Bristol

a city of England. It lies 118 miles due west from London. It is situated on the Avon, seven miles from the Severn, at the head of tidewater navigation. Bristol is noted for its capacious docks. The tides rise to the extraordinary height of forty feet, the greatest in Europe. The city has long had an extensive commerce with all parts of the world. Large coal mines are found near by. Glassware, pottery, and soap are manufactured in large quantities and exported to the British colonies. The total foreign business of the year is valued at about $65,000,000. There are large shipbuilding interests. The Great Western, the first steamship to make regular voyages across the Atlantic, was built here. Sebastian Cabot was born at Bristol. In his day Bristol was the chief seaport of Great Britain. Bristol ships visited the Newfoundland seal fisheries each year long before any European settlements were made in North America, and, indeed, Bristol merchants had been interested in explorations in the Atlantic before Columbus. The city and its business are growing rapidly. The present population is about one-third of a million. See England

Within its comparatively narrow limits, Bristol must have been in general character and aspect not unlike what it is today--a busy, bustling, closely-packed city, full of the eager, active, surging life of commercial enterprise. Ostmen from Waterford and Dublin, Northmen from the Western Isles and the more distant Orkneys, and even from Norway itself, had long ago learnt to avoid the shock of the "Higra," the mighty current which still kept its heathen name derived from the seagod of their forefathers, and make it serve to float them into the safe and commodious harbour of Bristol, where a thousand ships could ride at anchor. As the great trading center of the west Bristol ranked as the third city in the kingdom, surpassed in importance only by Winchester and London. The most lucrative branch of its trade, however, reflects no credit on its burghers. All the eloquence of S. Wulfstan and all the sternness of the Conqueror had barely availed to check for a while their practice of kidnapping men for the Irish slave-market; and that the traffic was in full career in the latter years of Henry I, we learn from the experiences of the canons of Laon.--K. Norgate.

Next to the capital, but next at an immense distance, stood Bristol, then the first English seaport. . . Pepys, who visited Bristol eight years after the Restoration, was struck by the splendor of the city. But his standard was not high; for he noted down as a wonder the circumstance that, in Bristol, a man might look round him and see nothing but houses. . . A few churches of eminent beauty rose out of a labyrinth of narrow lanes built upon vaults of no great solidity. If a coach or cart entered those alleys, there was danger that it would be wedged between the houses, and danger also that it would break in the cellars. Goods were therefore conveyed about the town almost exclusively in trucks drawn by dogs; and the richest inhabitants exhibited their wealth, not by riding in carriages, but by walking the streets with trains of servants in rich liveries and by keeping tables loaded with good cheer. The hospitality of the city was widely renowned, and especially the collations with which the sugar refiners regaled their visitors. . . . This luxury was supported by a thriving trade with the North American plantations and with the West Indies. The passion for colonial traffic was so strong that there was scarcely a small shopkeeper in Bristol who had not a venture on board of some ship bound for Virginia or the Antilles. Some of these venturers indeed were not of the most honourable kind. There was, in the Transatlantic possessions of the crown, a great demand for labor; and this demand was partly supplied by a system of crimping and kidnapping at the principal English seaports. Nowhere was this system in such active and extensive operation as at Bristol. . . . The number of houses appears, from the returns of the hearth-money, to have been, in the year 1685, just 5,300. . . . The population of Bristol must therefore have been about 29,000.--Lord Macaulay.