CHAPTER III.
Quit York for Manchester.—A Character.—Quaker Lady.—Peculiar Feature in the Husbandry of the Cloth District.—Leeds.—Simplicity manifested in the Geologic Framework of English Scenery.—The Denuding Agencies almost invariably the sole Architects of the Landscape.—Manchester; characteristic Peculiarities; the Irwell; Collegiate Church; light and elegant Proportions of the Building; its grotesque Sculptures; these indicative of the Scepticism of the Age in which they were produced.—St. Bartholomew's Day.—Sermon on Saints' Day.—Timothy's Grandmother.—The Puseyite a High Churchman become earnest.—Passengers of a Sunday Evening Train.—Sabbath Amusements not very conducive to Happiness.—The Economic Value of the Sabbath ill understood by the Utilitarian.—Testimony of History on the point.
On the following morning I quitted York for Manchester, taking Leeds in my way. I had seen two of the ecclesiastical cities of Old England, and I was now desirous to visit two of the great trading towns of the modern country, so famous for supplying with its manufactures half the economic wants of the world.
At the first stage from York, we were joined by a young-lady passenger, of forty or thereabouts, evidently a character. She was very gaudily dressed, and very tightly laced, and had a bloom of red in her cheeks that seemed to have been just a little assisted by art, and a bloom of red in her nose that seemed not to have been assisted by art at all. Alarmingly frank and portentously talkative, she at once threw herself for protection and guidance on "the gentlemen." She had to get down at one of the intermediate stages, she said; but were she to be so unlucky as to pass it, she would not know what to do—she
