "stupendously
grand"; but he has no better phrase
than "disgustful" for everything else in the
place. He speaks of the houses, as by a great
majority in middling and lower style, few
rising above that mark; of the streets, as long,
narrow, crooked, and amazingly dirty; of
the shops, as inferior to those in other great
towns; and of the dress and looks of the
people, as more like the inhabitants of
Wapping, Shadwell, and Rotherhithe, than those
in the neighbourhood of the Exchange or
any part of London above the Tower.
"During our short abode here," says Mr.
Curwen, "we scarcely saw a well-dressed
person, nor half-a-dozen gentlemen's
carriages." In short, the whole complexion of
Liverpool appeared to him nautical and
common, "and infinitely below expectation."

Undaunted, notwithstanding, by all his
failures hitherto, and hoping still "the
reward of a cheap plentiful country to reside
in for some time," the American wanderer
now proposed to turn his steps to York; but
a fellow exile induced him to change his plan,
on representation of the number of their
fellow countrymen who had already pitched
tents in the West; and to the West, with his
compatriot, he consented to go back. They
passed through Stockport, Macclesfield, Leek,
and were very "quietly and genteelly supped
and lodged" in the Dog and Duck at Sandon.
Thence through Stafford and Wolverhampton,
by Bromsgrove and Stourbridge (which instead
of a mean, pitiful place, as its avenues seemed
to threaten, they describe as a well-built, large,
lively, and rich town, having a noble, wide,
and convenient street a mile long, with cross
streets well paved), they reached Worcester,
which Mr. Curwen finds to be a very handsome,
well-built city, lively and full of business,
having spacious, airy streets, a noble cathedral