hese four chief seats of our great manufactures deserve especial
mention. It would be tedious to enumerate all the populous and opulent
hives of industry which, a hundred and fifty years ago, were hamlets
without parish churches, or desolate moors, inhabited only by grouse and
wild deer. Nor has the change been less signal in those outlets by which
the products of the English looms and forges are poured forth over
the whole world. At present Liverpool contains more than three hundred
thousand inhabitants. The shipping registered at her port amounts to
between four and five hundred thousand tons. Into her custom house has
been repeatedly paid in one year a sum more than thrice as great as
the whole income of the English crown in 1685. The receipts of her post
office, even since the great reduction of the duty, exceed the sum
which the postage of the whole kingdom yielded to the Duke of York. Her
endless docks, quays, and warehouses are among the wonders of the world.
Yet even those docks and quays and warehouses seem hardly to suffice for
the gigantic trade of the Mersey; and already a rival city is growing
fast on the opposite shore. In the days of Charles the Second Liverpool
was described as a rising town which had recently made great advances,
and which maintained a profitable intercourse with Ireland and with the
sugar colonies. The customs had multiplied eight-fold within sixteen
years, and amounted to what was then considered as the immense sum of
fifteen thousand pounds annually. But the population can hardly have
exceeded four thousand: the shipping was about fourteen hundred tons,
less than the tonnage of a single modern Indiaman of the first class,
and the whole number of seamen belonging to the port cannot be estimated
at more than two hundred. [97]

Such has been the progress of those towns where wealth is created and
accumulated. Not less rapid has been the progress of towns of a
very different kind, towns in which wealth, created and accumulated
elsewhere, is expended for purposes of health and recreation. Some of
the most remarkable of these gay places have sprung into existence since
the time of the Stuarts. Cheltenham is now a greater city than any which
the kingdom contained in the seventeenth century, London alone excepted.
But in the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth,
Cheltenham was mentioned by local historians merely as a rural parish
lying under the Cotswold Hills, and aff