1844 / Manchester

Among the Best

Tags:: Athens,; commerce,; England,; London,; science

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest, faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem, and Athens embodies the preeminent quality of the antique world, art.

In modern ages, commerce has created London; while manners, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, have long found a supreme capital in the airy and bright-minded city of the Seine.

What art was to the ancient world, science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. Instead of the city of the violet crown, a Lancashire village has expanded into a mighty region of factories and warehouses. Yet, rightly understood, Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens.

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Published In

The City

About the Author

Benjamin Disraeli, from Coningsby; or The New Generation. Statesman, novelist, and two-term prime minister, Disraeli in 1824 unwisely speculated on a South American mining company and only emerged from debt in middle age. When he was made prime minister in 1868, he remarked to a friend, “I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.”

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.