Books in a library, except you have time
and free access to them, are as baffling as so many bottles in a
wine-cellar, which are not opened for you, and which if they were
would equally go to your head without final advantage. I find,
therefore, that my sole note upon the Rylands Library is the very
honest one that it smelt, like the cathedral, of coal-gas. The
absence of this gas was the least merit of the beautiful old
Chetham College, with its library dating from the seventeenth
century, and claiming to have been the first free library in
England, and doubtless the world. In the cloistered
picturesqueness of the place, its mediaeval memorials, and its
ancient peace, I found myself again in those dear Middle Ages
which are nowhere quite wanting in England, and against which I
rubbed off all smirch of the modernity I had come to Manchester
for.
* * * * *
IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD
If I had waited a little till I had got into the beautiful
Derbyshire country which lies, or rather rolls, between
Manchester and Sheffield, I could as easily have got rid of my
epoch in the smiling agricultural landscape.
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