Page:Chesterton - Alarms and Discursions (Methuen, 1910).djvu/21

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The Surrender of a Cockney

That last burst of sincerity, that superb scorn of antiquarian sentiment, overwhelmed me finally. I closed my eyes in a kind of ecstasy. My friend (who was helping me to lean on the gate) asked me with some curiosity what I was doing.

"My dear fellow," I said, with emotion, "I am bidding farewell to forty-three hansom cabmen."

"Well," he said, "I suppose they would think this county rather outside the radius."

"Oh, my friend," I cried brokenly, "how beautiful London is! Why do they only write poetry about the country? I could turn every lyric cry into Cockney.

'My heart leaps up when I behold
A sky-sign in the sky,'

as I observed in a volume which is too little read, founded on the older English poets. You never saw my 'Golden Treasury Regilded; or, The Classics Made Cockney'—it contained some fine lines.

'O Wild West End, thou breath of London's being,'

or the reminiscence of Keats, beginning

'City of smuts and mellow fogfulness.'

I have written many such lines on the beauty of London; yet I never realized that London was

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