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BRIGHTON 175 |
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them, exclaiming, " Here I cannot tarry, lest having found my Heaven on earth I might cease to seek one beyond the grave."
One fault of Brighton however may at once be pointed out, in Sussex it is not of Sussex but belongs to England as a whole, just as Liverpool is in Lancashire but not Lancastrian. It is too closely in touch with the capital of the Empire to be provincial in any sense. The atmosphere of Sussex spreads but little in this town. Eloquence about London-by-the-Sea is exceeding stale, but it is also exceedingly true. Even in Paris the writer once saw some hats marked "Usine a Brighton (Angleterre)." The writer feels afraid of being unduly laudatory about his native place, and for a general description prefers to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes's appreciation of the week that he spent in 1886 at this " magnificent city built for enjoyment." It was " not the time of Brighton's influx of visitors, but the city was far from dull. The houses are very large, and have the grand air, as if meant for princes; the shops are well supplied; the salt breeze comes in fresh and wholesome, and the noble esplanade (such a public walk as I never saw anything to compare with) is lively with promenaders and bath-chairs, some of them occupied by people evidently ill or presumably lame, some, I suspect, employed by healthy invalids who are too lazy to walk. I took one myself, drawn by an old man, to see how I liked it, and found it very convenient, but I was tempted to ask him to change places and let me drag him" {One Hundred Days in Europe). Close to Holmes's own birthplace in Massachusetts there is another Brighton; the name (unlike most Sussex ones) is by no means uncommon in the New World, and in 1899 the |
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