قراءة كتاب With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 3

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With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 3

With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 3

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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out to see anywhere. No matter whether our quest is for city shows or the lovely rural scenery, or the sports on the Curragh, or the woes of the impoverished masses, we cannot pass a single hour without marvelling at the native good-humor and good wit of even the most distressful-conditioned people. Where less gifted sufferers grow melancholy-visaged, the Irish greet misfortune with a continual smile, in which fact lies a world of hope, and not a little envy.

Up in Belfast the austere-faced Ulstermen have made a commercial centre of the first rank. Ship-building and the flax industry, with others, flourish, and the city might be a civic paradise if faction warfare could be cooled down.

Passing now to Glasgow we find ourselves in a city of comparative palaces. Its buildings are of sandstone, its streets handsome, its municipal government so admirable as to have become the model for American cities. The canny Scot may be trusted to make the citizen’s penny bring a full pennyworth. The city authorities own their plants for providing the people with light, and for bringing the pure waters of Loch Katrine into every home. They went a step farther and bought the public tramways and cars, giving the people cheaper travel than had ever been known.

Glasgow stole the greater part of Liverpool’s ship-building business and Belfast a goodly share. Miles and miles of the banks of the Clyde are decorated with skeletons of new vessels waiting to be clothed in steel or wood garb. Every variety of craft is to be seen, from the battle-ship to the racing yacht. But Glasgow turns its hands to everything makable and salable. Its three-quarters of a million inhabitants work at innumerable trades. Their success shows in the substantial build of their city, which has more than a liberal allowance of splendid structures. Modern and up-to-date, its whirl of daily life recalls New York in certain aspects. This modernness in architectural effect is the more striking when we stand in the High Street and reflect that the grand national hero, William Wallace, fought a battle with the English on this spot in 1300. The city’s patron saint, Kentigern, gave it its name in the sixth or seventh century, glasgu, the dear family, after a band of his disciples settled there. Its cathedral, old St. Mungo’s, takes its name also from Kentigern’s munghu, or most loved friend. Its charter, authorizing the holding of a free market, was granted in 1175. Commercial development dates from 1707, when the union with England was settled. Glasgow University traces its beginnings to 1450. In making a new dock recently the diggers brought to light a boat, formed out of the trunk of a tree, a relic of primeval seamanship. The scenery of the Clyde, and for miles beyond its banks, has been the theme of many a poetical description by American travellers. The reader of Scott needs no reminder of its richness in historic story. But is not all Scotland a picture-poem of stirring romance?

“Auld” Edinburgh is written of elsewhere in this volume by its brilliant son. American newspapers that lop off the final letter, also objected to in Pittsburgh, are evidently unaware that it is pronounced Edinborough (burrow). The unrivalled queen of British cities, the uncommercial capital of Scotland, its ancient capital and its present glory, is worth the pilgrimage, even from old Athens and Rome. The towering castle was begun twelve centuries ago. St. Giles’s church dates from 1110. It was a walled town in 1450. Progressive in the sleepy old days, it set up its first printing-press, one of the world’s first presses, in 1507, and has been literary ever since. The early rulers brought musicians and scholars from abroad to delight their courts, and many jealousies they caused.


KENILWORTH AND WARWICK CASTLES.

ELIHU BURRITT.

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