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Updated: June 17, 2025
So up I was crawling, to dine off gurnards of my own catching, excellent fish, despised by deluded Cockneys, who fancy that because its head is large and prickly, therefore its flesh is not as firm, and sweet, and white, as that of any cod who ever gobbled shell-fish, when down the stair front of me, greasy as ice from the daily shower, came slipping and staggering, my friend Claude, armed with camp-stool and portfolio.
"Gang into an Exhibition," says the Ettrick Shepherd, "and only look at a crowd o' cockneys, some with specs, and some wi' quizzing-glasses, and faces without ae grain o' meaning in them o' ony kind whatsomever, a' glowering, perhaps, at a picture o' ane o' Nature's maist fearfu' or magnificent warks!
Lords, squires, and cockneys may pass away, but a time will scarcely come when Childe Harold and that ode will be forgotten. He was a poet, after all, and he must have known it; a real poet, equal to to what a destiny! Rank, beauty, fashion, immortality,—he could not be unhappy; what a difference in the fate of men—I wish I could think he was unhappy . . . I turned away.
Although it was neither Sunday nor a fête-day, there were pleasure parties gipseying under trees Parisian cockneys riding raw-boned steeds pony-chaises full of laughing grisettes dashing up and down the broad roads that pierce the wood in various directions old women selling cakes and lemonade workmen gambling with half-pence on the smooth turf by the wayside bonnes, comely and important, with their little charges playing round them, and their busy fingers plying the knitting-needles as they walked young ladies sketching trees, and prudent governesses reading novels close by; in short, all the life and variety of a favorite suburban resort on an ordinarily fine day about the beginning of autumn.
The Giessbach, lighted up at so much per head on stated evenings, with a band playing and a crowd of cockneys staring, presents perhaps an incongruous spectacle.
And suddenly he lifted his head and muttered a few emphatic words half aloud, regardless of whoever might overhear them. "I wish to Heaven I'd a right good, hard-headed Yorkshireman to talk to!" he said. "A chap with some gumption about him! These Cockneys and Americans are all very well in their way, but " Then he pulled himself up sharply.
Meanwhile the lords of the creation strutted about, some in dressing-gowns, others, "full puff," with bags and boxes under their arms while sturdy porters were wheeling barrows full of luggage to the jetty. The bell-man went round dressed in a blue and red cloak, with a gold hatband. Ring-a-ding, ring-a-ding, ring-a-ding, dong, went the bell, and the gaping cockneys congregated around.
As I paused, I heard two stolid Cockneys asking each other why the dickens they had come to this "beastly, cold, God-forsaken hole, with nothing but a lot of ugly mountains to see. There was better sport in Oxford Street." I should not have considered it murder if I had killed them where they sat, but I refrained, rather than soil my hands.
This seems to be still a favorite adventure with the cockneys; for we heard one woman, who went up with us, saying that she had been thinking of going up all her life, and another said that she had gone up thirty years ago.
Lords, squires, and cockneys may pass away, but a time will scarcely come when Childe Harold and that ode will be forgotten. He was a poet, after all and he must have known it; a real poet, equal to to what a destiny!" It is said that in actual life Borrow refused to be introduced to a Russian scholar "simply because he moved in the literary world."
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