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Updated: May 8, 2025
No costermonger, or common cad, or true Englishman, ever yet had that indefinable touch of the opera-supernumerary in the streets. It was a sombrero. "That's the man for me," I said. So I called him, and gave him the chisel, and after a while went down. He was grinding away, and touched his hat respectfully as I approached.
In most "independent," that is to say, "not impoverished" Irish families, water is the only beverage at dinner, with punch afterward; and estimating the number of teetotallers, among the English at three hundred, there are six hundred among the Irish, who constitute, it may be remembered, only one-third of the whole costermonger class, and those Irish teetotallers, having taken the pledge under the sanction of their priests, look upon it as a religious observance and keep it rigidly.
"The message of God," the young man answered, "must be spoken at all times." "Oh, chuck 'im out!" cried the disgusted costermonger, spitting upon the floor. "That sort o' stuff fair sickens me." The young man continued as though he had not heard. "Such charity as you are offering," he cried, "is corruption.
Then, to humor him to the top of his bent: "Haphazarding a guess, now; would this accounting leave a balance in my favor, or in yours?" He gave me a look like that of a costermonger weighing and measuring the gullibility of his customer. "Oh, aye; I'm no saying there mightn't be a bit siller coming to me; a few hundred pounds, more or less sterling, man, sterling; not Scots," he added hastily.
Beneath these exhibitions the sober strong spirit of the country, unfortunately not a prescient one, nor an attractively loveable, albeit of a righteous benevolence, labours on, doing the hourly duties for the sake of conscience, little for prospective security, little to win affection. Behold it as the donkey of a tipsy costermonger, obedient to go without the gift of expression.
He has no need of affectation he is far too well satisfied with his own character; and his pride is too deep-seated to appear at all on the outside. Careless alike of praise or blame, he can afford to be truthful. Too far, in fancy, above the rest of mankind to trouble about their petty distinctions, he is equally at home with duke or costermonger.
Starvation and exhaustion. If I hadn't been with him just now he'd have been dead before this. He fainted away." Brooks half closed his eyes. "It is horrible!" he murmured. The costermonger was next. Brooks looked around the room and at the clock. "Look here," he said. "If I sit here till tomorrow I can't possibly attend to all of you. I tell you what I'll do.
It is just as easy to draw a costermonger or a washerwoman as it is a gentleman or lady perhaps a little easier but it is by no means so easy to draw them as Keene did! If there had been no Charles Keene, I might, perhaps, with practice, have become a funny man myself though I do not suppose that my fun would have ever been of the broadest.
His artist's kit revealed his profession even to the uncritical eye, but no student of men could have failed to guess his bent were he habited in the garb of a costermonger. The painter and the poet are the last of the Bohemians, and John Trenholme was a Bohemian to the tips of his fingers. He carried himself like a cavalier, but the divine flame of art kindled in his eye.
Donkeys again. I know shy neighbourhoods where the Donkey goes in at the street door, and appears to live up-stairs, for I have examined the back-yard from over the palings, and have been unable to make him out. Gentility, nobility, Royalty, would appeal to that donkey in vain to do what he does for a costermonger.
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